Nostalgia And Cultural Hybridity In Indian Diaspora Literature

Abstract

This paper places Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee side by side a pairing that is more contentious than it first appears. Both are Indian American writers; both deal with immigration, identity, and the pull of the homeland. But their temperaments are so different, their formal choices so divergent, that reading them together illuminates the full range of the Indian diasporic imagination rather than a single point within it. Using Bhabha’s "third space," Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, and Hall’s dynamic model of cultural identity, I argue that Lahiri’s fiction inhabits a space of melancholic liminality where the past is both wound and refuge, while Mukherjee’s writing plunges into transformation with a recklessness that is either exhilarating or alarming depending on where you stand. Neither writer sentimentalizes nostalgia. Both treat it as a lens sometimes distorting, sometimes clarifying through which the contradictions of diasporic life become visible and available for literary exploration.