Rock Pebbles

July - Dec 2006

The expatriate Indian writers are not a monolithic category and cannot be viewed as a single homogenous group. It is essentially a composite cultural context, drawing from different nations, cultures and societies, with, indeed, the single thread of Indian background running through this variegated grouping. Even their affinity and identification with India is of varying degrees of intensity ranging from a minimalist remnant of cultural memory to a deeply missed immediate reality, thus differentiating writers of one nation from another, wherever they have settled, and one generation from another within each nation. Most of the time, their marginality in host nations enables them to strike a chord of homelessness of the modern individual.