Between Worlds: Alienation and Belonging in Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World

Abstract

This paper reads Amit Chaudhuri’s novel A New World through the lenses of diaspora and alienation, feeling at home in a strange place. The paper puts Jayojit Chatterjee’s emotional and psychological life in focus and argues that it is the comanchya of family relationships and memory and everydayness rather than exile or forced migration which leads to diasporic identity. The study employs close reading and the theoretical work of diaspora thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, and James Clifford to claim that Chaudhuri portrays diaspora as a silent interior event in which he experiences detachment from the subcontinent and to his adopted nation. Both homely and mundane as well as intergenerational, the essay presents new insights into alienation in diaspora literature. Subsequent research might extend this approach to Chaudhuri’s other novels or Indian diasporic writing more broadly.