The epigraph bears plainly the interest of Chitralekha Banerjee Divakaruni to
make an admirable navigation of her fictional creations with ineluctable gaps that
far speak of the divergent concerns of the postmodern and postcolonial times to
evolve into meta-narratives. Indian writers in English have a proud work behind them that
speaks of their incredible eye for the social realities to rise to great heights in literary
firmament. Writers such as R K Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad C Chaudhuri,
Anita Desai, Toru Dutt, and other eminent literary luminaries achieved global critical
acclaim for their authorship. The shrunken globe has changed the interrogatives of
approaching literature with several contemporaneous issues voicing the hitherto unvoiced.
Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) which won The National Book
Critics award led the way in upbringing the transformation in the Asian-American literature.
The newly emerging writers who settled in the adopted nations charged up myriad voices
through centering the eloquent subaltern in their texts that crossed the fluid geographies
and stern cultures. Among these writers is a new generation of women writers whose
unremitting quest for the multiple consciousness, the process of diasporic identity formation,
mediating the historical discourses, tradition in exile and the cross-pollination of cultural
symbolism, which among several others try to reconstruct the spaces they come to inhabit.
This reminds us of the critical practice that John Maxwell Coetzee espouses in reading
the absence and silence in the texts which exist as signs of ideological exclusion and
oppression.
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