Published Paper Details:

This paper critically examines Manju Kapur's novel The Immigrant through a subaltern perspective. A subaltern is someone with a low ranking in a social, political and other hierarchy and a subaltern study is the study of the psyche of those who have been suppressed and marginalized for so long. Manju Kapur, the most prominent and popular contemporary writer of Indian English Literature deals with various themes such as diaspora, feminism, cross cultural experiences, identity crisis, lesbianism etc. in her novels. Though she hates to be called a feminist writer, her novels are flooded with feminist concerns. The novel understudy is the story of a 31 year old spinster Nina who lived with her widowed mother in Delhi. She is a teacher at Miranda House. She gets married to an NRI Dentist Ananda and flies to Canada to add a new chapter in her life. Throughout the novel she is portrayed as a victim of Indian patriarchal culture struggling hard to establish her identity in a hostile modern world. The present paper is an endeavor to explore Nina as a subaltern female character searching for her identity in a host country. It also aims at showing how Nina tries her best to maintain harmony at home but when she feels cheated and suffocated, she doesn't hesitate to walk out of the male dominated world.