Issues of Alienation and Racial Prejudice in Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man

Abstract

When a person migrates to an alien land, he instantly turns into an outsider–a pariah. He has to struggle a lot both for his new identity and to overcome his feelings of nostalgia. Being accustomed to a social and cultural life, he desires acceptance of the society and assimilation to the new culture. But what he gets is a sense of loss and alienation and hence suffers from insecurity and identity crisis. Gradually, he attempts to adapt to the new ways of life and the new milieu of that adopted land and tends to forget his past. But the irony starts when he returns to his native land only to find himself an alien in his own culture. Hence a migrant who returns finds himself a nowhere man. Markandaya’s novels depict diasporic dilemma arising due to migration and the consequential rootlessness, loneliness and anxiety. This article traces alienation and its aftermath as depicted by Kamal Markandaya in her novel The Nowhere Man.