• SHOMIK DE

Movement is only the determinant of Time. If there is no movement Time will stand still. This may be called dynamism or flux. On the other hand Time is alive in this flux. This flux or movement also is found in every organism. Movement is, in fact, significative of life. We find this movement in human life also. But if the movement in human life becomes spacious, it is called dispersion, a word come from the Greek word diaspeirein. ‘Dia’ means ‘across’ and ‘speirein’ means ‘scatter’, and thus the word ‘diaspeirein’ literally means ‘to scatter’, ‘to spread’, or ‘to disperse’. But term diaspora was originally used to refer to the “dispersion of Jews after the Babylonian exile in 586 BC and to the aggregate of Jews and Jewish communities scattered in exile outside Palestine.” Now the term is used to denote to any group or community of people who are so dispersed. Though the root of diaspora or dispersion is embedded in the Bible, it has now become more frequent because of globalisation. But before globalisation diaspora became familiar. When man began to colonise the Other, diaspora was a common characteristic. We must have to brood over the fact that if a community leaves a place and resettles at another place what changes it faces. Does that community really leave behind everything that it once thought part and parcel of its life? Do individuals of that community adopt and adapt to everything belonging to that new territory? Don’t they feel nostalgia or sense of loss? And many other questions become relevant, but are not easy to answer unless we study their records alias writings, because their life and pulse are written in literature. Piece of writing that records the diasporic experience is called diasporic writing or diaspora literature. If we think for a moment, we shall notice that most of the writers of diaspora literature felt the burden of diaspora in their own lives. Thus diaspora literature record their lived experience which is, on the other hand is multi-layered. Diaspora involves journey which, on the other hand involves de-territorialization and re-territorialization, dislocation from homeland to re-location to new territory. Individual living in foreign land feels the loss of homeland, or makes an imaginary picture of his homeland, and ultimately becomes nostalgic. He has to adapt to new culture, creed, and creed of the new land, but he does not leave his old values. He there faces the language problem. Then a hybrid culture develops. But he always suffers from the sense of alienation in his adopted country, he is minority in the foreign land. Everything of these is vibrantly recorded in diaspora literature. P. K. Nayar gives a list of the features of “diasporic culture/literature”: • The shift, contrast, and relation between centre (from where there ancestors/parents originated) and the periphery (into which they dispersed) • The memory --- the individual or communal --- of home, including details of childhood landscapes, historical events, people • The sense of alienation in a new society/culture/land • A need to retain features from the ‘homeland’ --- this includes a determined effort to retain rituals, language, forms of behaviour • A reclamation of history of the homeland and childhood spaces • A conscious attempt to assert ethnic identity in terms of the homeland, While simultaneously seeking acceptance/assimilation in the new cultures (Nayar, 190). V. S. Naipaul and Meena Alexander are two expatriate writers who picturizes their ancestral land India in their writings, but their viewpoint vary to a greater degree. While Naipaul is very much harsh in his criticism of India, Alexander comes back to her ancestral land on the wings of memory in their novels An Area of Darkness and Fault Lines. My focus is to bring out the difference between these two writers picturing of India in these two novels.Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, familiar as V. S. Naipaul, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2001. Born in Trinidad on 17 August 1932 Naipaul is now a British citizen Whose grandparents left India in the 1880s as indentured labour. His father became an English language journalist in the Indian immigrant community in Trinidad. Though Naipauls belonged to the Hindu Brahmins, they ignored many of the practices and restrictions common to Brahmins in India.His non-fictions include An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, India: A Million Mutinies Now (three travelogues written on India), The Middle Passage (travelogue on Trinidad), The Loss of El Dorado, The Return of Eva Pan, A Turn in the South, etc., and his fictions include The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, etc. Mary Elizabeth Alexander, commonly known as Meena Alexander, was born in Allahbad, India on February, 1951. She officially changed her name from Mary Elizabeth to Meena in her fifteenth year. In fact, Meena was the name she had been called since her birth. In her memoir Fault Lines she remarks, “I felt I had changed my name to what I already was, some truer self, stripped free of the colonial burden. ” Her name itself suggests her multilingual nature: ‘Meena’ means ‘fish’ in Sanskrit, ‘jewelling’ in Urdu, and ‘port’ in Arabic. Surprisingly the writer too is result of multiple cultures. When Sudan achieved independence in 1956, her father applied for job to the Sudanese government, the family moved to Khartoum. Most interestingly Meena, between the age of five to eighteen, moved between Sudan and India, between Khartoum and Kerala, between her parents and grandparents. She is a poet, novelist, and critic. Nampally Road and Manhattan Music are her two most famous novels. Fault Lines is her autobiography or memoir.

Diaspora, Nostalgia, Deterritorialization, Reterritorialization.

"INDIA IN NAIPAUL & MEENA ALEXANDER", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 8, page no.176-188, August-2018, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1808026.pdf

"INDIA IN NAIPAUL & MEENA ALEXANDER", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 8, page no. pp176-188, August-2018, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1808026.pdf