Literary Writings on Immigrants

1. The Emotions of Migration
Presented by
 Dr. Jayshree Singh
 Senior Faculty(Lecturer in Selection Grade)
 Deptt. of English, Bhupal Nobles P. G. College
 Mohanlal Sukhadia University
 Udaipur – 313001
 Email: dr.jayshree.singh@gmail.com
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2. Introduction
 Emotionology - The study of attitudes or standards that a
society encourages in human conduct
 Emotions - A complex set of interactions among
subjective and objective factors
 Migration - (of people ) Moving from a place to live to another place
for a while or changing a platform from an
environment to another one
 Emotional History of Migration It takes place across borders and
boundaries.
 Their settlement and memories become
significant.
 Their experience covers migration, emotions
and belonging.
 Migrants think and speak about their
choice, pain, loss, separation, and misery.
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3. Objectives
 To interrogate the human displacement across
borders and rupture in relationships
 To sensitise the migrants’ memories and emotional
loss.
 To understand mobility in terms of the social structure
and cultural process
 To differentiate western psyche with Indian psyche as
regards emotional history of migrants
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4. Discussion
 Emotion is a child like activity for Indian migrants as
well as for those who are left behind in their homeland.
 Migration is mostly an economic activity in Indian
context.
 It encourages cultural inflow and cultural outflow.
 It also generates loss of belongingness for the
homeland and loss of identity in the foreign land.
 Migration to abroad indeed brings good-feel factor, but
there is emotional crisis of self and nationality.
 Because of "Videsiya bhav" lots of narratives, memoirs,
letters and travelogues have been written to search roots
of India in their imagination and it is the catharsis of
their wings/flight.
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5. The Narratives of Migration
The Name sake by Jumpa Lahiri (Indo-American)
takes the Ganguli family from their tradition bound life
in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into
America. On the heels of their arranged wedding,
Ashoka and Ashima Ganguli settle together in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His wife resists all things
American and pines for her family. The immigrants face
cultural dilemmas in the foreign system and gradually
imbibe the cultural ways of the host country too. Their
own children groomed to be “bilingual” and “bicultural”,
face cultural dilemmas and displacement more.
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6. Spatial Segregation and Mobility
The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet (Indo-
Canadian)is a moving story of race and displacement. It
carries the reader effortlessly from 19th-century India to
the cane fields of Trinidad, and the contemporary urban
centres of North America. Mona, a young Indo-
Caribbean woman who grew up in Trinidad, confronts
not only her own turbulent past, but the secrets of a
winding family history, that begun on the Indian
continent almost two centuries ago. The novel explores
the Caribbean life, immigrant experience marked by
violence and shame, but also by love and respect.
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7. Sensitising Cultural Counterpoint
 Pomegranate Dreams and Other Short Stories by
Vijaya Lakshmi Chauhan (Non-Resident Indian)
 – “In the City of Storks” and “Touchline” tell the truth
that lie behind the human world’s memories, reveries
and subsequent emptiness. The stories unveil that
every individual makes his own nests with emotions to
secure oneself from likes-dislikes, distance-intimacy,
lost –found. What can redeem human world from
bondage? Can it be love or intimacy? Can it be
belongingness or uprootedness? Is it to sever from past
or to settle scores with present situation?
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8. Emotions of an Expatriate
An Area of Darkness -V.S.Naipaul
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It is a travelogue detailing Naipaul's trip
through India in the early sixties A
deeply pessimistic work, An Area of
Darkness conveys the acute sense of
disillusionment which the author
experiences on his first visit to his
ancestral land.

9. Conclusion
 Thus emotional history of migration tells the stories of
remembrance, missing, searching and sometimes it
evokes resilient attitude towards one's own and
towards the place they live.
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