‘Imaginary Homelands’ and resistance to Melting Pot in the poetry of Sujata Bhat

The Indian Diaspora creates a major impact in world culture. The sense of yearning for the motherland is the most overwhelming sentiment of the Indian diaspora wherever it exists. Their nostalgia, together with a curious attachment to the homeland’s traditions, religions and languages gave birth to diaspora literature. The writers of diaspora deal vastly with themes of loss/gain of identity, nostalgia of the past/history/homeland, remembrance of religious & community rituals, details of imaginary landscapes, childhood events, sense of alienation, etc. The paper tries to explain how the writers of Indian diaspora resist the cultural assimilation offered by the foreign land and how they recreate their unique Indian identity. Countries like America attracted large number of immigrants with the help of the concept of ‘melting pot’ – the cultural integration of the immigrants by making them lose their own language, tradition and culture and thus create a homogenous society. But diasporic writers like Sujata Bhatt resist such tendencies by creating an ‘Imaginary Homeland’ (a concept given by Salman Rushdie in his collection of essays ‘Imaginary Homelands’ - 1992) i.e. Imaginary India in her case through her poems based on the themes of her childhood experience in India, women’s issues, history, mythology and polylingualism. She conflates her Indian identity with the alien culture and her poetry shows the signs of her understanding of time, history and cultures and exhibits the impact of these forces on the construction of self and identity. The poetry collection taken for analysis of resistance to the idea of melting pot in the poetry of Sujata Bhatt is – ‘Brunizem’, the first volume of poetry by Sujata Bhatt which was published in 1988.