Dynamics of Migration: Memories, Unhousing and Unhappiness

Abstract

Ethnic identity, in the context of immigration, shifts and evolves under multicultural
influences. The concepts of “identity” and “difference”, informed by historical, economic,
political parameters, are crucial to a discourse on ethnicity. In the context of transcultural
migrations, women live through the vagaries of double marginalisation of cultural dissonance
and gendering. Consequently, Indian diasporic women’s writings give voice to the vicissitudes
of ethnic existence and gendered experiences, thereby showing how the images of women in
South Asian novels have changed in the last three or four decades.