Dislocation, Displacement and Immigrant experience in the Short Stories of Shauna Singh Baldwin

: The Indian Diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be a part of it-Kiran Desai various struggles of Indian women immigrants after partition. Most of people migrated in the aftermath of the Partition and as a result their families suffered displacement and dislocation. She represents the experience of leading characters in three different settings -- India, USA and Canada. Baldwin unfolds the theme of cultural displacement and exile employing a variety of narrative strategies. Thus engaging with her short stories, this paper views her writing as a representation of cultural displacement, divided identity, quest for identity, home and belongingness.


IJELLH
She represents the experience of leading characters in three different settings --India, USA and Canada. Baldwin unfolds the theme of cultural displacement and exile employing a variety of narrative strategies. Thus engaging with her short stories, this paper views her writing as a representation of cultural displacement, divided identity, quest for identity, home and belongingness.
Keywords: Partition, Diasporic Consciousness, Dislocation, Displacement, Identity Introduction: Shauna Singh Baldwin is a famous diasporic writer and a great voice of Indo-Canadian origin.
In an interview with Tehelka when she was asked to comment on the fact that generally a writer of Indian origin is labeled everything from an Indo Anglian writer to an Immigrant Writer. Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a World literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of Migrants, the colonized or political refugees-these border and frontier conditionsmaybe the terrains of world literature. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 11) Baldwin represents women of India in various settings and provides an insight into the lives of Indian women in their own and in other cultures after immigration because of partition. She shows how due to partition people after being dislocated from their homeland, try to adapt to the foreign culture and how they search for self-identity. She examines the wounds endured by immigrant Sikhs during partition and discusses how as immigrants they cope with the new environment. The theme of dislocation and cultural displacement resonate throughout the text.
The stories explore how courage and adaptability is necessary to maintain an Indian identity while living in some other country.
In Draupdi Ma grandfather feels a drastic change before partition in india and after partition while his stay in Canada as an immigrant. He finds a strong sense of cultural displacement.
When Sukimama says to darji to let him know the girl with whom he is going to get marry "I tell you, she may be a very nice girl, but I do not know her. It is not 1945 anymore, Darji, it is1966." Darji replies in a bold voice; did they addle your brain in Canada? You should have stayed in England, sir. The English understand these things." (Baldwin, 1996, p. 13) In "Rawalpindi 1919," Baldwin shows how a mother thought about the changes they will require to make to their home when her son will return from England. She imagines her son will expect chairs to sit on, not cushions, and plates to eat from, not thalis. The mother recognizes and tries to accept these changes.
In "family ties" the narrative also talks about the effect of Partition on his father where he lost everything and even after being settled down in an alien country he never came out of that bad dream. He tells how his Dad, Dada and Dadi locked their haveli near Rawalpindi before the IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2019 13 Muslims came and how they fled on a death train and his only twenty-one-year-old father arrived in the new India because Nand Singh (driver) and his father used their turbans to rope themselves to the belly of the railcar and hid beneath it with a revolver as their only weapon while Dada and Dadi's screams filled the mad swirling darkness. He says "I know Dad is thinking of his parents when he wanders off to a quiet spot, takes off his shoes, sits cross-legged before the Granth Sahib and says the words of the Gurus, chanting low. I stand behind him keeping the flies away with his special silver-handled yak's-hair tail, white and rough as my Dada's beard might have been, and when he nods I turn the pages of the tome for him.…Dad doesn't wear a saffron turban or carry a big kirpan. He isn't even as large as I remembered, and helooks a little worn. ….And all the time Inder asks, "Aren't you going to be in the war?" "No," Dad replies. "I lost enough in '47." (Baldwin, 1996, p. 15) The story "Devika" shows one woman's fight to adapt from Indian life to Canadian life. She struggles a lot to adapt to Canadian life style and she needed her family support: "She wanted her mother, her father, and at least twenty solicitous relatives telling her what to do, how to do it, how to live, how to be good, how to be loved." In order to remove her feelings of intense loneliness, Devika invents Asha, an imaginary friend who takes the shape of her best Devika's imaginary friend restores to the present a past version of her friend, the "wilful, Fun-loving, irreverent Asha, the one who'd sworn never to be married" (Baldwin, 1996, p. 156). Devika was in a dilemma and was trying to cope with double personality disorder. By visualizing Asha, Devika also tries to show a difference between modern Canada and traditional India. "In Canada, [Devika] found it more difficult to sort the good girls from the bad ones. It is important to have both, because if there are no bad girls, how would anyone know that girls like Devika are good?" (Baldwin, 1996, p. 158).
In "Nothing Must Spoil this Visit" a mother feels the changes in generation because of western influences. She finds a cultural displacement and was worried to find a good wife for her son as she explains her choice in a wife for her son, "After all, I chose her because I saw from the start she would be an adjustable woman" (Baldwin, 1996, p. 121). According to her, there is a drastic cultural change and so, a "modern" woman should be adaptable to maintain her family's reputation.
In "Simran" the mother of Simran is also feeling a cultural displacement when she realizes that it a copy of the Koran was lay cradled in her only daughter's baggage. She was horrified. What her daughter exposed herself to in America? She remembers about her rich culture and talks about Partition pain: We are a proud Sikh family and we have long memories. The characters were displaced by Partition, and they got doubly-displaced when they immigrated to foreign lands. Thus the major theme in Shauna Singh Baldwin's short stories is a sense of consciousness to the homeland after settling in an alien land after partition. She not only describes the trauma of Partition and dislocation from the place of origin but also the problems of relocation to an alien place. Thus Baldwin beautifully represents the individuality of her characters through her varied writing styles and effectively presents that partition trauma and immigrants efforts to stick to and follow their culture, customs and traditions.