DIASPORA AND SECOND GENERATION ADAPTATION

Migration to different countries caused a different mind-set of the people who migrate. Their grievances and their utmost efforts to overcome them became the cynosure of expatriate writings. It covers the paradigms of their aloofness on a strange land, their herculean efforts of assimilation, adaptation and acculturation at various levels of their living in a foreign land resulting into a distinct hybridised identity. This ‘hybridised identity’ is not confined to the first generation only but it propagates down to their children and grandchildren and so on and on.

The first generation of immigrants often attempt to retain their ‘originality’ in the ‘new’ land and in doing so they also compel their off springs to do everything to preserve the native culture thereby giving birth to double standards in their life. Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reflected through their novels and short story collections the pathos of a split identity which they had experienced in their own life. Interpretation of vivid shades of immigrant’s personalities through a variety of characters under various situations is the crux of the world portrayed by Lahiri and Divakaruni. Considering the characters of successive generations the reading evolves that the confusions and losses diminish with the descending generations and thus increase the acceptance for the adopted land.

Racial discrimination, generational clashes, distinct parenting and relational disturbances are the issues that can be earmarked as the problems confronted by the people of diasporas. But at the same time liberal and non-restricted air in the America soil provides a relaxed breath to otherwise bounded Indian woman.