Kalika Shah

Multiculturalism and Identity Politics Kalika Shah

This book aims at analysing the fiction produced by the expatriate Parsee writers of the Indian subcontinent: Bapsi Sidhwa, Rohinton Mistry and Boman Desai. These Parsee writers of the South Asian origin have emigrated to Canada and USA in the latter part of the twentieth century. Their works offer several possibilities seen from the multicultural point of view. The fiction of these Parsee diasporic writers examines the problem of migration, relocation and changing identities from a vantage point of distance gained by an insider's view of their community and an outsider's view from the host country. Dislocations, even when voluntary, always have a traumatic side to it due to the process of acculturation, assimilation into or differences with the host country and the issue of rights and privileges in the new location. For the diasporic communities of different backgrounds, their memory, history and cultural beliefs are the important factors that determine their identities. These Parsee novels demonstrate how individual and group/collective identities of the Parsees get constructed and reconstructed/redefined against the changing multinational contexts.