POLARITIES OF POLLEN CULTURE: A STUDY OF THE SELECT WORKS OF DIASPORIC WOMEN WRITERS (MANJU KAPUR, JHUMPA LAHIRI AND KIRAN DESAI)

Abstract

Contemporary accelerated globalization witnesses the newly emerging mixture of cultural and social practices arising in the context of migration of diaspora. In the cross-cultural phenomena, in the backdrop of intercultural mixture, the identity of migrants disrupts the binary of local and global existence. In synthesizing the discordant and multiplicity of culture, the diasporic experiences are always gendered and generation based. This gendered transcultural phenomenon is viewed by the women writers more acutely in terms of cultural fragmentation and degeneration with identity crisis. As the female immigrants’ diasporic experience is forced on them by the circumstances of their choiceless marriages, they are propelled to move from dependency to autonomy, they are lost in the dichotomies of traditional duties and western lifestyle. They are exposed to otherness – in the sexual liberation in the western world and new experience of lifestyle in the ways of dressing and culinary habits. This research paper analyses the diasporic space of women writers- Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur and Kiran Desai. In the question of power balance between the previously dominant and subordination culture, the open cosmopolitan culture enters as the mode of cultural identity.