Diasporic Tendencies in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams

Abstract

The present paper aims to trace out the diasporic tendencies in the selected novel of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams. Diaspora literature constitute the problematic abroad life of immigrants. As an outsider, diaspora community faces many critical issues in their host land. Alienation, racial segregation, cultural conflict and identity crisis are core issues faced by immigrants. Indian diaspora literature is an academic body of writing enriched by Indian immigrant writers. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has occupied adorable status in female category in the literary canon of Indian diasporic writing. She has artistically projected the survival issues of immigrant women in her poetry, novels and short stories. Divakaruni has critically examined how Indain immigrant women struggles in assimilation with western culture and survive with hyphened identity. Indian immigrant’s experience, contemporary America, history, fantasy and the difficulties of immigrant’s living in an alien land are her major thematic concerns. Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams is a journey of young Indian artist named Rakhi in California, United States. Surviving in abroad, Rakhi perceives the conflict of hyphened identity. She asserts that as an immigrant, she is having a dual identity and she swings between ‘real’ and ‘reel world. Rakhi’s two daughters survives as second generation immigrants in United States who are not much aware about India and its culture. The novel profoundly focuses on the identity conflict, east-west conflict, cultural clash, assimilation, pain of immigration and belongingness.