Published Paper Details:

This paper on Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man, Vidiyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea would undertake a comprehensive study on the three marginalized voices and problematizes the concept of homeland. Although the characters and situations are entirely different from each other, they share the same common problem-. They belong to the minorities and are not adequately represented. Lenny, Salim and Antoinette underscore how the voices of minorities are often heard but not paid a heed to in a crowd of Eurocentric and local voices. Lenny, a young Parsi girl with a limp, lost her closest companion Ayah and felt a revolt bubbling inside her but the Parsi society didn't let her express it, in fear that it would cause a rift between them and the other community. Their family observed the horrific violent acts during the ethnic warfare between two major communities in undivided India. The Bend in the River is the story of Salim, who being a Indian Muslim in Africa always felt a nag behind him as he could never fit into either category, a struggle to survival marked his existence. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette lost her mental sanity, never really accepted by the people she considered as her own, lost her mother and her autonomy and finally got betrayed by her white husband who even fetishized her beauty and never trusted her black companions. Her voice was curbed due to imprisonment and because of the English narrative style in the preceding novel which branded her as the madwoman in the attic. However there always lies a sense of solidarity binding these communities together in the form of strategic essentialism. The problems faced exclusively by the minority community and a struggle to thrive is often neglected in narratives. Problems of identity crisis have always affected minorities no matter the place they settled or the time period they concerned themselves with.