Displacement And Identity Struggle In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen Of Dreams

Abstract

The present research article attempts to trace out the Displacement and Identity Struggle in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams. Diaspora literature constitutes the problematic abroad life of immigrants. As an outsider, the diaspora community faces so many critical problems in their host land. Alienation, racial segregation, cultural conflict, and identity crisis are core issues faced by immigrants. Indian diaspora literature is an academic body of writing enhanced by Indian immigrant writers. Indian diasporic literature holds Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in high esteem. She has creatively projected the survival issues of immigrant women in her novels, and short stories. Divakaruni studied how Indian immigrant women balance their identity with Western culture. Indian immigrant’s experience, contemporary America, history, fantasy, and the difficulties of immigrants living in an alien land are here major thematic concerns. Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams is the journey of a young Indian artist named Rakhi in California, United States. Surviving abroad, Rakhi perceives the conflict of hyphened identity. She proclaims that as an immigrant, she is having a dual identity and she swings between ‘real’ and ‘reel’ world. Rakhi’s two daughters survive as second-generation immigrants in the United States who are not much aware of India and its culture. The novel deeply emphases on identity conflict, east-west conflict, cultural clash, assimilation, the pain of immigration, and belongingness.