The issue of 'Indian-ness',' Identity' and 'The Lost Homes' have been widely discussed by the writers all over the world. As a literature student I studied some of the Diaspora literature. I had never realized that one day the saga of my own life might sound like one of these books. I always ponder over the inevitability of the fate of the immigrants. Immigrants have been rearing up the same sensibility, why don't we have the courage to break the shackle. Is it that hard? Our predecessors must have tried hard, some might have gotten free.
I believe as long as we would continue to treat our present as foreign and past as home and lost, it won't be possible to Identify with the present, our identities would always be dis-located, because, in 'foreign land' things always work differently. We are behaving adamantly in the present. Why do we always indulge in discussions as to what would have been the conditions in India when we had left it? We will be stepping into the world of artificial intelligence (machines) where territorial and cultural limitation won’t exist and should be prepared for the challenges of the world to come.
The displacements of people can be of different type, it could be forced migration, deportation, and voluntary emigration, emigration where we are the colonizers and where we are the colonized ones. Mine is the voluntary emigration, and, I am confined to that one only, as I won't be able to sense others. We crossed "Saat Samunder" to a make it an abode of our own. One should have the courage to accept the fact that we did it voluntarily. The feeling that we have committed a sin, in crossing the black ocean, should be undermined. Our soul should be purified and free of all the guilt. It is acceptable to some extent to bear the guilt by the parents who are the first to emigrate, but would be unacceptable if we hand it down to our off springs. They have only the present, unlike us; never should we try to create a "false past" for them. Neither they would be the archetype of our "golden past”, nor should we expect.
Sensibility is an unstable entity, which we create out of our believes, surroundings, sub-conscious mind, our hatred and love and we are not ready to give up throughout lives the sensibilities, constructed on such an ambiguous and instable base. This struggle between the 'Memory and Forgetting', that we experienced should be limited to ourselves only. Our identities are plural and let’s face it and face it with dignity, but this ambiguity should not permeate our future.
With Love
Anupama
Note- In "we" I am always included.