Paper Details

Name: Mandeep Kaur Randhawa
Country: India

Year: 2018
Volume: Volume-5, Issue-1 & 2 (Combined Issue)
Page Number: 37-45

The displaced people often faces the problems like deracination, oppression, legal disabilities, an endless struggle with issues of identity and an often painful adjustment to a host land whose hospitality was unreliable and ephemeral. The concept of displaced persons implies a ‘homing desire’ which is not the same as a ‘desire for a “homeland”’ or an ‘ideology of “return”’ (Brah 180). Furthermore, as K. Gardner notes, the very migratory process inherently involves “acts of the imagination, in which home and destination are continually re-imagined, and thus forever changed” (35). ‘Home’ has always been a difficult concept to define because it has multiple meanings with differing levels of abstraction. For our purposes, we can point to four significant meanings of home: firstly, a geographical space or material home; secondly, a site where everyday life is lived, the ‘lived home,’ thirdly, a nucleus of social relationships and a point of identification, a cultural home; fourthly, a ‘desired home.’ Different meanings of home can be contradictory, while simultaneously bleeding into each other, within diasporic experience (Clifford 303-04). In brief, the term diaspora may be defined as “the collective forced dispersion of a religious or ethnic group, where the group’s cultural heritage is nevertheless preserved and the historical fact of dispersion is retained in its collective memory” (Chaliand and Rageau 3). In addition, diaspora communities usually retain an idealized memory of the original homeland, and they often feel “alienated and insulated” from their adopted location in the hostland. (Safran 83-4).