Volume IV Special Issue VII September 2024

Name of Author : Arya Prakash

Title of the paper : Between Home and Elsewhere: Travel in Diasporic Prose Fiction

Abstract: Diaspora, the term in Greek means to disperse and refers to the voluntary or forcible movement of people from their homeland into new regions, has been in the discourse of humanities for more than half a century. The concept of diaspora encompasses a range of themes including alienation, displacement, existential rootlessness, nostalgia, quest of identity etc. In the Indian context, diaspora refers to the communities of Indian origin living outside India due to various reasons such as ancient trade and exploration, the migrations happened during the colonial era, job prospects, higher education, familial connections, social mobility etc. Diasporic literature became one of the prominent field of writing in the post-colonial studies and Indian diasporic writers like V.S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Meena Alexander have made significant contributions to this particular genre with their short stories, poems and novels. This paper analyzes Jhumpa Lahiris short story collection Roman Stories through a diasporic lens. Born in the UK to Bengali Indian parents, Lahiris writing explores the immigrant experience, identity struggles, and the challenges of navigating a New World. Roman Stories, first published in Italian in 2015 under the title In Other Words and the English translation published in 2016, offers a poignant and compelling depiction of Rome through nine stories, portraying characters, both local and foreign, who navigates the city of Rome and yet never quite finding a sense of belonging. The present study aims to focus on the motifs of travel in Roman Stories. The paper tries to analyze how travel motifs corresponds to the common theme of diaspora like identity crisis, displacement nostalgia and it draws its argument from psychological theories on travel. This paper is duly divided into three parts beginning with an introduction of the story, author and discussing on the psychological theories of travel and travel motifs. The paper then proceeds to the second section that explores the motifs of travel given in the stories in detail. And the concluding section analyzes how these images and instances of travel given in the short stories connect to the themes discussed in the discourse of diaspora.

Keywords : Diaspora, Post-Colonial studies, Diasporic literature, Indian diaspora, Roman Stories

DOI :

Page Number : 47-49