Diasporic Experience in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni‘s The Vine of Desire: Some Evidence

The present research paper discusses about the issues of diasporic experience in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Vine of Desire. The novel under scrutiny, being a sequel to her earlier novel Sister of My Heart and written against the backdrop of California, portrays the trauma experienced by the immigrants due to dislocation, a sense of disquiet longing for home and homeland, nostalgia and memory and thereby struggle for identity. The focal point of the paper is to see how the two women, Anju and Sudha, get doubly displaced from their home as well as homeland; how their diasporic experiences are lime lighted in California; how this displacement helps these women become liberated; how does this lead to their breakdown? Being a story of transformation of Anju and Sudha and their quest for autonomy and identity in the host land, the novel is a fictitious representation of both positive and negative effects of diaspora on immigrants signifying their desperation for home and home land.