Volume IV Special Issue VI August 2024

Name of Author : Nasla P

Title of the paper : Politicizing the Indian Diaspora: A Critical Approach to Some Select Poems of Aga Shahid Ali and Meena Alexander

Abstract: In this era of global transformations, academic attention refocused to the concept of Diaspora, a transnational movement. It denotes the dispersal of people, forced or induced to other landscapes along with the ensuing developments in their culture. The Indian Diaspora is the largest Diaspora in the world dates backs to Indian civilization. Many Indian diasporic writers express their sense of loss and discuss the convergence and divergence of cultural flex in an unprecedented manner. To an extent, Indian English poetry has revolved as an uppermost tool to shed this alienation and anguish. Aga Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri emigrant to USA exhibits the realities of exilic resonances through his poetry which lifts his longings for the mother land. His poems on Kashmir illustrate the political turmoil and the ambiguity of the future in a land which turned out to as a place of war from the paradise on earth. Meena Alexander, a major figure of Indian diaspora introduces herself as a dislocated person. Her poems possess a deep sense of identity majorly the very identity of women in a patriarchal system of India. Problematizing the politics of gender and culture along with an alienated effect create the crux of her poetry. This paper focuses on the nature of politics concentrated by the two Indian diasporic writers through their poems and how the medium evolves as a powerful tool to accommodate the same.

Keywords : diaspora, politics, identity, culture, gender

DOI :

Page Number : 100-103