Women Writers of Indian Diaspora

Contents: 1. Introduction/Silky Khullar Anand. 2. Poetic echoes from the Indian diaspora in North America/Rupinder Kaur. 3. Identity crisis in Indian diaspora women poets: a study of selected works of Suniti Namjoshi and Meena Alexander/Tanu Gupta. 4. Hyphenated India: reading women diaporic writings/Charu Sharma. 5. Representation of Indian diaspora in Bharati Mukherjee: sacrosanct nativity or dynamic nationality?/Sumati. 6. Diaspora and cross-cultural identity: a study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fictional works/Abha Shukla Kaushik. 7. Gender issues and affirmation of self in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri/Poornima. 8. Smithereens of self in Jhumpa Lahiri’s unaccustomed earth/Supriya Bhandari. 9. Ethnicity-from attribution to reactionary: the journey of Meera Syal’s female protagonist in Anita and Me/Aindrilla Guin. 10. Hyphenated existence: a study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Meera Syal’s Anita and Me/Sumedha Bhandari. 11. Music as a metaphor: a study of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams/Sumeet Brar. 12. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s arranged marriage: a perspective/Shalini Gupta. 13. The second sexual revolution in Abha Dawesar’s The three of Us and Babyji/Aashoo Toor-Gill. 14. Recipe fiction and the undercooked Nightbird reading of Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightingale Call?/Rajesh Kumar Sharma. Index. Contributors.

Women Writers of Indian Diaspora comprises thirteen critical essays which explore the complexity, richness and paradoxes that inform the works of Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherji, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni, Meera Syal, Abha Dawesar, Anita Rau Badami, Kiran Desai, Kavita Daswani, Monica Pradha, Shauna Sing Baldwin, Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Rishma Dunlop. The articles focusing on poetry, fiction and short fiction by women writers of Indian diaspora offer multidimensional perspectives into the diaspora life by encompassing themes as diverse as exile, nostalgia, rootlessness, alienation, racial and gender discrimination, marginalization, assimilation, identity and cultural hybridization. Some of the contemporary women writers make use of literary space to highlight women’s issues and their existential dilemmas through gendered lenses. The book will prove to be of immense help for those working on writers of Indian diaspora.