Disaster, Displacement, and Deconstruction: Identity and Memory in Contemporary South Asian Women's Diaspora Literature

Abstract

This essay examines how contemporary South Asian women writers engage with disaster, historical, cultural, and psychic, in their diaspora fiction. Reading Bharati Mukherjee's Wife and Jasmine, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and The Vine of Desire, and Anita Rau Badami's The Tamarind Woman and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? through the lens of Derrida's deconstruction theory, the essay argues that these authors represent diaspora as a condition shaped by multiple overlapping disasters: the spectacular violence of the Partition and the Air India bombing, and the slow, attritional disaster of cultural displacement. Identity and memory are shown to function not as stable inheritances but as active reconstructions through which women navigate disaster's aftermath. The essay contributes to disaster studies in literature by foregrounding the gendered dimensions of catastrophe and survival, demonstrating how these authors challenge binary paradigms of loss and recovery, authenticity and hybridity, in favour of more fluid and dynamic frameworks.