Locating (Im)migrant Identity in Urban Landscapes: From Postcolonialism to Globalization in the Indo-English Migration novels of Anita Desai

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The idea of city is never fixed, it is always in the “making” or “becoming”. It is a metaphor for a life full of opportunities, freedom. However, it also leads to an ironic alienated self. This article deals with this metaphor to present urban geography through the eyes of an immigrant gazer. At the interface of (im)migrant and urban space, the (im)migrant is constantly de-territorialized. The emphasis will be on how the troubled and diverse urbanscape fashions contemporary human identity, development, creativity, mobility, etc., and how spaces and places (physical, imagined, dispersed and diverse) are depicted. The Whorfian hypothesis has attacked foreign languages depicting different spatio-temporal urban landscapes and the experiences of alienation within it. I will examine the author’s difficult task in conveying the experiences of immigrants – the Jewish Diaspora and the citizens of newly-independent countries – in an alien megalopolis personified as an anthropoid inflicting a malevolent power “dwarfing the individual and reducing him to a speck of insignificant grime”. I will also address cultural and architectural differences in Western and Oriental cities within the postcolonial cultural spaces that entail an identity crisis among migrants.