Cultural conflicts in select Diaspora Novels: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss & Jumpha Lahiri’s The Namesake

Abstract

People are identified by their culture basically. When we know the new culture it will enrich our knowledge but adopting the same and living in an alien land will affect our freedom of thought and life. Folks move from one place to another for all kind of betterment. Change of whereabouts and language from one to other drag the people to a further complicated world. They drop all their hopes towards the newness and try to adjust or struggle for their life in the unexpected circumstances. Man Booker Prize winner, a famous Indian Diaspora writer, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss discusses different kind of losses take place by man’s displacement. The characters Biju, Sai and Bela represent the pain and affliction of departers. They are longing for identity and want to create a comfort zone in the alien soil leads them frustrated. Jumpha Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winner, put across the same expatriate sensibility in her novel The Namesake. The protagonist Gogol and others Ashoke, Ashima migrate to another country still wants to follow their culture and traditional values there. These novels traced the concept of cultural identity with rootlessness and ancestral expectation. The present paper deals with identity predicament in the basis of cultural conflict through the characters’ strife of unfamiliar terrain.