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Social Alienation in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and

Bye-Bye, Blackbird

Murankalari Padaippagam

SOCIAL ALIENATION IN ANITA DESAI’S BAUMGARTNER’S BOMBAY AND

BYE-BYE, BLACKBIRD

Author Mr. Abhishek David John ., M.Phil

Assistant Professor, Department of English Valliammai Engineering College.

Co- Author Miss.Reyna Sheryn Shaju, M.Phil.,

Students Counselor, ADJS-Spot the Spark

Social Alienation in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Bye-Bye, Blackbird Author: Abhishek David John

Co-Author: Miss. Reyna Sheryn Shaju © Abhishek David John Language : English

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John’s Family

Preface

Inspite of its popularity, the idea of alienation remains ambiguous with elusive meanings. The most common variants include powerlessness, meaninglessness or lack of comprehensibility, lack of commitment to conventional social norms, estrangement from cultural values of society, sense of loneliness or exclusion etc. these definitions of alienation given above can only serve as a rough guide as there can be different conceptions of the idea. Writers have not only differed in definitions but also in their assumptions. Two such contrasting assumptions are the normative and subjective or psychological. The followers of Marxian tradition treated alienation as an normative concept, an instrument for criticizing the state of affairs in light of trespassing of moral principle. Some other writers have emphasized that alienation is a socio-psychological fact often resulting in deviant behavior. Attempts to test and measure the incidence of alienation among various population have gone vain as it yielded ambiguous results. This has challenged the usefulness of alienation as a tool in social sciences research.

It is commonly conceived that migrants from one country to another face alienation. Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay revolves around a German-Jewish

refugee from the Holocaust who ends up in India. Set against England’s green and grisly landscape, enigmatic and attractive to some, depressing and nauseating to others, Bye-Bye, Blackbird explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in an alien society. Confrontation and contrast is Desai’s style. –she always sought to draw contrast between things, tradition and progress, interior lives struggling against external pressure.

The two fictions – Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay – are existentialist studies of individuals. Their background, historicity, social settings, class, cross-cultural pluralities, race, their adjustment towards alienation are all analysed in these two novels in a perfect manner. The solitude that Desai depicts in her diasporic characters is a result of the inner psyche of the characters with respect to their external circumstances. Loneliness is a manifestation of both inner and outer conditions.

Abhishek David John Author

Acknowledgement

I consider it my bounden duty to express my gratitude to Dr. T.R.Paarivendhar, Founder and Chancellor and Thiru. Ravi Pachamoothoo, the Chairman, Dr.T.P.Ganesan, Director, SRM University and Valliammai Engineering College for providing me career prospects.

I would also acknowledge my grati tude to Dr.B.Chidhambara Rajan, Principal and Dr.M.Murugan, Vice principal, Prof. N.Lakshmana Perumal, Head Department of English, Mrs. J.J.Monica Paul, Head Placement, Valliammai Engineering College,

I am thankful to all my departmental colleagues for their moral support. I would also like to thank Dr. Kamalakannan.M, Asst. Prefessor, Department of English, Presidency College for his motivation.

I am extremely thankful to Mr. P.K.John, Mrs. Susan John, Miss. Rachel Anisha John and Miss. Reyna Sheryn Shaju for their active support during the preparation of this book.

I am extremely thankful to Mr.P.K.John, Mrs. Susan John, Miss. Rachel Anisha John and Miss. Reyna Sheryn Shaju for their active support during the preparation of this book. A special thanks to my brother and well-wisher Mr. P .Thomas who has been with me throughout my ups and downs. I am also grateful to my friends Mr. G. Loganathan, Mr. K. Balaji and Mr.T. Arun for their good moral support. I deeply regret any mistakes which remain and they are my own.

Abhishek David John Author

CONTENTS

PrefaceAcknowledgement

1. Introduction 11 2. Loneliness in Diasporic Life 25 3. Tortuous Estrangement in Bye-Bye, Blackbird 394. Holocaust Escapist Entangled in the Alien Country in Baumgartner’s Bombay 49

5. Similarities and Differences 61

6. Conclusion 73

7. Works Cited 86

Introduction

Alienation is essentially a sociological concept developed by several classical and contemporary theorists and is “a condition in social relationships reflected by a low degree of integration or common values and a high degree of distance or isolation between individuals, or between an individual and a group of people in a community or work environment” (Ankony and Kelly 120).

Alienation can be referred to a personal psychological state, where one is alienated from his/her own self (subjectively) or alienated from the society (objectively). The term ‘alienation’ has been used for ages with varied meanings. Usage of the term traces to Neoplatonic age to till date. In the New Testament the term has been mentioned as ‘apallotrioomai’ which means ‘being alienated from’.

Since Ancient Roman times the term had been used for legal–political mentions which means to transfer the authority to someone else. The term alienation comes from the Latin term ‘alienus’. An alienus in ancient roman times could refer to someone else’s slave. Physicians refer

12 Ç Social Alienation

alienation to abnormal, imbalanced mental state of an individual.

From the start of 17th century the term alienation has taken different synonyms. Hugo Grotius put forward a social contract theory that everyone has ‘sovereign authority’ over themselves. In the 18th century Hutcheson developed a distinction between alienable and unalienable rights in the legal sense. Rousseau proposed a more psychological–social concept. Even the law of alienation of affection came into existence for men to seek compensation from other men for taking their women.

In literature, German Romantics was believed to be the first to introduce the concept of alienation through poems and other kind of art. At the start of 20th century Hegel introduced the philosophy of alienation. He used German terms in partially different senses, referring to a psychological state and an objective process, and in general posited that the self was a historical and social creation, which becomes alienated from itself via a perceived objective world, but can become de-alienated again when that world is seen as just another aspect of the self-consciousness, which may be achieved by self-sacrifice to the common good.

Through the ‘medical–philosophical treatise’ Pinel has introduced a new concept of mental alienation. Later Foucault wrote:

...in an obscure, shared origin, the ‘alienation’ of physicians and the ‘alienation’ of philosophers started to take shape – two configurations in which man in any case corrupts his truth, but between which, after Hegel, the nineteenth century stopped seeing any trace of resemblance. (209)

Abhishek David John Ç 13

Srivatsava wrote

Alienation is a term which has been in use in theological, philosophical, sociological and psychological writings for a long time. Originally alienation referred to some sort of mental illness but later on to man’s estrangement from god. For Marx, alienation meant man’s dehumanization and his estrangement from other fellowmen, even from the product of his own labour. (27)

Marx’s concepts of alienation are classified into four types: Economic and Social Alienation, Political Alienation, Human Alienation, and Ideological Alienation. Social alienation is a result of economic alienation. Social alienation is the individual subject’s estrangement from its community, society, or world. The Capitalist creates economic hierarchy, thus men are divided among themselves economically, and thus economically lower class is alienated from the society. In human alienation, people become estranged by themselves in the struggle to stay alive. Marx divides human nature based upon two aspects. The necessity of food, cloth, shelter and all other basic needs come under one category, while the second one comes after satisfying the basic needs which is endless and thus satisfaction never happens and become strangers to themselves.

Alienation in other words can be termed as Powerlessness, Meaninglessness and Normlessness. Alienation or isolation with regards to society can be referred as, “the feeling of being segregated from one’s community” (Kalekin-Fishman 97). Neal and Collas stress that:

While social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress, its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. With


increased isolation and atomization, much of our daily interactions are with those who are strangers to us and with whom we lack any ongoing social relationships. (114)

The heart of social alienation is self-estrangement. Self-estrangement can be defined as “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities” (Kalekin-Fishman 97).

Till the start of 19th century psychological problems were referred to mental alienation, where a person is separated from themselves, their real world or their understandings. Using the psychoanalytic theory, mental alienation was named as schizophrenia by the concept of ‘schizoid’ (‘splitting’), wherein a person acts as if they were two, one in the real world and the other in the imaginary world. Thus alienation in literature is referred to as the psychological isolation of an individual largely from family or society.

Alienation happens mostly and obviously, largely for people who migrate from one country to other. People who migrate to other places need to adjust themselves to many situations expectedly or unexpectedly. Movement of living beings from one place to another is called as Migration. Migration can be divided into two categories: Emigration and Immigration. Emigration can be defined as the act of leaving one’s country or place to settle permanently in another. It is same as immigration but from perspective of the country of origin. Immigration is the movement of people into another country or region to which they are not native in order to settle there.

Immigration can be either purposely or non-purposely. Not only human beings migrate, but also other creatures especially birds migrate a lot due to temperature,


breeding, etc. For men it is due to economic stability, better prospects, political, natural disaster, etc. Among the countries which hosted immigrants, the Europe and the United States have the largest number of immigrants.

The Push and Pull factors contribute to the movement. Economic instability, poverty, need for survival comes under the Push factor, which leads to emigration. At times emigration might happen massively like the one that happened in the 18th and 19th century Europe. Some of the major factors are lack of employment, lack of political or religious rights, humiliation based on race, culture, sex, warfare, drought, coercion etc.

The theory of immigration differentiates between Push and Pull factors. As the name implies, Push is referred to as the economic well-being of one to immigrate to other country when compared to the wage-rate in their country.

During the 19th century, U.S. had the largest number of immigrants due to the economic appraisal. Usually people from under developed to developing countries go to the developed countries for their well-off, provided that the cost of living is adjustable in their immigrant country.

Better opportunities for self and children, instant wealth, more job opportunities, high pay, political freedom or cultural rights comes under the Pull factors. Nowadays immigration to other countries is as simple as travelling to the neighbour state. The cost and time consumption also has significant roles in the act of immigration. As the opportunity costs decreased, the immigration rates become higher.

In English literature, many writers deal with the immigrant experience and write extensively about the struggles and isolation the immigrants face in the


alien country. The number of writers who wrote about immigrant experience has been gradually increasing as writers often settle in foreign country or they just take the nucleus of the incidents which happened to them or they see in foreign land for their co-immigrants. Books of immigrant experience have been extensively appreciated and welcomed by people.

Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope, Kamala Markandeya’s The Nowhere Man, Santha Rama Rau’s Remember the House, Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner, deal with the tension ensuing from cultural and geographical displacement. There is a significant rise in the number of modern Indian writers who write about Diaspora. They are Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Chandra, Amit Chaudhuri, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Deepak Chopra, Abha Dawesar, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Narinder Dhami, Roopa Farooki, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nikita Lalwani, Amulya Malladi, Pankaj Mishra, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Nair, Mitali Perkins, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Kamila Shamsie, Shashi Tharoor, Monique Truong, Thrity Umrigar, and M.G. Vassanji, etc.

Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay is centred around a German-Jewish refugee from the Holocaust who ends up in India. There he is no more at home as a foreigner in India than he was as a Jew in Germany. Set against England’s green and grisly landscape, enigmatic and attractive to some, depressing and nauseating to others, Bye-Bye, Blackbird explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in an alien society. The Zigzag Way is a novel about an American academic and writer who goes with his girlfriend to Mexico and rediscovers his passion for fiction writing.


Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss tells the story of an orphaned young woman who is sent to live with the grandfather she never met in a remote area of India bordering on Nepal. Together they endure a nationalist uprising against India which costs each of them the individual they love the most. At the same time their cook’s son tries to make a success as an illegal immigrant in New York City. The novel won the Booker Prize. Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices is about an Indian woman who runs a spice shop in Oakland.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories concerning the adjustments that are made to the United States by Indian immigrants. Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is about an illegal immigrant from India makes her way in the United States.

V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is the story of an East-Indian merchant living in Africa attempts to survive as his country goes from one revolution to another. A House for Mr. Biswas is about an Indian living in Trinidad who seeks true happiness by owning a house of his own.

Contemporary literature dealing with the emotional problems of the modern man reflects the injuries, frustrations and the identity crisis that an uprooted individual undergoes. Anita Desai, an expert in delineating the lacerated psyche, portrays the insecurity, alienation, anguish of uprooted individuals in Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay.

The problems of alienation, isolation, immigration, and expatriation can be understood by two related terms, exile and home. Home is not merely a habitat, but it is the one where an individual belongs to and gives them cultural and self-identity. It is the one which gives shelter for an individual, and hence called as motherland, native soil


and a security. Exile is one’s enforced or regretted absence from their native land.

Postcolonial India has witnessed the migration of many educated Indians who were attracted to the West. It was seen as an escape from the economic and communal chaos which was prevalent in India. But adapting the alien culture was very difficult for them. Thus the theme of exile, immigration and alienation is common in the twentieth century literature scene. Lost, lonely, isolated, estranged characters which march toward the point of meaningful relationship can be seen in the literature of this period.

Political, cultural, social, economical and geographical dislocations have made man exile. Cultural alienation has become a universal phenomenon. The concept of immigration is as old as the history of civilization. The Book of Genesis tells the story of alienation and exile. The motivation behind modern migration may vary. Whatever the reason is, the impact of cultural shift will affect individual psyche.

Of the writers who wrote about alienation, Anita Mazumdar Desai has a major role in writing about immigrant experience. Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and the Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was born to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar, on 24 June 1937 in Mussoorie, India.

She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. Although German is her first language she did not visit Germany till her teens. She learned to read and write English at school, thus English became her literary language. She began to write poems and stories at the age of 7 and published her


first story when she was 9. She did her schooling at Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School in Delhi and completed B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi.

The next year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and the Cosmos. They have four children including Kiran Desai who won the Booker prize for The Inheritance of Loss. Her first book, Cry, the Peacock, was published in England in 1963.

She wrote “I see India through my mother’s eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father’s, of someone born here” (Griffiths 282). Desai writes only in English which she said was a natural and unconscious choice for her. She said, “I can state definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and I’d say perhaps it was the language that chose me and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty years now without stopping to think why” (Srivatsava 1).

Like Virginia Woolf, she is the one who introduced the psychological novel to India. Desai considers Clear Light of Day as her most autobiographical book as she had written about her childhood memories and neighbourhood in Delhi. For weekends they take their children to Thul, where she set her novel The Village by the Sea. She won Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 1983 for the same.

The Booker prize shortlisted novel In Custody was published in the year 1984 which was about an Urdu poet in his declining days. The Zigzag Way appeared in 2004 and a collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance was published in 2011. Merchant Ivory Productions


released In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant in 1993. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture.

The following awards are credit to her writing: In 1978, Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fire on the Mountain, in 1978, Sahitya Akademi Award (National Academy of Letters Award) for Fire on the Mountain, in 1980, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction for Clear Light of Day, in 1983, Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for The Village by the Sea: an Indian family story, in 1984, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction for In Custody, in 1993, Neil Gunn Prize, in 1999 shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the Fiction Fasting, Feasting, in 2000, Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy), and in 2003 Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature.

Anita Desai has published thirteen novels and her works include Cry, The Peacock (1963), Voices in the City (1965), Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), The Peacock Garden (1974), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Cat on a Houseboat (1976), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Games at Twilight (1978), Clear Light of Day (1980), The Village By The Sea (1982), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Journey to Ithaca (1995), Fasting, Feasting (1999), Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), The Zigzag Way (2004), and The Artist Of Disappearance (2011).

Desai’s is the literature of confrontation and contrast – between old and new India, tradition and progress, interior lives struggling against external pressure. Yet, to her surprise, she found strange parallels between East and West when she arrived to live in America.

Though Desai’s strength lies in reflecting female sensibility, she evokes an India rich in imagery, culture,


age-old traditions and conventions. Her richest imagery stems from ordinary things. Desai said that Imagery is intrinsic for her. While her childhood was quite poor in some ways, she was very rich in time. Experiences were embedded in memory within that space of time and became enormously powerful.

There is a kind of jewelled seductiveness to Desai’s surfaces that doesn’t entirely obscure the undercurrents of women’s growing need for identity and self-affirmation. She shies away from labels like ‘feminist’ or ‘political’. But she has not hesitated to use her observed experience in her novels. Her women characters are frequently subservient and unworldly. Beneath the superficial detail are the terrible failures of marriage – the loneliness, shame, violent beatings and worse. So what’s changed? Desai said:

I’m often asked why my women characters don’t stand up for themselves more forcefully. But I’m not glorifying or idealizing anyone. I can’t have Jeanne d’Arc characters, because they don’t exist in India. I am working to tell the truth. You know, most Indian society is caught in a trap – an economic, religious or philosophical trap. Some of my characters do attempt to break free, and learn the truth, often bitterly. Few have the ability to live the lives they really want. (qtd. in, Elizabeth 1)

These stories are the key to understanding Desai and her belief that in writing and in life there is the need for art to transcend the vicious cult of celebrity and 21st-century greed. Her three protagonists are intent on keeping secrets, believing that the excesses of humankind can be overcome by hiding their creativity.

To start with immigrant experience and alienation, two novels Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s


Bombay have been taken for analysis. Irrespective of their setting they have a common theme – alienation, either it may be for an Indian or a Jew, both were alienated from the society and feel isolated.

Bye-Bye, Blackbird attempts to explore and examine the torturous estrangement Adit, Dev and Sarah suffer. Usually there might be one character in any novel who suffers from isolation. But in Bye-Bye, Blackbird there are three characters and Desai has beautifully explained it in different perspectives. Adit, Dev and Sarah are culturally and socially estranged from their own root.

The present study, Social Alienation in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay And Bye-Bye, Blackbird attempts to highlight, through the study of the novels, how Desai has delineated the problems and plights of exile of the rootless individuals caught in the crisis of a changing society. It also shows the complexities and dilemmas of the immigrants in an alien land by focusing upon its attraction, repulsion and their exploitation by the vested interests.

The study shows how Anita Desai has chartered the crisis of tormenting sensitive soul of the immigrants. Desai depicts the plight of Indian immigrants in London in Bye-Bye, Blackbird. She portrays the conflict of Indians who cannot sever their cultural roots and yet makes effort to strive new roots in an alien territory.

In the novel Baumgartner ’s Bombay , Desai briefly makes a point on the Nazi occupation of Europe the repercussions of the Second World War, Indian Independence, and the violence of Partition. These events are introduced to the novel via the experience of the protagonist and the title character, Hugo Baumgartner. It is impossible to absorb and understand in one reading the


character Hugo as well as the novel. The character has the complex psyche of loneliness.

One can clearly understand the theme and nucleus of the novel from the title itself. It can be understood that Baumgartner, a German Jew as his name implies, comes to Bombay, India and his acquaintance with the country is described in the novel. The theme concentrates more on how he faces the alien country, what are all the problems he faced during his lifetime in the country and how he survived out of isolation. What Desai depicts here is how one particular man’s presence in a city alters that city for everyone in it, himself too.

The next chapter attempts to analyse the theme of alienation with reference to the novel Baumgartner’s Bombay. This was her tenth novel written in 1988. It has the most historically and geographically ambitious text, the first to be written outside her native – India.

The fifth chapter is about the common themes employed in both the novels Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner Bombay and also about the similarities and dissimilarities that prevails in both the novels. The intentions of the author to take up a similar theme but in different perspectives are also analysed and the circumstances which led to apply these ideas in her novels. Also, the characterization of individuals and their importance are discussed. How these characters helped in carrying the novel to a better ending, their importance at situations where the theme was consciously applied are also explored. The features of the novels, their impact on people during its release and how these novels serve as the best example for people with complex psyche with regards to alienation and their experience in terms of immigration are also analysed in this chapter.


In the concluding chapter the causes of alienation and how people overcome the estrangement and humiliation in the alien country are discussed. The strategies they handle to survive in their host country were examined. The result of immigration, its experience and the problems they face are either adjusted by themselves or they long for their motherland and goes back to their native in search of peaceful life and respect. So either they adjust or leave for their motherland. Not only Desai, but also writers who chose this theme have concerned with these two results. What is differentiating Desai from other writers is her treatment of the characters and unlike the characters of other writers who doesn’t make any effort to solve the problem or who are neither practical not balanced and never approach problems with a practical sense and lazy in taking decisions clearly, Desai’s characters long for the result and never failed to take up the chance to fight with the situations.

Loneliness in Diasporic Life

Diaspora is primarily concerned with emigration and settlement of people beyond the boundaries of their homeland due to socio-economic or political reasons. The word Diaspora may be explained as the voluntary or forcible movement of people from their home land into new regions. The group maintains its separateness from the host country based on common ethnicity or nationality, yet maintains attachments, nostalgic or related to culture to the home country. Though the group is physically or geographically displaced, they retain their social and cultural position to the old memories of the culture which they have inherited.

We can see that from the sixties till today a number of novels written by Desai traces settlement patterns of twentieth-century immigrants with plots taking place in major cities across India, America, Europe and South America. The setting of Desai’s novels indeed becomes a valuable source for cultural space, especially as regards its relation to individual identity in changing contemporary situations.


The sense of exile and alienation is a complex issue because of its psychological origin. At any point of time, human beings live in a definite geographical location and within a particular social setting. They are also tuned-in to certain cultural norms and have specific emotional investments. Basically they live in ‘spaces’ that have either physical presence or are born out of such concrete parameters into conceptual presences: geographical and social spaces fall into the former category whereas cultural and emotional spaces belong to the latter. But all these spaces are external and hence to communicate with them human beings need something intrinsic that would reach out to various synaptical points outside. This ‘something’ that arises internally and connects with the external is the mental-space. It connects then procures, engulfs and envelops to form a personal universe for each individual; making every individual’s world a psychological manifestation of the individual’s mind. This phagocytic nature of the mental-space fuses the external with the internal creating a spectrum of senses. Different people perceive the same thing differently. If reality is a constant, its perception is a variable and this difference in perception is because of the distinctive quality of each individual’s mental-space.

The treatment of the migrant condition in literature is the most engrossing topic exciting intellectual debate. The postmodernist world has seen the emergence of interdisciplinary and cultural studies as the major thrust areas of academic exploration. Thus, in a world where identity, origin and truth are seen in postmodernist terminology as structure less assemblages, the writer Anita Desai appears as a very good example in that regard. Desai’s mother was a German Christian and her father was a Bengali Indian. Her mother, Antoinette Nime, could trace her origin to France, and her father, Dhiren


Mazumdar’s native place was Dhaka (now in Bangladesh) but he had settled in New Delhi. This mixed parentage of complex origin gives Anita Desai the advantage of having double perspective when writing about India and Indians and as well as about migrants in India and Indian migrants to the West. Becoming a global citizen has helped her perspectives still further and also made her explore the condition of the Diaspora in her fiction in a better way. Desai has dealt with a group of diasporic Indians in Britain of the late 1960s in her novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1969); she has also dealt with the character of a migrant Austrian Jew in India in her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). In the novel, Journey to Ithaca, she has shown an Egyptian acculturated in India along with an Italian spiritual seeker in the subcontinent (1995). Finally, she has also shown the predicament of a lonely Indian, Arun in USA, in her novel Fasting, Feasting (1999).

Basically, it is the tension between what is to be included and what to be excluded from the study of literary text that makes it all the more interesting. This is especially relevant when the fiction deals with the condition of being in a Diaspora about migrant existence. The solitude that Desai depicts in her diasporic characters is a result of the inner psyche of the characters as also their external circumstances. Loneliness is a manifestation of both inner and outer conditions and hence, its sense can be evoked even in the middle of society.

Alienation refers to estrangement that occurs in the relation between an individual and that to which he or she is relating to. It is a feeling of not belonging. This feeling can be physical, mental, religious, spiritual, political or economical. At one time or the other each one of us has experienced alienation in one form or other whether in school, college, among our family members, in religion, in


politics or in society. This aloneness alone for them is the treasure worth treasuring.

This kind of situation more or less prevails in Desai’s first novel Cry, the Peacock. Cry the Peacock, published in 1963 can be considered as a trendsetting novel as it deals with the mental rather than the physical aspects of its character. It also deals with the total alienation of Maya from her husband, Gautama and from her surroundings and even from herself. Both husband and wife had different attitude towards life. She wants to be attached to the world and its abounding charms, while Gautama wants to remain aloof and detached so as to attain ‘peace of mind’. This attitude alienates them from each other. This incompatibility of nature causes deep alienation in the mind of the protagonist, Maya and she becomes intensely abnormal.

The mental incompatibility and disharmony is the root cause of Maya’s alienation, which is made clear by their reactions to the things around and the attitude to death. Gautama thinks that she is immature and has never been brought face to face with the mundane realities of life. The dream world of Maya and the solid world of Gautama can’t go together any longer. Peacocks are wiser in that they have really looked into the truth of life and death. Maya echoes the trembling passion of the peacocks, the mortal agony of their cry for love and death. Even in childhood she has walked to the rocks and jungles, watching the beautiful peacocks there, but then she has not given her mind to the significance of their cry, their inner wisdom. Now she understand the real meaning of their call. ‘Lover, I die’, weeps for them, knowing their words to be exactly hers. Maya’s tragedy is fully articulated in the symbolism of peacocks. It is really the struggle of life-in-death and death-in-life. In sum, Cry the Peacock


is a pioneering effort towards exposing the psychological problems of an alienated woman. The novel is a powerful study of the experiences of a disturbed and alienated mind.

Anita Desai has dealt in her fiction with the sense of exile and alienation in both diasporic setting and non-diasporic setting. In fact in her 1999 Booker shortlisted novel, Fasting, Feasting, she presents a comparative picture of the state of exile for a native Indian and an immigrant Indian. Most of her earlier works deal with Indians living in India and the high-point of that period is another of her Booker shortlisted novel, Clear Light of Day (1980). Apart from Indian immigrants in the West, she has also dealt with Jewish immigrants in India, Italian immigrants in India and even an Egyptian immigrant in India. Both her novels, Fasting, Feasting and Clear Light of Day, are rich in details in exploring various themes adhering on their psychological aspects. Bimla Das of Clear Light of Day and Uma of Fasting, Feasting are two well wrought characters brilliantly portrayed by Desai. But it is not only the protagonists, there are other characters like Aunt Mira, Jaya and Sarla from Clear Light of Day and Mira-masi, Anamika and Ramu of Fasting, Feasting who all contribute poignantly towards a similar goal. That is the greatest quality of Desai’s work; giving them a varied perspective, a Chekhovian irony and a psychological insight.

Aunt Mira of Clear Light of Day and Mira-masi of Fasting, Feasting present two pictures of individuals trying to overcome their sense of alienation but in rather contrasting ways. Aunt Mira was not exactly an aunt, she was a cousin of the mother’s, a poor relation who had been widowed at the age of fifteen and had lived with her husband’s family ever since as a maid of all work, growing shabbier and skinnier and seedier with the years. By then


there were more daughters-in-law in the house, younger, stronger and abler, and she was no longer indispensable. So when the mother wrote, asking her to come and stay with them, she was allowed to leave their house and come.

Aunt Mira, being a widow, is useless to the family and hence when the Das family requires someone to look after their children she is ‘sent for’ and is ‘allowed to leave’. Useless, but another household might find some use for her, as the worn article, thrown away by one, is picked up and employed by another.

The Jew, Hugo Baumgartner in the novel Baumgartner’s Bombay had spent his childhood in his native Germany with his parents. Even as a child a sense of loneliness gnaws at his being and is evoked at his crucial moments of triumph. On his first day at school when his mother comes to fetch him with a cone of bonbons for him, he holds up his prize for the others to see but already “the other children were vanishing down the street” and “no one saw his triumph”. He accuses his mother for being late and complains: You don’t look like everyone else’s mother” (Desai 33). Hugo’s loneliness as a child, in the midst of society comes because of the lack of identification. Even when he is not neglected he feels the same loneliness as is evident from the Christmas incident in the school when all his classmates were sent gifts by their parents to be distributed to them by their teacher. Hugo longs for the red glass globe that adorns the top of the Christmas tree. When the teacher makes it up as his gift he instinctively realizes that his parents have not sent any gift for him and he stubbornly disinclines from accepting it even though goaded by his classmates to take it. It is perhaps this sense of loneliness experienced by the Jewish community in Germany that helped Hitler fuel his Aryan myth and transform loneliness into fear. The Baumgartner


family lives in fear in Nazi Germany and fear is an acute form of loneliness.

Long before Hugo has a literal displacement after the suicide of his father, he has experienced a displacement whereby he has not literally moved but the world around him has moved or rather changed. So when Hugo has a physical displacement and migrates as a teenager to India, he already harbors the sense of loneliness. Thus it seems that the change in location is only incidental to his sense of solitariness. But the circumstantial changes also help to aggravate one’s solitude and hence it is not merely incidental and this fact is quite apt in consideration with the estrangement that Hugo suffers from his mother. That Hugo’s mother stayed back in Nazi Germany and her highly censored letters only bear the curt statement that she was well and it provides no comfort to Baumgartner. The memory of his mother in Germany is a constant deterrent against stopping him from succumbing to a sense of loneliness.

Influences and counter-influences that mould one’s perceptions govern human life. When the tension generated by these counter-acting influences rises to a critical level, human beings suffer. The molding gives rise to senses that off late were in a latent state. Thus Baumgartner’s loneliness is also aroused from latency when in India he is in the loneliness-alleviating company of Lotte, a German cabaret singer. Baumgartner keeps stray cats and cares for them in an attempt to give some purpose to his lonely existence.

At the height of Second World War, Baumgartner is interned in a camp in British India because he carries a German passport. In the camp Baumgartner is among other Jews yet he stays aloof because he, unlike others,


could find no way “to alleviate the burden, the tedium, the emptiness of the waiting days” (Baumgartner’s Bombay 125). Even after the war, when he meets one of his camp-mates, he finds that he has changed his name from the ‘too Jewish’ Julius to the ‘very English’ Julian. If Julius deliberately dilutes his Jewish identity, Baumgartner unknowingly suffers from an identity crisis and to counter it, there arises in him a sense of non-belonging.

The Second World War rendered the Jewish Diaspora nationless and hence identity crisis becomes inherent in the community. The only time that Baumgartner tries to reconcile the Germany of his childhood with the present-day Germany by taking a stoned German youth, Kurt, to his apartment, he is robbed and murdered by him. It is perhaps the ultimate indictment that no reconciliation is possible and all attempts to wipe out the sense of diasporic loneliness are futile.

The German, Kurt, follows the typically decadent lifestyle of the hippies in India but another German, Sophie, from the novel Journey to Ithaca is most unlike in that regard. She has come to India following her Italian husband, Matteo, who is seeking spiritual love. Sophie cannot identify with Matteo’s ideals and does not find the Mother as inspiring as Matteo does. She is left neglected and lonely in a foreign land. It is quite ironic when Sophie discovers that the Mother herself is a seeker of divine love and is of Egyptian origin who has travelled all over the world until settling in India. But by the time she comes to make the revelation to Matteo, the Mother is already dead and Matteo has disappeared. She is left stranded bearing in her the sense of spiritual loneliness that has come out of the mysticism in the churning of differing cultures.


The Diaspora of Indian community is also not exempted from being a victim of the sense of loneliness. Since Indian independence, UK has been a prime destination for migrant Indians. The earliest of such communities constituted either of ‘Anglophiles,’ whose purpose of migration has been to experience the pristine beauty of England, or of ‘Anglophobes,’ who migrate to take the proverbial ‘postcolonial revenge’. In England both these types of migrant Indians are pressed together and marked as ‘the Others’. This sense of otherness is sometimes due to blatant racism and sometimes it comes out from the individual’s own inner needs. It is such a situation when both the Anglophobe and the Anglophile find themselves in the same boat that their distinctions diminish as their purposes dilute. Purposeless, they find themselves lonely.

Anita Desai’s novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird is about migrant Indians in the England of 1960s. Adit lives in London with his English wife, Sarah. Dev is a newly arrived immigrant from India. Adit has well adjusted himself in the country of his adoption and has allayed his sense of loneliness by being nonchalant to its various causes. Dev, on the other hand, is critical of Adit’s attitude. He gets disturbed and angry when someone whispers the word “wog” behind his back. Obviously Dev has more reasons to be lonely and thus when he ventures into the city he feels, “like a Kafka stranger wandering through the dark labyrinth of a prison” (Desai 169). Dev’s loneliness eventually stops haunting him and he decides to stay in England. Adit, in the interim, suffers from a crisis of identity. He starts longing for the land and the people he has left behind. He feels depressed of “Mrs. Roscommon-James’ sniffs and barks and Dev’s angry sarcasm” (Desai 176) as well as from the fact that Sarah “had shut him out, with a bang and a snap, from her childhood of one-eared pandas and large jigsaw puzzles” (Desai 176). He


finally decides to return to India with Sarah. What this proves is that the sense of loneliness is not a phenomenon of overpowering presence but rather of intermittent overpowering, guided by circumstances incidental and always in flux.

Just as the United Kingdom, the United States of America has also attracted Indians as a destination of academic and economic prosperity. The size of the Indian Diaspora community in the US is gradually increasing in the post-globalization era. But it is quite debatable to assert that globalization has solved the problems of the Diaspora Indians. No doubt, problems like racism are no longer as headstrong as before, but the problems of the inner ‘human condition’ still plague the diasporic community. Arun, from the novel Fasting, Feasting is a very good example of an Indian in the suburbs of Massachusetts, finding himself lonely and unable to adjust to a culture of freedom.

He is not only bewildered by American college life but also by the ways of the Patton family, his host for the summer. He cannot understand the passion with which Mr. Patton himself barbecues red meat after coming home early only to find his son Rod and daughter Melanie absent from the ceremony. He finds it strange that Mrs. Patton keeps her refrigerator always stocked to the full, despite knowing that there are not many heads in her family to consume that food. Arun cannot even identify with Rod and Melanie. Though Arun takes up jogging like Rod, unlike him he simply cannot devote himself to such physical exercise. Arun is appalled to find Melanie’s condition of bulimia amidst the plenty that America provides. All dysfunctional indulgences of Americans make Arun puzzled and from this puzzlement breeds his sense of loneliness. Faced with a seeming paradox of a new culture, he is lonely.

An inviting doorway does not mean that the hearth inside can make one feel like home, especially when the


idea of home and family differs from culture to culture. This difference is not fundamental; it is superficial. But so are all cross-cultural conflicts and paradoxes. The first encounter that any migrant has with his/her country of adoption is with superficialities. It definitely takes time to scratch this surface of superficiality and till then it is only loneliness for company. Arun tries to seep in through the surface for he knows that the meeting place for two cultures can only be some middle ground. To reach this middle ground he has to assuage the distance that he has to travel, for which he has to know the distance of the other extremity. Arun does so by delving deep into the core of a suburban American family and invariably he is shocked at his first encounter. He takes the first step in overcoming his state of shock by giving to Mrs. Patton as parting gifts, the parcels that have been sent to him by his parents from India.

Arun may travel that extra mile and transform himself into the like of Rakesh, another of Desai’s character in her collection, Diamond Dust and Other Stories. But Rakesh, Westernized, does not necessarily live without any sense of loneliness. What he has alienated himself from to become a Westerner gives rise to his sense of loneliness. This not only proves that loneliness is an inherent character of diasporic life but also that the sense of loneliness acts as an umbilical cord attaching oneself to one’s native place, irrespective of its existence, while living in a Diaspora. It is perhaps consoling that loneliness is in this sense a necessity.

The feeling of ‘otherness’ which arises from a lack of a sense of belonging is also delineated well in the works of a relatively younger writer, Jhumpa Lahiri. Belonging to the group of diasporic writers (was born in London of Bengali parents, and grew up in Rhode Island, USA), Lahiri is well recognized because of her Pulitzer Prize (in 2000)


winning book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her other famous novel is The Namesake (2003). Interpreter of Maladies (1999) contains nine stories which tell among other things, the lives of Indians in exile – people who are at a cross culture conflict having a tough time to understand the traditions and culture they have inherited and adjusting to the strange new world they encounter every day. The stories tug at the heartstrings as one feels the immigrants’ sense of nostalgia and yearning for the country of their origin. In the alien world, the differences between being an Indian, a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi does not matter. The basic point is sticking it out together.

The Namesake is thoroughly enmeshed in the ‘otherness’ syndrome from beginning to the end. It is the story of a Bengali couple, Ashok Ganguli and Ashima who successfully make out a home for themselves in America but wear their hearts on their sleeves for their homeland, India. Their children, Gogol and Sonia have problems with their identity. They do not feel at home in Calcutta where they go for their holidays but are at ‘home’ in America. The ‘other’ syndrome does not assail them at all as it does their parents who do not regard America their ‘home’ even after twenty years of living there. But it does not stop them from being marginalized among their American friends. Perhaps this feeling of marginalization stems from a sense of insecurity.

Salman Rushdie is the author who inaugurated the field of postcolonial diasporism with his debut novel Grimus, which was an experiment to show the plight of estrangement and alienation. The story deals with immortality, generated worlds, surreal things, other scopes both interior and exterior, and castaways.

The story follows Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic


fluid. Flapping Eagle, an Axona Indian, is ostracized from the society because of his fairer complexion. His mother perished just after few moments of his arrival in this mortal world. His sister Bird Dog sheltered him and offered him with the preparation of interminable life and after that, she evaporates mystifyingly from the terrestrial of the Axona. Flapping exiles from his people, and mooches the world for centuries in search of his sister and his identity and in this mission, after wandering for 777 years 7 months and 7 days; he falls through the fleapit in the Mediterranean Sea. Because of his eternity, he lands in an equivalent dimension at the preternatural Calf Island.

People of this island are consecrated with immortality yet fed up with the monotony of life. However, they are disinclined in giving up their immortality and happen in a stagnant community under an understated and creepy authority. In the search of his identity Flapping is weary of the mundane reality of immortality hence wants to get rid of the Grimus effect. The novel apparently demonstrates that migrants have no future, neither on Mortal Island nor on immortal one. They could wander wherever they wish but without having their heart with them.

Midnight’s Children, his tour de force, paved the path for postcolonial literature in India. Rushdie began to decolonize English from the English and his programme is still in furtherance by him as well as from others. Like Salman Rushdie, the protagonist Saleem Sinai wanders among three countries i.e. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh but is unable to find a proper place to live in. Midnight’s Children is a narrative of displacement and rootlessness that is caused by relocation. Many of its characters are migrants drifting from shore to shore in search of some “imaginary homelands” and obviously, the author identifies himself with his migrant personae.


In Midnight’s Children, he pictures this trauma of fluid identity. In his first migrated country Saleem becomes a dog; a member of the Cutia Unit. Consequently, his body has gone fully numb, the only sense active being his sense of smell, anaesthetized against feeling as well as memories. His fellow solders start calling him ‘Buddha’ because there hung around him an air of great antiquity, though he is twenty four year old at that juncture. Here Saleem Sinai is presented as the microcosm of all the diasporic generation; how they are treated in the newly inhabited territories; how the venom is thrown upon them and the current example of this venom throwing is Australia. Saleem, being the mouthpiece of his creator, expresses the feelings that Rushdie feels while living in an adopted land.

Tortuous Estrangement in Bye-Bye, Blackbird

This chapter explores the complexities and the dilemma of the immigrants in Exile literature by focusing upon its attraction, repulsion and their exploitation. Generally the literatures all over the world are concerned with and built upon the strong feelings and passions of men and women all over the world in spite of their differences such as race, religion, color or identity.

Desai mostly wrote about the female protagonists, their problems and how to arrive to the point of independence. But in this novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird she has handled three characters in a different perspective and all the three are given equal importance in balancing their characters and the struggles they have gone through are equally distributed in equal interval of time.

Desai handle her characters in a unique manner. Her characters are portrayed as an unresolved mystery. Her concern for the characters and the theme provides an unexpected glimpse deep into their psych. It can be inferred from the following lines of Desai in her interview with Yashodhara Dalmia:


I am interested in characters who are not average but have retreated, or been driven into some extremity of despair and so turned against, or made a stand against, the general current. It is easy to flow with the current, it makes no demands, and it costs no effort. But those who cannot follow it, whose heart cries out ‘the great No,’ who fight the current and struggle against it, they know what the demands are and what it costs to meet them. (The Times of India, Sunday Bulletin 1)

Bye-Bye, Blackbird was Desai’s third novel which was published in the year 1971. The title Bye-Bye, Blackbird refers to Britain’s bidding farewell to an Indian – Adit – who was referred to as a ‘blackbird’. The novel clearly explains the experience of an Indian immigrant in London. The novel has three parts: ‘Arrival’, ‘Discovery and Recognition’ and ‘Departure’.

In the first part, Dev who arrives at England was humiliated in the public and private places. This treatment towards Indians by the British people developed a kind of distress in him. In the second part Dev adopts to the lifestyle of Britain and despite of his ill-treatment by the countrymen he feels comfortable to stay there. In the third part Adit who was comfortably running his life in England becomes homesick for India and leaves England with his wife.

The novel explains the tale of two Bengali youths and their sufferings in an alien land. The three main characters, Adit – an Indian immigrant, Sarah – his English wife and Dev – his friend, irrespective of their origin suffered a lot in England. For Adit and Dev it is an alien and isolated land, whereas for Sarah it is her own motherland. But just because she got married to an Indian, she was also alienated from her society, family and even from her own self.


Desai clearly gives a picture of immigrants, whoever it maybe, may it be Dev and Adit, who were isolated in England, or the native girl, Sarah, alienated from her neighbors. For Dev and Adit, it is the country which alienated themselves. For Sarah, it is her husband and her own society, failed to understand her individuality. Thus, Desai gives yet another idea of alienation where it not only occurs for immigrants but also for people who engage themselves with immigrants.

All the three characters were humiliated and try to survive in the society by adjusting themselves with the situations they face, but the result is different for each individual. Dev adjusts himself and started to enjoy the riches in foreign land despite of humiliation. On the other hand Adit who enjoyed and glorified England which he was thought from his childhood, changes his mind to return to India, whereas for Sarah it is a different case. Though she was in her own country, she was alienated by her own English people just for the reason that she was married to an Indian. But she will be totally alienated and feel lonely in an alien country which she will be going soon as Adit decided to leave for India.

Desai in Bye-Bye, Blackbird also portrays the psychological alienation of individuals, both Indians and Englishmen. Both Adit, an Indian and Sarah, his English wife suffer from many psychic problems such as isolation, alienation, loss of identity, racial and cultural tumults. Indians were openly called as ‘wogs’, ‘Macaulay’s bastaurds’ and are not even allowed to use a common lavatory. The height of humiliation can be understood from the example, as there are three lavatories in England, ‘Ladies’, ‘Gents’ and ‘Asiatics’.


Adit has a kind of love–hate relationship with England, for he loves England for its richness and hates it for its treatment towards Indians. Hence, Adit feels nostalgia for India. He understood that he has been living an artificial life in the alien territory, losing his self-identity and sacrificing everything including his self-respect and pride to live a rich life in Britain. The theme of alienation associated with withdrawal, loneliness and isolation prevails well in this novel. These problems are inter-related and disrupt a good relationship especially the relationship between man–woman, and man with society. Indo-Anglian novelists like Anita Desai has handled the theme of East–West encounters, very deeply in their novels. Anglian refers mostly to American or European countries.

Adit who is an Indian has been taught to praise Britain and its culture, history and riches, wants to stay in England but longs for his mother country, his friends, food, dress, music, festivals and joys. Sarah understood that her own countrymen don’t like her for marrying an Indian. Though Adit and Sarah belongs to different origin, different tastes in life, they love each other. On one hand Adit doesn’t like British food and on the other hand Sarah cooks Indian food for her husband without developing an interest to it. Sarah neither understand Indian music or jokes nor develops an interest for it. People mock her by calling ‘Mrs. Skurry’.

The two cultures, British and Indian made her to act two different roles at every point of time depending upon the situation. Inside the home, a typical Indian wife, and outside, a British girl. She fears of losing her self-identity between these two cultural currents. We get a clear picture of this by the following lines of Desai from Bye-Bye, Blackbird:


Who was she – Mrs. Sen who had been married in a red and gold Benares brocade sari One burning, bronzed day in September, or Mrs. Sen the Head’s secretary, who sent out the bills and took in the cheques, kept order in the school and was known for her efficiency ? Both these creatures were frauds, each had a large, shadowed element of charade about it. When she briskly dealt with letters … she felt an impostor, but equally, she was playing a part when she tapped her fingers to the sitar music on Adit’s records … she had so little command over these two charades she played each day, one in the morning at school and one in the evening at home, that she could not even tell with how much sincerity she played one role or the other. They were roles and when she was playing them, she was nobody. Her face was only a mask, her body only a costume. Where was Sarah? Where was Sarah? ... she wondered if Sarah had any existence at all, and then she wondered, with great sadness, if she would ever be allowed to step off stage, leave the theatre and enter the real world – whether English or Indian, she did not care, she wanted only its sincerity, its truth (34–35).

England is full of silence. Unlike India, people used to lock their homes and don’t have contact with their neighbours often. Dev thinks that England is full of emptiness. It lacks the colorful pleasant environment in India which has always people wander here and there, where secularism exists and where everyone treats other with kindness. Hence, he developed hatred towards the country, also on the countrymen. Towards the end, Adit and Dev exchanging their shoes, Dev became accustomed to English life and Adit returns to homeland.

The alien country attracts and repels both Dev and Adit at every point of time. Anita Desai focused on the psychological aspects of the characters, thus weaved the


characters with consciously into their motivation and tensions. Like most Indian husbands Adit never cared for Sarah’s feelings, neither asked her opinion about getting back to India.

In Bye-Bye, Blackbird, Desai deals with the problems faced by the black immigrants in England. She expresses the theme of alienation through three different characters Adit, Dev and Sarah, their psychic tumults towards their treatment by their fellow countrymen. Adit who was mocked by his friend Dev as ‘Boot licking toady’ and ‘spineless imperialist lover’ lost his love for England towards the end of the novel. He understands that he was living in an imaginary world where he was just a stranger to his fellow beings in the alien territory and no one has respect for him as he is considered just the black and not one among themselves even though he shows his gratitude to the country and praises England. So at the end he makes up his mind to return back to India to lead a real and simple and peaceful, respectful life.

Sarah’s is more complex than Dev and Adit. However, unlike other heroines of Desai, Sarah is more practical and balanced in approaching problems, so she faces the problems boldly and rationally. Often, she confuses, what is her role and who she is, Sarah, and English girl, the Head Secretary in the school or Mrs. Sen, a typical Indian wife, who grinds spices for curry to her husband.

She doubts whether she is losing her reality. She always wanted to take up only one role either Indian or English, whatever it may be, she wants her real self, its sincerity and truth. It can be understood from Adit’s mocking over Sarah to Dev from the following lines of Desai: “These English wives are quite manageable really, you know. Not as fierce as they look…very quiet and hard


working as long as you treat them right and roar at them regularly once or twice a week” (Bye-Bye, Blackbird 32).

Sarah leads a miserable routine life with her Indian husband. Adit behaves like a typical Indian husband who has no care on his English wife. This is evidently seen from the following lines of Desai: “Wash up, Sarah, dear and go to bed and don’t mind me when I fall over the cat...unable to part with the warmth of shared experience and shared humor, leaving Sarah to pick up empty cups and glasses and full ash trays and yawn her way to bed…” (Bye-Bye, Blackbird 27).

Adit even compels her to wear traditional Indian saree on their wedding day which Sarah never likes and contradicts his view by comparing herself to a Christmas tree. Here are the lines from Bye-Bye, Blackbird where Adit gets upset and said:

You feel like a Christmas tree! I suppose all Indian women look like Christmas trees to you—or perhaps liker clowns, because they wear sarees and jeweler you–you—English people and your xenophobia! You’ll never 1accept anything but your own drab, dingy standards and your, boring ways. Anything else also clownish to you, laughable…. (Desai 193)

In Part III due to the sudden outbreak of Indo-Pak war, Adit decides to go back to India. The tension between the characters is well maintained throughout the novel. There is a kind of dislike towards the foreigners can be seen in the novel which makes the characters to feel like in a veritable hell in an alienated world.

Desai said: “Bye-Bye, Blackbird is the closest of all my books to actuality practically everything in it is drawn directly from my experience of living with Indian immigrants in London” (Ram 31). It may be of the reason


that she was also born to a German mother. The fact may be she would have seen her mother to struggle in a country which is no way closer to her motherland. It is a general concept that only when a person undergoes such as incident only then they can clearly explore about the problems they encountered. Or only if a person has enormous imaginary power they can speak broadly and deeply about the same.

All the three characters became disillusioned at one point of time due to their treatment by others. English men lack sympathy and do not recognize their neighbours and behave with them like strangers. Every character finds them self insulated and isolated. Adit and Dev realizes that people from under developed country rush to the West and miss their mother country badly.

There is a kind of silences and emptiness everywhere in England. First Dev becomes the victim of alienation as his conception and perception are at variance with the experiences he gets. He compares and relates everything with that of to his mother country and feels isolation and loneliness. There is a kind of chaos and confusion in his mind.

Finally he takes his decision not to return to India and live among the mass like one in crore. Instead he slowly and steadily adapts himself to the alien country. He wanted to sacrifice his self-respect for his well-off. Adit had no frustration initially in adapting to the alien country as he was taught in such a way to praise England, its beauty, richness, culture and wealth from his childhood. Right from his childhood it was his ambition to go to England and get a decent job there and settle in the country. The way he dreamt of the foreign country and the way it was illustrated to him were only about its richness and not about its treatment with its immigrated people.


At first Adit was happy with his job. But later he developed a kind of aversion towards his job and also to his country. He appreciates the landscape of England, but not its treatment towards strangers. For him England is fertile, luxurious and prosperous. At times Adit sings: “O England’s green and grisly land, I love you and only a babe can” (Bye-Bye, Blackbird 130).

But the scenario changes in the last part. He secretly longs for Indian food music, friends and relatives. He admits to be ‘a stranger, a non-belonged’ in England. Hence he wanted to go back to India. By the time Sarah was also pregnant and it may be of the reason that he wanted his child to be an Indian citizen. Adit incurs the angry of White people by marrying Sarah. Like the one we see in our regional film, Matharasapattinam, which was story based on an imagination of the incidents happened during our independence, where the hero Arya, a poor Indian who loves a British girl, the heroine, Emie Jackson, daughter of a British man who held higher position in the British force, who accompanied her father during his visit to India.

Due to the fact that it is a shame to marry an Indian, her father separates them and took her to Britain. The truth is that British people came to India to steal its wealth and richness, and having done so they treat Indians as slaves and as if they are illiterates. Not only during the British rule in India, but also many years after the independence the treatment was the same. It was clearly reflected in the novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird.

The novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird explains something more than the life. The background setting was at the England with Indians suffering in it. All through the novel she has shown some sort of identity crisis which the characters of the novel suffers. All of them were not


happy and searching for their self-identity. This novel may serve best for the immigrants who always have that longing for their mother country. Hence it is concluded that immigrants who suffers in the foreign countries can either adjust to their situation to lead a better life like Dev or comes back like Adit who can no more tolerate the feeling of nostalgia for his mother country.

Here are the concluding lines of the novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird by Adit,

Make my bed and light the light,I’ll arrive late tonight.Blackbird, bye-bye. (Desai 224)

Holocaust Escapist Entangled in the Alien Country in

Baumgartner’s Bombay

This chapter aims at exploring the survival strategies handled by the German Jew, the protagonist of the novel, Hugo Baumgartner. The confusions and chaos which continuously follow him to migrate from one place to another and to the other are explained well.

The novel Baumgartner’s Bombay is Desai’s tenth novel. She would have taken the theme of alienation with regards to a German Jew as she may deliberately wanted to deliver the world how would a German suffer in a country like India (her mother is a German). She perfectly matched the theme by mixing it up with the World War II. During the time the World War II was taken place, she was in the country and had a memory of the incidents happened in front of her eyes and it obviously became a theme for her writing.

In an interview Desai said, “I grew up during the war years – I was a little girl at the time, and was only barely aware of what was happening in Europe. I really


experienced the war through my mother, sensing the anxiety that she had at that time about her family in Germany. After the war, she began to realize the Germany that she had known was devastated. She never had the courage, or the wish, to return to it. I visited Germany as an adult, and have only been there on two or three brief visits.”

It is Anita Desai’s classic novel of the Holocaust era. It is the story of profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The novel is about a German Jew as he flees Nazi Germany, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war’s end.

Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay builds an old city, a city which is unknown to the 21st century. It’s the story of a German. It’s the story of an exile. It’s the story of a German who handled several strategies to fit in an alien country. It’s the story of an ill-fated man. In this novel, the protagonist is impressively not understood by humans, but very familiar with the cats. The World War which scared him to fly to India seeking for a secure place to escape the Holocaust makes him caught in the hands of British who conquered India and made him to stay in the prison for six long years. What he fights all through his journey is loneliness. No amount of kindness could alleviate his loneliness. He was isolated, alienated and made separated from his mother country as well as from his mother. The immigration which happened to have a secure and better life turns out to be a tragedy for him.

The novel traces the life of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew, born in Germany, during Hitler’s reign. His father was a Jewish merchant, was born and raised in Berlin. They lived a wealthy life as his father’s trade was booming. Then the unexpected Holocaust happens forcing them to


lose all their properties during which his father dies. The entire property of his father was slowly seized by his dad’s business associate who, posing as if helping the family in grief, somehow manages to gulp the whole fortune to him. Thus Hugo’s childhood happiness came to an end with the start of the war. He tells Hugo to go to India, as Germany is no more safe for Jews, and that he would put a word about him to his business partner in India.

Hugo decides to go and live in India whereas his fragile mother refuses to come to ‘the land of snakes and beggars’. So, he set out for himself and plans of returning once things were normal in Germany, as his dad’s business associate assures that he would take care of Hugo’s mother. But who can predict what will happen in future.

Hugo and his mother thought that everything would be normal once the war is over and that Hugo can come back to Germany and take care of his mother. But everything goes wrong despite of their survival plan and everyone becomes disconnected with other. Believing his words Hugo leaves for India. Hugo goes to India and lands in Calcutta. It was the time when the World War II between Germany and England begins. Thinking to escape the war from Germany Hugo came to India and his poor fate made him caught in the hands of British who ruled India that time. When he arrives he is imprisoned in an internment camp as a ‘hostile alien’. Hugo was arrested and sent to a concentration camp being mistaken to be a Nazi, wherein his repeated attempts to prove that he was but a Jew born and brought up in Berlin, came to naught.

He accepts the fate and starts to enjoy the routine life in the camp for six years. What would be a better option than accepting the change, for an individual who caught in the hands of ill-fate? In all this time, he had been writing


letters to his mother, and received no reply. He was afraid that perchance his mother would have been caught by the Nazis. It is striking how both corporal and psychological distress haunts Baumgartner equally. However, this is only one of the symptoms of survivor guilt. Paul Valent lists “ruminations, images, dreams, and flashbacks” as cognitive signs for it (556).

Survivor guilt is described as a traumatic stress. Paul Valent defines Trauma as “[a]n experience in which one’s life has been grossly threatened and out of which a variety of biological, psychological, and social wounds and scars result” (555).

It is easy to depict those with Baumgartner. While finally receiving his mother’s postcards, for instance, he remembers in every detail her actual writing habits and with the weight of those post cards prohibits himself to live comfortably and luxuriously in the hotel. During the bloody excesses in Calcutta, Hugo sees his mother bleeding in his dreams, which are of course fueled by the violence he perceives around him, but the completion of these pictures with his own helpless presence is clearly marking them as further indication of survivor guilt. When he finally allows himself to continue with life and moves on to Bombay, Baumgartner still carries her with him. Although he apprehends himself as a native, his mind flashes back to her in picturesque clarity how he must tell her about the snake-charmers and he just does not want to admit that he will never see her again.

After he was released from the camp, he goes to meet the person he was supposed to meet in India: Mr. Habibullah. Here again his ill-fate plays a role and made him to suffer. Unfortunately, the latter was broken and was in a situation where he was forced to leave Calcutta


for Dacca because of the Hindu–Muslim clashes in Bengal back then. Mr. Habibullah advices Baumgartner to go to Bombay and meet Mr. Chimanlal. In a riot, it appeared that Habibullah’s shop was looted and he was possibly killed. So, Hugo leaves for Bombay, meets the generous and kind Chimanlal who helps Hugo much.

Hugo Baumgartner starts living in Bombay, in a small apartment behind Taj Hotel. He meets people from various cultures here and tries to mix and gel up with them. With Chimanlal, Hugo forms somehow a deeper relationship than that of employee–employer, and accompanies the former in his horse race moments, which obviously is considered bad by the former’s family. So, whatever silver cups they won together by betting, Chimanlal gave Hugo to keep and that someday they would share it. For each of his bad luck to survive in the alien country, he gets another chance to change his path. But here the fate takes another chance. In the meantime, Chimanlal dies and his son takes over his business, thus forcing Hugo jobless because Hugo has had no bonding and business papers with Chimanlal.

Finally, he was made jobless and became separated from anyone who could accompany him in the alien country. He resorts to live a secluded life with stray cats in Bombay. His only companion was a fellow ‘coarse German’ named Lotte who was once a bar dancer. With her at times he feels like being in his motherland. One day Baumgartner takes a drugged foreigner, Kurt to his home because the latter happened to be penniless to pay the bill for what he had eaten and refused to move out of Café de Paris, the restaurant to which Hugo was a regular customer. The restauranteur had pleaded Hugo to go and speak to the homeless ‘firanghi’ and ask him to get out. Hugo was in a constrain because it is only this restaurant that provides leftover food and milk for his cats for free every day. So,


he spoke to the guy in German. As the latter refused, Hugo offers to take the homeless to his home. This man, wild and dominant in nature, comes to Hugo’s home and eyes the silver cups. Is Kurt going to be a catalyst in bringing joy in the lonely life of Hugo or is he going to be a fatal mistake? The mystery is solved only at the end, and it’s shocking. He kills Baumgartner.

The final chapter of the novel is meticulously written. Human emotions during panic and confusion, especially in a city like Bombay, were so neatly pictured. The whole story was deeply soaked in humanity, the hidden devils and gods within. It is about alienation, abject condition, perspective of people, and hapless nature of a common man. There were historical references to World War II and its consequences; that how it affected the lives of ordinary, powerless people. It is interesting and astonishing to note that you can forge a wonderful fiction out of a failure; a total nobody, in contrast to the well-equipped, or clever, or intrepid and adventurous, or charming type of protagonists whom we are so accustomed as well as bored of seeing.

His years in jail are less fun and morose. His acquaintance with Lotte (who marries a wealthy Indian and escapes imprisonment) is rekindled in Bombay many years later. They find themselves in each other’s comforts. Their luxuries are alcohol. They immerse their sorrows and loneliness in it and worry about nothing.

Baumgartner has no friends in the big city. He knows a handful of them. Chimanlal, his business partner; Farrokh, the restaurateur who helps Baumgartner with scraps of food from the previous night for his cats; and his neighbors who he ‘namastes’ every day. Baumgartner is a loner for most part of the story even though Lotte acquires a sizable portion in his life as his friend from a known


world. His companions for some point of time – Lotte, the unhappy dancer, Farrokh, the owner of a cafe, and Kurt, the young Aryan druggie, were just passing clouds. Mostly he spends time with his assortment of cat-friends who make visitors to his small apartment so uncomfortable that they resort to holding handkerchiefs to their noses.

In Baumgartner’s Bombay, there’s as much India as there’s Germany. Desai vividly captured the minutest details and spends her intelligence on describing the characters rather than the situations. And through the characters we learn greed can kill and lost is lost forever. The loss cannot be replaced by anything new.

Baumgartner’s life to be a miserable one and everyone who reads will reach the point of empathizing with him. One can even found humor in his exchanges with Farrokh and Kurt. There is a line written on the cover of the book ‘A daring, colourful novel almost impossible to absorb in one reading’, which stands quite true for this book. One cannot absorb many things while reading the novel for the first time.

One should reread the lines and paragraphs to understand what exactly the author is trying to do here. The authors idea of loneliness, and the survival strategies adopted by the protagonist to exist in the alien country can be understood only when reading the novel for many times.

The miserable things right from his childhood which made him lonely and forced to take decisions which are hopeless are he loses his father in a tragic accident, suffers due to the callous attitude of the despot towards Jews, destroying their furniture business and rendering them penniless. He is left alone with his mother, dependent on insensitive relatives to carry on his linearly grim journey.


And, as often happens, the difficult circumstances make him grow sooner than expected. The Push-factor which made him to move to India was his anxiety to build a safe haven for himself and his poor mother, and to try his luck in India. The warm people and numerous opportunities offered in a developing country, does give him some joyous moments, including a little bit of romance in the night clubs of Calcutta.

During his prison stay he was connected with some intelligent, worldly wise men, and Desai has deftly portrayed the shyness of introvert Hugo in her indomitable narrative. The scene, where Hugo struggles to strike a relationship with a fellow prisoner, fighting off his own insecurities and complexes and trying to understand the finer nuances of social life would be a significant one. It is only during the end of the war, Hugo moves to Bombay, and this is where the novel begins, showing him to juggle with the dual role of a foreigner, fairer in complexion and superior in looks from the native Indians and yet, in sharp contrast to his handsome features, poorer than most of the destitute, trying hard to live with some dignity and lots of love for his cats.

His unusual looks and over sensitivity towards miserable street cats earns him a reputation of a crazy man, who has lost his mental balance and is yet trying hard to live in a civilized society, defying all the rules and following his own path, eluding the cruel clutches of destiny and braving the sarcastic jeers of his neighbors.

Will Baumgartner ever be able to carve out a comfortable life for himself or will he just take a role in the drama evil inspired luck, forms the nucleus of the novel. The tragedy is inescapable and the protagonist is fated from the very beginning to suffer all his miseries, and yet in her


true sartorial style, she creates a lovable man in the form of Hugo, forcing the reader to sympathize with him and silently pray for some peace for the pure soul. The chaos is created by the confusing time and space, as the story runs in intermittent flashbacks, running from Germany to Calcutta to Bombay, in a haphazard fashion. Miseries of Baumgartner’s woes are kept in a well-balanced manner.

In her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay Anita Desai confronts the reader with a protagonist whose life is a chain of happenings not intended, wished for or fought against by him. It seems Hugo Baumgartner is not even aware of the probability that his own willful intervention into the course of his personal history could change matters for him.

When he is murdered eventually the readers ask themselves if this sudden and drastic end really differs from a natural death since Baumgartner’s life without social relations, active engagement in anything he is dedicated to or even a plain economic use for society did not appear to be important or of a unique value for many people. The brutal and cold fact is Hugo Baumgartner will not be missed by anyone except by the cats he took care for.

Lotte who was his companion for sometime as she is a German and did not succeed in the Indian society made him to feel happy for some time. This creates a bond between them although their lifestyles differ drastically. The reader will wants to yell at the character to take his life back into his own hands. Or is it an utopist myth that by changing yourself you can change the world? Is not this what we really look for in the heroes of our preferred literature? But Hugo Baumgartner is not a hero. He is a common man.


In the course of the novel itself Baumgartner’s life is not in danger although he suffers the discriminations of the Nazis in pre-war Germany. Still Baumgartner owes his life to his refuge since his mother, who stayed, cannot remain undiscovered and will die during the war in a concentration camp. After he left her, he still is convinced that she will follow later and he will be able to make a home for [them…] have servants for [her] and drive away the snakes and bring [her] gold oranges.

The young Hugo develops his own symptoms while and after his internment when there are no further letters of her and he slowly realizes what must have happened. The German historian and cultural scientist Jörn Rüsen states “we could not live without our own history. It is a part of our existence and mental cognition of the self” (17). This is relevant for Baumgartner: He has to live with the belief that he killed his mother by not saving her, he thinks. He falls ill a lot. Rüsen also states, “He [finds] himself physically deteriorating, growing old at a rapid rate” (126). It seems the whole camp cannot resist against “the recurrent bouts of malaria […] and the almost chronic dysentery,” Rüsen explains (126).

Desai describes very figuratively how Baumgartner is overcome by another outburst of dysentery and the pressing, stabbing anxiety about his mother. His reaction is to look for solitude to mourn over his mother and physical pain. Even after being released from the internment camp he wants to adjust his accommodation to what he thinks adequate in order to grieve about her.

Inevitably, there are also social responses which are a logical consequence of the former cognitive ones. After seeing his mother’s bloodshed, Baumgartner makes no attempt to find and return to [his] life before the war and looses himself in hopelessness, thinking that this was how


the world ended. This avoidance of life’s joys and vitality in general is a further manifestation of survivor guilt.

However, survivor guilt has even more impact on Baumgartner’s social behavior which will serve as his last anchor in life. David Moshman distinguishes between a narrow and a broader meaning of the Holocaust: In the narrow sense, the term refers to the Nazi Judeocide, the deliberate and systematic killing of five to six million Jews by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II. In the broader sense, the Holocaust encompasses Nazi efforts to eliminate Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, the disabled, and others whose elimination served ideological goals distinct from the war effort.

But even within the broader sense the Nazi Judeocide occupies a central position. And even in relation to the concept of genocide Moshman explains, “The Holocaust is widely construed as the prototypical instance of genocide” (433).

Baumgartner’s love for cats shows us that he escapes his loneliness only through this cats who were his sole companion at the end of his life. Baumgartner was in debt to Farrokh and the other restaurateurs who filled his bag for him with the remains of the food cooked the night before. Without their help he could not feed the cats that flocked to him in the alleys, knowing him to be the Madman of the Cats, the Billewallah Pagal, or the sick and maimed ones he picked up…and carried home to nurse, telling them they would have to leave when they were cured but never finding the heart to turn them out.

In return, he gave them his custom. He could not really afford to patronise cafes, however third-rate their quality and competitive their rates, but it was necessary


to remain a customer, not to slip down to being a beggar. Baumgartner was not as unconscious as one might think of the dividing line. Planting himself heavily at the table and grasping the glass of thick, milky tea that had been set before him by the waiter’s wet and dripping hand, he made himself play the role of customer. All he done was only for his cats.

Throughout the novel Desai vividly presents us how the protagonist was alienated from his mother, mother country, family, neighbours and even in India with his fellowmen. The cats were his companions as they too had a similar life as Baumgartner suffering for food and companionship and also for a safe place to live. May be for this reason Baumgartner had grown them up. This novel is the best to explain alienation in terms of society and Desai has used all the resources available to portray Baumgartner as a suffering man longing for love, self-identity and friendship.

Similarities and Differences

This chapter aims at the common theme employed in both the novels Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay. Any novel can be discussed in terms of any particular topic. Any small theme in a novel can be elaborated to a grand manner in a thesis chapter. This chapter is concerned about the theme of alienation in terms of society. How the characters in both the novel suffer a psychological tumult with respect to alienation. And how they handled the situation to overcome the problems are also analysed.

The similarities between both the novels are explored in this chapter. The theme which was taken up by the author is alienation in terms of loneliness, betrayal, loss of self-identity, longing for love and care. All the major characters in both the novels are suffered a stream of psychological disorder in terms of alienation.

The war has an impact on both the novels. Both the novels were written post independence era. English, though a foreign language, became popular amongst the Indians as a means of communicating with the outside world after independence. Educated Indians who communicated in


English were much less, and those who wrote books in English were few. Hence the theme of migration plays a major role in both the novels. Post independence novels about foreigners and Indians who migrated to other country has been increasing and hence Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay.

The trend turned towards ‘Realism’ during the post-nineteenth century. Serious efforts were made towards a realistic depiction of society. Themes became more universal and women-oriented entailing a more sympathetic treatment by women writers. The women writers of this period to their credit could hold their own and make their voices heard and concerns felt even in the hitherto purely male dominated literary world.

Desai’s mixed parentage helped her in identifying the issues with Indians more than any other writers. On one hand, she feels every tone and issue of Indian society, and therefore, identifies with every core issue; on the other hand, she absorbs the Westerner’s views as an outsider. The juxtaposition of the Western and Eastern cultures and the pull of the one over the other are well understood by her. She has confessed that while she feels about India as an Indian, she thinks about it as an outsider.

Ani ta Desai ’s range of themes i s var ied . The colonial conflict, alienation, self-identification and racial discrimination (Bye-Bye, Blackbird, 1971) and displacement, alienation and the search for roots (Baumgartner’s Bombay, 1988) are quite similar from their core.

Bye-Bye, Blackbird is the story of many Asians who seek out greener pastures in the western world. Fed up with the state of things in their country, they move out into foreign shores only to be disillusioned at the cold


reception they get there. It does not matter whether one is an Indian or a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi – all are grouped together as Asiatic and looked down upon as they make their cities dirty and polluted. This impact was created post-Indian independence.

The novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird is the story of Adit and Dev, two immigrants to London. Adit comes from a well-to-do educated Bengali family in Calcutta. He does try to find a job in his native place but the nature of his clerical job with all its dinginess, unpunctuality and slowness irritated him. He gets back to London and marries an English girl Sarah and tried his best to reflect all English manners and values in himself.

The second immigrant is Dev, his friend who has gone there to study at the London School of Economics and is appalled to see the way the Asians are treated with no one even protesting. Hereon, there is a reversal of roles and situations. Adit prepares to come back home with his wife whereas Dev reconciles with the demeaning situation and accepts the British life for the bright side of London. Sarah also for her part tried to hide the English identity and willingly gets ready to be assimilated into the new culture.

Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) is the heart-rending melancholic song of displaced people, their search for self-identity in an alien place and of misplaced friendship and deep-rooted cultural conflict. It is the story of Hugo Baumgartner, an old Jew who has escaped Nazi Germany and made Bombay his home. But to his dismay, he finds that even fifty years of stay in India has not been sufficient to bring him close to the Indians. He is considered a ‘firanghi’ – neither belonging to India or to the West.

To the Indians, there is no difference between a Nazi and a Jew just as for the Westerners; there is no difference


between an Indian, a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi. The novel takes us to different sorts of war– from pre-war Berlin, to Venice, pre-war Calcutta, a detention camp at the foothills of the Himalayas and then, post-war Calcutta. Baumgartner was made lonely and alienated, after the death of his good friend Chimanlal and he retires to an old life in a dingy flat.

Strangely, he finds solace in the company of cats whom he rescues from the streets. Baumgartner is ultimately betrayed by a fellow German who kills him for money. His story is the one of marginalized or the ‘other’. It is very touching because it is the story of every man who emigrates. His voice is the voice of the unheard and uncared; his pain is that of the outsider who desperately tries to assimilate the alien culture into himself but cannot.

In an interview in 1982, Desai declares about these situations as “I am not interested in brilliant members of society, who manage to control their fate. I am interested in the failures and the wrecks…”. In Bye-Bye, Blackbird, there are also some notes about the male dominance in Indian society, with respect to Sarah. It also shows the extent to which male members are put on a pedestal in a typical Indian family. Another issue deals with the cross-culture conflict. This part belongs to every single character in the novel. Adit who is feted, loved and cared for in India, feels relieved to be out of home in a foreign and alien land – England.

Both Adit and Baumgartner had their feeling of ‘otherness’ which arises from a lack of a sense of belonging. The lives of Indians in exile – people who are at a cross culture conflict having a tough time to understand the traditions and culture they have inherited and adjusting to the strange new world they encounter every day. The emergence of interdisciplinary and cultural studies in


the academic platform is pivotal to studies in literature. As Boehmer states, “…the postcolonial and migrant novels are seen as appropriate texts for such explorations because they offer multi-voiced resistance to the idea of boundaries and present texts open to transgressive and non-authoritative reading” (243).

Literature on Diaspora has projected the experiences of the emigrants and their diverse issues. Diaspora is primarily concerned with emigration and settlement of people beyond the boundaries of their homeland due to socio-economic or political reasons. Diaspora may be explained in terms of Ashcroft’s statement, “The voluntary or forcible movement of people from their home land into new regions” (68).

Emigrated group maintains its separateness from the host country based on common ethnicity or nationality, yet maintains attachments related to culture to the home country. Though the group is physically or geographically displaced, they retain their social and cultural position of the culture which they have inherited. Anita Desai is careful in portraying the diasporic sensibilities in the characters in her fiction, Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay. Though the novels vividly represent emigrant situations, and the treatment of different issues related to Diaspora, they significantly contribute to diverse interpretations that are characteristic of the postmodern era.

The post-colonial phase of the Indian Diaspora differs from the earlier forms of migrations. The migrants are from middle-class families, highly skilled and are attracted by favorable opportunities in abroad. Professional migrations into the US, UK, Europe and Australia are common. The characterization of individuals and their importance are


described below through various conversations in the novels.

Bye-Bye, Blackbird, written on the Indian Diaspora, revolves around two friends, Dev and Adit, in London. Adit has been in London for some time and is married to Sarah, an English woman. Dev is in England in search of a degree and subsequent employment. Adit was disappointed with his job in India. This has forced him to leave his homeland and settle abroad for a decent income. Adit is able to withstand insults hurled at him because he has adopted England as his home and he never listen to the insults. Dev, on the other hand, gets irritated when a schoolboy calls Adit, ‘wog’. A perfect conversation for this situation from Bye-Bye, Blackbird was given below:

Dev exploded, “That boy at the bus stop – he called us wogs. You heard him.”

Adit: “I did not”.Dev: “Adit, I saw you turn, I saw your face. You can

take that – from a schoolboy?”Adit: “It is best to ignore those who don’t deserve

one’s notice.” (Desai 18)As they take a walk down the street, they hear Mrs.

Simpson muttering aloud, “Littered with Asians! Must get Richard to move out of Clapham, it is impossible now” (Desai 18).

Emigrants, especially Asians are looked down as the ‘other’ in England. ‘Otherness’ is defined by difference, typically difference marked by outward signs like race and gender.

When Adit does not bother about the insults mocked at him, Dev says, “Boot-licking toady. Spineless imperialist lover….You would sell your soul, and your passport too,


for a glimpse, at two shillings, of some draughty old stately home” (Desai 21).

There are also other Indian emigrants who gave company to Dev and Adit. The ethnicity can be explained from the lines of Sheffer: “Of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin – their homeland” (3).

Dev is divided between the opportunity he has received in England and the thoughts of bearing suppression and differences. He feels like an alien, insecure and unidentified. His agony is expressed by Desai in Bye-Bye, Blackbird:

Dev ventures into the city. He descends, deeper and deeper, into the white-tiled bowls of Clapham tube station. The menacing slighter of the escalators strikes panic into a speechless Dev as he swept down with an awful sensation of being taken where he does not want to go. Down, down and farther down – like Alice falling, falling down the rabbit hole, like a Kafka stranger wondering through the dark labyrinth of a prison….Dev is swamped inkily, with a great dread of being caught, step in the underground by some accident, some collapse, and being slowly suffocated to a worm’s death, never to emerge into freshness and light. (59–60).

During Adit’s visit to his landlady he is treated as an outsider and his visit is rather unwelcome. Adit is sincere about his enquiries about their daughter, but she wishes to reject the fact of Adit having lived in their house for three years. On their way back, neighbors stare curiously from behind the rose trees and a dog barks. The visit by a non-white is an unpleasant surprise to the white family and their neighbors.


This experience is unforgettable, and “He is perfectly aware of the schizophrenia that is infecting him like the disease to which all Indians abroad, he declares, are prone. At times he invites it, at times he fights it. He is not sure what it might be like to be one himself, in totality. He is not sure. Any longer” (Bye-Bye, Blackbird, 86).

His uncertainty is best described by Desai in Bye-Bye, Blackbird:

In this growing uncertainty, he feels the divisions inside him divided further, and then re-divided once more. Simple reactions and feeling lose their simplicity and develop complex angles, facets, shades and tints… there are days in which the life of an alien appears enthrallingly rich and beautiful to him, and that of a homebody too dull, too stale to return to ever. Then hears a word in the tube or notices an expression on an English face that overturns his latest decision and, drawing himself together, he feels he can never bear to be unwanted immigrant but must return to his own land, however abject or dull, where he has, at least, a place in the sun, security, status and freedom. (86)

Weeks later, Adit, Dev and Sarah visit Sarah’s parents, Mrs. and Mr. Roscommon-James. This visit is nostalgic and Adit realizes that his mother-in-law treats him rather differently. He says, “My mother-in-law hates and despises me. They make fun of the life I lead and the ideals I profess. Therefore I am angry. I am hurt” (Desai 176). Adit develops such a hatred for England that he suspects everything English to be insulting and depressing. He loses control of himself: “…the eternal immigrants who can never accept their new home and continue to walk the streets like strangers in enemy territory, frozen, listless, but dutifully trying to be busy, unobtrusive and, however superficially, to belong” (Desai 182).


The question to settle in a foreign is a question to any diasporian unless one associates oneself with either of the lands. This oscillated mind, the suffering and agony out of cultural change are expressed by the Diaspora. Adit realizes that he has to escape from England and he began to tell Sarah of this nostalgia that had become an illness, an ache.

He tells Sarah, “Sarah, you know I’ve loved England more than you, I’ve often felt myself half-English, but it was only pretence, Sally. Now it has to be the real thing. I must go. You will come?” (Desai 204)

Sarah is happy that Adit has finally taken a decision and condescends. Under the pretext of the war between India and Pakistan, Adit resolves to return back to his homeland. When Sarah announces her pregnancy, Adit is delighted and tells her that the kid would be born in India.

Sarah, married to an Indian, faces an alienation that is internal. Desai has remarkably stated “Sarah shed her name as she had shed her ancestry and identity, and she sat there, staring, as though she watched them disappear” (Desai 31). Sarah is one who puts up with resistance and attitudinal differences within her community as she is the wife of an Asian. Her experiences are tormenting, and she feels an ‘outsider’ in the company of her own countrymen.

Baumgartner’s Bombay traces the journey of the Jew, Hugo Baumgartner, in India, his land of refuge from the Nazis. Desai has etched out the life of a Jew, whose escape from Germany during the Second World War has cost him his identity and nationality. Suffering internal exile, the Jews stay in their own country and feel alienated. The novel brings out diverse interpretations on the Jewish Diaspora and its problems like migrations, suppression,


resistance, representation, difference, race, culture, gender, nationality and place.

Baumgartner, who has been in India for fifty years, remains a firanghi to his friends. His only acquaintances, he claims his own are his homeless pet cats and Lotte, a German cabaret singer. He recalls the years he has spent in India and the desolation that he feels now is the result of his inability to assimilate with the Indian culture:

He had lived in this land for fifty years – or if not fifty then so nearly as to make no difference – and it no longer seemed fantastic and exotic; it was more utterly familiar now than any other landscape on earth. Yet, the eyes of the people who passed by glanced at him who was still strange and unfamiliar to them, and all said: Firanghi, foreigner. (Baumgartner’s Bombay 19)

Baumgartner could certainly not recognize himself as an Indian, for he has been the survivor of a marginalized sector in his homeland, Germany and the longing for belongingness is a part of him. Sayyid says, “The Jewish Diaspora is made possible by the development of a proto nationalism, which prevents its assimilation into other cultural formations…. A Diaspora is formed when people are displaced but continue to narrate their identity in terms of that displacement” (38).

He represents the minority group in Germany that yearns for a homeland which is unassailable. Disempowered, robbed of representation in the social, religious and the political world, these oppressed people are treated as aliens in their own land. Baumgartner recalls, “In Germany he had been dark – his darkness had marked him the Jew, der Jude. In India he was fair – and that marked him the ‘firanghi’” (Baumgartner’s Bombay 20).


In Farrokh’s presence, Baumgartner is reminded of the racial differences between them. “A dignified man who made much of wearing the sacred thread, of reading the scriptures and remaining aloof from all those of an inferior race, to him a mass of mleccha. For all the kindness shown him, Baumgartner had always felt he belonged to the latter” (Baumgartner’s Bombay, 13).

To Baumgartner, the issues of culture, race and caste are so deep-rooted that he finds it impossible to be one among the others in this locality. Hugo’s loneliness is the outcome of the lack of identity in his homeland, so he feels lonely even when he is not neglected. The sense of loneliness experienced by the Jewish community in Germany helped Hitler aggravate loneliness into fear. The Baumgartner family, like the other Jew families lives in constant fear in Nazi Germany and loneliness is the outcome of fear. Hugo suffers both a physical and psychological displacement. The estrangement from his mother, coupled with the sense of homelessness worsens matters as he is unable to situate himself within the society.

Baumgartner makes every effort to establish a meaningful relationship with Kurt, but it turns out to be tragic. Kurt robs and murders Baumgartner, who is helpless. Neither Kurt nor Baumgartner can withstand the pressures of loneliness. While Kurt reacts violently to the situations in life, Baumgartner reconciles. It is perhaps the ultimate judgment that no reconciliation is possible and all attempts at overcoming diasporic loneliness are futile.

Diaspora continues to pose questions related to its fluidity and writers interpret the multiple issues that are inherent. Migration is a pertinent phenomenon that dominates human perceptions. The author has applied a


similar theme but in a different perspective. It might be her mixed parentage or she would have seen people suffering from the worst experiences of immigration, which led to write these novels.

All these characters whether it is Adit or Dev, Sarah or Baumgartner, every character was used to carry the novel to a best ending and arrives at a conclusion. The differentiation between these two novels is Bye-Bye, Blackbird has three major characters and Baumgartner’s Bombay has only one. In Bye-Bye, Blackbird it is Indian immigrant to England and in Baumgartner’s Bombay it is a German to India. One special thing about Bye-Bye, Blackbird is it has a female character Sarah who suffers from loneliness and alienation in her own country.

These novels were received well by the people especially who immigrated to the other country from India and helped them to analyse their situation and arrive at a decision about their life. Desai deserves acclaim in being able to delve into the characters and responses to situations that are beyond their control. She has dealt with refined emotional states that find their ultimate expressions in the form of attitudes or behavioral tendencies. She is certainly one of the observant writers who have succeeded in opening fresh grounds in analyzing and probing further into this area of study.

Conclusion

No one in this so-called civilized world is a native. All are migrants. The earliest human beings became great migrants and hence when the first civilization cropped up they became the first ‘civilized’ natives. The newer migrant groups scattered the former groups or grouped along with them to become the new natives. The Anglo-Indians in India is more Indian than the other. Post-second world war the migration of Jews to India was increased; the 1970s saw the coming of ‘hippies’ and after that there has been constant migration of traders and refugees from India’s neighboring countries like China, Nepal, Bhutan, etc.

The United Kingdom is also an example of one. Butlin & Dodgshon said, “Since the early Phoenicians to the Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Normans and the Romans, all have become the natives of Britain” (55). The later day migrants from the British colonies of Africa and Asia and those from the Commonwealth countries have made British society multicultural. The treatment of the migrant condition in literature is the most engrossing topic in the twentieth century. The postmodernist world has seen the emergence of interdisciplinary and cultural studies as the major thrust areas of academic exploration.


The writer Anita Desai appears as a very good example in that regard. The mixed parentage of complex origin gives Anita Desai the advantage of having double perspective when writing about India and Indians and as well as about migrants in India and Indian migrants to the West. She is both an outsider, if seen from her mother’s side, and a native, if seen from her father’s side.

Desai has lived both in India and went to Girton College, Cambridge, UK, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. She explored the condition of the Diaspora in her fiction in a better way. Desai has dealt with a group of diasporic Indians in Britain of the late 1960s in her novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1969); she has also dealt with the character of a migrant Austrian Jew in India in her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). In the novel, Journey to Ithaca, she has shown an Egyptian in India along with an Italian spiritual seeker in the subcontinent (1995). Finally, she has also shown the lonely Indian, Arun in USA, in her novel Fasting, Feasting (1999).

The two fictions – Bye-Bye, Blackbird and Baumgartner’s Bombay – are existentialist studies of individuals. Their background, historicity, social settings, class, cross-cultural pluralities, race, their adjustment towards alienation are all analysed in these two novels in a perfect manner. The solitude that Desai depicts in her diasporic characters is a result of the inner psyche of the characters with respect to their external circumstances. Loneliness is a manifestation of both inner and outer conditions.

In the novel Baumgartner’s Bombay even as a child a sense of loneliness gnaws at his being and is evoked at his crucial moments of triumph. Hugo’s loneliness as a child, in the midst of society comes because of the lack of


identification. Even when he is not neglected he feels the same loneliness.

Hugo has experienced a displacement; he has not literally moved but the world around him has moved or changed. Hugo has a physical displacement and migrates as a teenager to India, he already had the sense of loneliness. Thus it seems that the change in location is only incidental to his sense of loneliness. But the circumstantial changes also help to aggravate one’s solitude and hence it is not merely incidental and this fact is quite apt in consideration with the estrangement that Hugo suffers from his mother.

Baumgartner’s loneliness is also aroused from latency. Just as Baumgartner keeps stray cats and cares for them in an attempt to give some purpose to his lonely existence, his relationship with Lotte can be thought to be in parallel to it. Baumgartner suffers from an identity crisis and to add fuel to it, there arises in him a sense of non-belonging. After the Second World War identity crisis becomes inherent in the community of displaced migrants. Baumgartner cannot go back to Germany because the Germany of his childhood no longer exists and hence his sense of loneliness continues.

The only thing that Baumgartner tries to reconcile the Germany of his childhood with the present-day Germany is by taking a German youth, Kurt, to his apartment, where Baumgartner is robbed and murdered by him. It is perhaps the ultimate indictment that no reconciliation is possible and all attempts to solve out the sense of diasporic loneliness are futile.

Thus, in Baumgartner’s Bombay, Desai has explored the outer and inner psyche of a German who longs for self-identity, social attachment, relationship, companion, love, care, and his acquaintance with the people living out there


in Bombay and his experience of betrayal, loneliness, fear, non-belonging, sorrows, adjustment, frustration, estrangement, crisis, disrespect, silent violence, distress, grief, pain and dolour in a perfect manner with the novel consciously written about a single human being.

The Diaspora of Indian community is also not exempted from being a victim of the sense of loneliness. Since Indian independence, UK has been a prime destination for migrant Indians. In England migrant Indians are marked as ‘the Others’. This sense of otherness is sometimes due to racism and sometimes it is due to the individual’s inner needs. They find themselves lonely.

Anita Desai’s novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird about migrant Indians in the England of 1960s is a novel unlikely Baumgartner’s Bombay, it is about two Indians along with a group of Indians from various part of the country and the speciality about this novel is that it has a third major character, an English girl who is the wife of an Indian immigrant to England and her own adjustment in her own country.

Desai’s treatment of characters is realistic in nature and their sudden shift in thoughts is well portrayed by her. Adit has well adjusted himself in the country of his adoption and has allayed his sense of loneliness by being nonchalant to its various causes. Dev, on the other hand, is critical of Adit’s attitude. Dev’s loneliness eventually stops haunting him and he decides to stay in England. Adit, in the interim, suffers from a crisis of identity. He starts longing for the land and the people he has left behind. He feels depressed. He finally decides to return to India with Sarah. What this proves is that the sense of loneliness is not a phenomenon of overpowering presence but rather of intermittent overpowering, guided by circumstances which are incidental.


Nowadays globalization has solved the problems of the diasporic Indians. Problems like racism are no longer as headstrong as before, but the problems of the one’s inner condition still plague the diasporic community. What the protagonist has alienated him from to become a Westerner gives rise to his sense of loneliness. This proves that loneliness is an inherent character of diasporic life. The sense of loneliness acts as an umbilical cord attaching oneself to one’s native place, irrespective of its existence, while living in a Diaspora.

The other importance about Bye-Bye, Blackbird is that it is an authentic study of cultural encounters. Desai’s novels seem eminently as a novel about East–West encounter and the traumas of cross-cultural adjustments, the anger, shame, sorrows, grief, regrets and frustrations of characters. The colonial experience of both, the oppressor and the oppressed, and their struggle to break through cultural situations are brought about by the colonial political history.

The heroine of the novel, Sarah stands between the edges of two cultures –India and England. She is weak but possesses steady voice; she becomes a victim of psychic and social alienation. She signifies the twentieth century man’s attempt to overcome the problem of cross-cultural trauma. This novel portrays Indians and Englishmen in England with their problems both physical and psychological.

Adit and Sarah, both of them suffer from problems such as the loss of identity, alienation and humiliation largely on account of racial and cultural prejudices. He suffers humiliations ungrudgingly and he inwardly identifies himself with Indian. Apart from this he obviously longs for Indian friends, activities, food, dress, music and


culture. Sarah finds by hints and suggestions that she is not liked by her own countrymen for having married an Indian. Initially, Dev is misfit in England, discriminated everywhere; he can’t get accustomed to the silence and emptiness of the city.

Towards the end of the novel, things entirely change. Adit begins to be nostalgic for India and gradually gets disenchanted with England. The novel depicts the plight of Indian immigrants in London. The title of the novel refers to England’s bidding farewell to an Indian ‘Black Bird.’ Even from the title one can clearly understand the racism exist in the diasporic community. For British, Indians are Black and hence the author has carefully chosen the title with a sense of bidding farewell to the Indian bird.

Another character, Dev is perturbed when he finds Indians humiliated in both public and private places. In the second part they become changed person and begin to feel the charm of the country. In part three, Adit once comfortably settled in England becomes then home-sick for it and Dev stays on there.

Desai portrays well the conflict of the immigrants who can’t save their cultural roots and makes an effort to strike new roots in alien territory and eventually becomes alienated. The novel is basically concerned with immigrants abroad, their experience of alienation, loneliness and nostalgia for their past life in India. The central problem with which the novel deals with is the problem of marital maladjustment.

The novel with its triangular alienated theme has very well analysed the concept of social alienation from the point of three individuals with their own desires and aims but caught in the trauma of Diaspora. This novel is a best example of Diaspora as it deals with three characters


and their sufferings in a single book and their efforts to overcome loneliness.

The novel has been developed by the rapid changes in social conditions. The novelist was interested in exploring the subconscious of human mind. During the last two centuries many writers followed the psychological theory of Freud and Jung. The psychological and social tensions are obvious in the novels of Desai. The east and west encounter theme is obvious in the works of Anita Desai. In the contemporary world of fiction, the writers dealt with the various legacies of colonialism, migration, instances of discrimination, violence, encounters with cultural otherness.

Desai focuses on personal struggle of anglicized, middle class men in contemporary India. They attempt to overcome the social limitations imposed by tradition on them. Her characters feel alienated and exiled. Even if they stay in crowd, they feel loneliness in alien country. Desai is more interested in the interior world of her protagonist than political and social realities. Her novels deal with aggressive assault of existence.

Desai uses several devices of stream of conscious narratives. Desai engaged the complexities of modern Indian culture from a feministic perspective. Alienation at different levels forms the theme of her novels. It explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in alien society. The novel has been said to be the novel of closest to her personal experience as immigrant.

Anita Desai succeeds in her pattern when she shows a character in action. Her revelation of the unconscious threads of human mind gives the structural unity to the novel. She reveals the intense of longing of the exiled hero’s emotion towards his native land. These two novels are also


concerned with the varied human love–hate relationship. Adit from the beginning of the novel develops attachment to the western way of life, especially to England; but while living in England he shows his repulsion towards the way of European life and particularly of England. As a matter of fact Dev observes the basic distinction of social and educational factors between the East and the West.

Dev shows his aversion dislike towards men and manners of England; but his stay there for a while intensifies his leanings to the country. Sarah stands for her reconciliatory approach between the east and west. She sacrifices her inhibitive leanings just for the sake of her husband. She outlines a proper and balanced approach to the various groups of human relationship. She proves her respectability as an Indian wife. Adit loves England; Dev loves India; but Sarah swings in between her natural inclination and willing adoption. She willingly resigns all her claims for existence in England and ready to leave England for India with her husband.

The novel touches the racial problem and feeling in England. It is not simply white man’s burden but also the feeling of superiority by virtue of their being rules over us. Expatriation and the problems and complexities prevalent in the life of expatriates have merged as a major theme in these novels. The novels crossed the barriers of caste, creed and nationality. The author has been articulate enough in narrating the complexities of life of immigrants.

Anita Desai dives deep in the unconscious and sub-conscious psyche of the expatriates and their nausea, nostalgia and longingness to their native land. Her depiction of characters and situation is not one sided and her protagonists seem to be cherishing a strange love–hate relationship with the end of their adoption with great precision brilliance.


Desai feels that all these immigrants have moulded and transformed themselves entirely up to the expectations of England. They have fully adopted the life style of Britishers. They keep comparing England with their own native. The characters in Bye-Bye, Blackbird are proud of their blind admiration of England. Ironically, in all their appraisal worship, land of liberty, individualism they have realized that England can provide them neither of these whenever they goes, they becomes a victim of racial discrimination and constantly regarded as second grade citizen.

In Bye-Bye, Blackbird, there are different effects on different characters. Desai digs out deep rooted national feeling imbibed by history of Indian freedom. It is to be appreciated that Desai has vividly pictures the role of the novelist in bringing the psychic changes of the protagonists and their plight in an alien country. She reveals that culture will change any person to follow it not out of compulsion of any external force but by changing the person’s psyche to follow it voluntarily, whether it is Eastern culture or Western.

Anita Desai’s works mark a new and mature phase in Indian English fiction. Anita Desai started writing in the sixties. The emergence of eminent women writers merged into the stream with their male contemporaries. The legacy of colonialism had effects on the writers whose themes centered on socio-political and cultural issues results.

Her early novels concentrate on the feminine sensibility at war with the hostility of male centered universe. Her later novels reveal the sensitive apprehension of existentialist against the modern man dropped in loneliness, equally alienated from family and society.


A preferred theme running through her novels is the aloneness of the human being in the isolated island of human destiny. The burden of existence hands heavy on most of her characters. Desai usually used the theme of expatriation in most of her novels. Desai evokes the right atmosphere through the rich imagery characteristic of her style and the use of symbols. The psychological issue in her character’s life affairs the dimensions of existential agony because it is rooted in the existential loneliness.

In conclusion it would be appropriate to quote Marx’s theory of alienation:

The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body–both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, tile object, and the instrument of life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body–nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Marx expresses this view in the language of the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations which allows him to express the idea that human beings are their social relationships. The theory of alienation makes no sense unless Marx’s remarks are understood in this context, for the theory of alienation assumes that a product is part of the human being who made it, that nature is part of the human being who cannot live independently of it, and that social relationships are part of the human being who engages in them.

The word alienation can be referred to a separation–a taking away of human beings from themselves and from their belongings. Therefore, the use of the concept of alienation depends upon a prior conception of human


possibilities. The concept of alienation is theoretically powerful, because it explains the degradation of human life.

Overcoming alienation is at the core of Marx’s thought. Marx’s Theory of Alienation is a red thread that stretches from the young Marx to the old one. Alienation like exploitation is a permanent feature of capitalism that deforms and degrades people. It can only be overcome in a society in which human beings were able to realize their full potential (the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all).

Through the analyses of the two novels, this concluding chapter arrives at some points which are the ideas to escape alienation. Social isolation involves a combination of low levels of social interaction with the experience of feelings of loneliness, where the social aspects are measured objectively while the emotional aspects measured inherently subjective.

One can overcome social alienation by making an effort to make connections with groups. This form of direct exposure helps desensitize any anxieties we have about joining groups and disproves faulty assumptions we might carry into group situations. Developing our own self-acceptance; being self-accepting helps with overcoming alienation. The more you accept yourself, the more likely you’ll experience others as accepting you. Evaluate and change any assumptions about you’re being too different and that others won’t accept you.

Another target for integrating alienation is working with the feelings and beliefs involved with ‘loneliness’. Alienation can be overcome and individuality developed and realised only through participation in a social world.


To conclude, for Anita Desai, writing is an effort to discover, and then to underline, and finally to convey the true significance of things. She presents to readers her opinion about the complexity of human relationships as a big contemporary issue and human condition. So, she analyses this problem by projecting and expressing changing human relationships in her novels. She is a contemporary writer because she considers new themes like alienation and detachment and knows how to tackle them in brilliant manner. Anita Desai takes up outstanding contemporary issues as the subject matter of her fiction while remaining rooted in the tradition at the same time. She explores the anguish of individuals living in modern society. She deals with the complexity of human relationships as one of her major themes, which is a universal issue, as it attracts worldwide readers to her novels. She strives to show this problem without any interference. On the other hand, she allows to her readers to pass judgment over her characters and their actions in an objective and impartial way. Anita Desai unravels the tortuous involutions of sensibility with subtlety and finesse and her ability to evoke the changing aspects of Nature matched with human moods is another of her assets.

Diaspora issues are discussed from the individual viewpoint and then magnified globally. Desai deserves acclaim in being able to delve into the characters’ responses to situations that are beyond their control. She has dealt with refined emotional states that find their ultimate expressions in the form of attitudes or behavioral tendencies. She is certainly one of the observant writers who have succeeded in opening fresh grounds in analyzing and probing further into this area of study.

The relationship between migration and its processes and impact on individuals and their development of


psychological or psychiatric conditions is a complex one and deserves to be teased out. The process of migration itself and the migratory and post-migratory stresses may need to be studied. These should include life events, racial and socio-economic discrimination and factors such as housing, employment, status, etc.

Furthermore, cultural identity and measures of acculturation will be worth assessing to understand the stresses and supports an individual feels and how these interact with other life events. Achievement versus expectation, self-esteem, ethnic density and cultural patterns of development and attachment and periods of separation from one or both parents deserve to be studied further.

Future studies must look at the distribution of symptoms across different ethnic and cultural groups, and the similarities as well as differences must be studied to understand the role of cultural factors. Pathways into medical and psychiatric care can also give a clue to the differential rates of schizophrenia in different groups. Socio-economic factors may well prove to be more significant than ethnicity or migrant status alone.

In conclusion, race, ethnicity and an alien cultural group may function as vulnerability factors and continuing socio-economic disadvantage, discrimination and alienation may work as chronic difficulties, making vulnerable individuals develop psychosis. A deep sense of alienation, loss and failure may contribute to poor self-esteem, which may contribute to distorted images of the self. Broader social factors play a role and deserve to be studied in the specific context of the influence of migration.

This study has explored the theme of social alienation in all possible manners and provides with the idea of overcoming alienation as much as possible.

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