Published Paper Details:

Displacement from home causes a crisis of identity, but also creates opportunities for a new hybridized identity which often questions received notions of nationality and culture. In case of women, there is a further inflection of identity by gender. Diaspora helps Indian woman to come to terms with herself, a process which could not be affected within the Indian socio-cultural setting. In my paper focused on Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, I wish to look at the implications of crossover by female protagonists and characters and how it impacts cultural identity. The women novelists have fashion female autonomy in their female characters by giving them a new vision of Indian women, pleasing to Western mind and feelings and yet reflecting their Indian-ness and have allowed each heroine to assume beyond the adequate performance of the Indian expected feminine roles. They fight against the role-model mind set and the cultural identity of the archetype of traditional Indian women. The paper will seek to study the tension and conflict between being rooted and being in perpetual motion in relation to the governing issue of being a woman caught between patriarchy and a liberalized world order and how they negotiate between the question of "home" and "world".