Tracing Colonial Cosmos in South Asian Diasporic Fiction: A Critique of Hybrid and Transnational Identities

Abstract

The research aims at highlighting the transnational world as the cosmology of colonialism where anticolonial regimes and resistance strategies are thwarted. The fictional works of The God of Small Things and The Inheritance of Loss by South Asian Diaspora writers Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai respectively are selected in this regard to be studied through Homi K. Bhaba’s concept of hybridity complimented with Avtar Brah’s ‘Diaspora space. Roy has presented hybrid characters, Pappachi and Chacko, who are torn between two different cultures, hence tangled in identity crisis. Desai has portrayed Biju and Sai who are residents of foreign land and are unable to be settled in host culture. This dilemma of hybrid identities is highlighted to reveal the hazards in transnationalism where identity and resistance both are at stake but the ‘diaspora spaces’ can mitigate the marginalization of those who are constrained to move away in a globalized world. Moreover, in the transnational world, diaspora is entangled in the collision of social, cultural and political spaces where no-belongingness and in-betweenness are the outcomes.