Voices from Foreign Land: A Study of Select Diaspora Narratives of Rohinton Mistry

Abstract

Diaspora is a social formation outside the nation of its origin. Diaspora deals with the uprooting, forced or voluntary, of the mass of people from their native ‘homeland’ and their ‘re-rooting’ in the foreign land. The word ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek composite verb diasperiein-dia (meaning ‘through or across’) and speirein (meaning to sow/scatter). Diaspora means to scatter through/across, an act of dispersion or scattering. It is an act of gathering and settlement from the homeland to the host land, which is known as the new land. The term diaspora was not in circulation before the 1980s, and there was no evidence of diaspora theory before that decade. Rohinton Mistry is a writer of the Indian diaspora who settled in a foreign land and speaks about his diasporic consciousness of his homeland through his novels set in Canada. The main objective of the research article is to reveal voices from the cross-border using diasporic narratives in the novels of Rohinton Mistry.