(Re) Visiting The Imagined Homeland: A Study of M. G. Vassanji’s Changed Perspective on India through His Works

Abstract

India has always been at the centre stage of Indian diaspora writings. The second generation Indian diaspora writers have been engaged with the Indian landscape and India of their imagination. The pull of a distant homeland has kept Indian diaspora writers drawn toward India in one way or the other, as is widely acknowledged in their writings. Moyez Ghulam Vassanji, an Indo Afro Canadian writer is one of the most representative contemporary diaspora writer, whose works have Indian background, since the publication of his first novel The Gunny Sack in 1989, when he had not visited India to the works like A Place Within: Rediscovering India which was published 2009, by the time he had visited India several times. In this paper, the difference in imagined Indian land and the real Indian land through the lens of Indian Diaspora writer will be brought forth. The Indian landscape as determinant of identity in next generation Indian Diaspora, twice removed from India, has been questioned and probed in this paper. Through the writings of M. G. Vassanji, the importance of real landscape and imaginary landscape on “psyche”, “identity”, and “identification of the self with respect to a place” are gauged.