‘Narratives of home’: Interrogating Selvadurai's Representation of Home in Funny Boy, Cinnamon Gardens, and The Hungry Ghosts

'Home' as a multidimensional concept has been receiving increasing critical attention, especially, in Diaspora Studies. Shaped by a globalizing discourse, the word 'home' evokes multiple emotions and sentiments. Its signification not only changes when articulated from different locations but is also shaped by other determinants like ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. In The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives, Jasbir Jain argues that when the diaspora decides to 'write home', 'location, space and time' disintegrates into multifarious discourses. Writing home is not simply a creative expression for them, but also a connectivity 'as if being called back answering a summon' (11). Drawing upon Jain's argument this paper tries to interrogate Shyam Selvadurai's representation of his home country Sri Lanka in his novels Funny Boy (1994), Cinnamon Gardens (1998), and The Hungry Ghosts (2013). In doing so this paper tries to trace the trajectory of Selvadurai's shifting relationship with his home country, Sri Lanka and problematizes the use of memory, history, trauma and dislocation in his narratives