Diaspora, Memory, and Cultural Belonging in Rachana Joshi’s Leaving India and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Paper: 202

Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Abstract:

The literature of diaspora speaks in the voice of memory. It carries the tension between roots and routes—between belonging to a homeland and adapting to a new one. This paper explores how Rachana Joshi’s Leaving India and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children reimagine Indian identity through the intertwined lenses of diaspora, memory, and cultural belonging. Both texts address displacement not merely as a geographical phenomenon but as a psychological and cultural condition, where identity is continuously negotiated through remembrance and narration. The analysis employs perspectives from postcolonial and diaspora theory—drawing on scholars like Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, and Vijay Mishra—to explore how Joshi and Rushdie use language, memory, and narrative structure to reconstruct belonging across borders.

Introduction:

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” — Edward Said

 Post-independence Indian English literature has become a rich terrain for voices navigating dislocation, hybridity, and the search for belonging. Diaspora literature, in particular, reflects India’s long history of migration and cultural transformation. Rachana Joshi’s Leaving India (2009) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) exemplify this dialogue between the homeland and the diaspora, between the personal and the historical.

While Rushdie’s narrative unfolds within India’s postcolonial transformation, Joshi’s work speaks from the transnational space of departure and nostalgia. Both, however, treat memory as the binding thread of cultural ID. The term 'diaspora' originates from the Greek 'diaspeirein'—to scatter. In modern postcolonial discourse, it represents communities dispersed from their homelands yet maintaining emotional, linguistic, and cultural ties with them. Avtar Brah (1996) defines diaspora as a “space of intersectionality” where belonging and alienation coexist. Vijay Mishra, in The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, identifies two forms: the old (indentured) diaspora and the new (post-1960s migratory) diaspora—both marked by longing and memory.

entity. In their worlds, remembering becomes a creative act—a way to rebuild the nation and the self in the aftermath of displacement.

Conceptual Framework: Diaspora, Memory, and Cultural Identity

 Memory, therefore, becomes the foundation of diasporic identity. Pierre Nora (1989) described lieux de mémoire—sites of memory—as spaces where collective remembrance substitutes for lived experience. For diaspora writers, these “sites” are linguistic and narrative: the act of writing becomes a memorial gesture. In Rushdie’s and Joshi’s works, memory bridges the gap between the homeland and the self, transforming loss into literary creativity. 

Rachana Joshi’s Leaving India: Nostalgia and the Feminine Diaspora

Rachana Joshi’s Leaving India is a delicate, introspective portrayal of cultural displacement. Her poems echo the emotional geography of the Indian diaspora—where physical distance is countered by mnemonic intimacy. Joshi’s voice is tender, personal, and feminine, addressing how migration fractures yet reshapes the sense of self.

In the poem Leaving India, the lyrical speaker revisits the homeland through sensory memories—“the smell of wet earth after monsoon”, “temple bells fading into the sea”. The language evokes what Vijay Mishra calls the diasporic imaginary—a mental reconstruction of home. For Joshi, the act of remembering is not passive nostalgia but an act of resistance against cultural erasure.

Her use of simple yet evocative imagery conveys what Homi K. Bhabha terms the third space—a hybrid zone where the migrant negotiates between cultures. Joshi’s identity is not divided but expanded through movement. The poem Leaving India thus becomes a metaphor for both loss and liberation: leaving as a wound, but also as a beginning.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: History as Diasporic Memory:

If Joshi’s poetry whispers the language of personal exile, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children shouts the chorus of a nation in transition. The novel is a monumental act of remembrance—Saleem Sinai’s narrative becomes India’s fragmented autobiography. The novel begins with a birth at the stroke of midnight, symbolically merging individual and national identities.

According to Steven Connor (2005), modern writers like Rushdie turn myth into a mode of survival, translating cultural memory into modern identity. Rushdie’s style—his magical realism, linguistic play, and self-reflexive narration—embodies hybridity itself. English becomes “Indianised”, a postcolonial space of cultural negotiation.

Rushdie’s notion of “chutnification” of history—mixing memory, myth, and imagination—reflects the diasporic consciousness. The narrator admits, “To understand one life, you have to swallow the world.” In doing so, Rushdie dismantles linear history, replacing it with the fluid temporality of memory. This process mirrors the diasporic condition—where the past is not left behind but continuously reinterpreted.

Thus, Midnight’s Children performs diaspora even when set largely within India: its narrative technique enacts dislocation, fragmentation, and the constant search for coherence amid cultural multiplicity.

Comparative Discussion: Memory as Home

Both Joshi and Rushdie locate home not in geography but in memory. Joshi’s poetry captures the intimate dimensions of exile, where belonging is reconstructed through remembrance and affection. Rushdie’s fiction, on the other hand, explores the collective memory of a nation, turning history into myth and language into identity.

Aspect	Rachana Joshi – Leaving India	Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Genre & Form	Lyrical poetry collection	Postmodern novel (magical realism)
Central Theme	Personal exile, emotional memory, feminine nostalgia	National history, fragmented identity, postcolonial transformation
Tone & Voice	Intimate, reflective, nostalgic	Ironic, exuberant, self-conscious
Representation of Memory	Memory as emotional preservation and identity reconstruction	Memory as narrative invention; history “chutnified” through storytelling
Belonging	Found in emotional and sensory recollection	Found in storytelling and hybrid cultural identity
Language & Style	Minimalist, imagistic, rooted in emotional truth	Linguistically hybrid, experimental, metaphor-rich
Cultural Space	Diasporic consciousness from abroad (the New Indian diaspora)	Postcolonial consciousness within India (yet with diasporic structure)
Gender Perspective	Feminine subjectivity and identity negotiation	Male narrator as national allegory
Philosophical Dimension	Home as memory and continuity	Home as fragmented imagination; identity as multiplicity
Outcome of Diaspora	Healing through remembrance and poetry	Reconstruction of nation through narrative irony

Where Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai “remembers” India through grand historical allegory, Joshi’s speaker reclaims it through the personal lens of diaspora. The scale differs—Rushdie writes of a nation’s birth, Joshi of a person’s departure—but both perform the same cultural task: translating memory into belonging.

Their narratives converge in their resistance to fixed identity. As Brah suggests, diaspora identity is always becoming, never being. Joshi and Rushdie demonstrate that belonging is not about returning home but about creating new homes in language and imagination.

Stylistic and Thematic Techniques

• Language as Cultural Space:

Rushdie’s hybrid English mirrors the multilingual reality of India, while Joshi’s plain diction reflects intimacy and emotional clarity. Both redefine English as an Indian language.

1. Temporal Fluidity: Rushdie’s hybrid English mirrors the multilingual reality of India, while Joshi’s plain diction reflects intimacy and emotional clarity. Both redefine English as an Indian language.

2. Memory blurs the boundaries of past and present. Rushdie’s non-linear narrative and Joshi’s cyclical imagery show how time folds in diaspora writing.

3. Rushdie transforms myth into postmodern allegory; Joshi reclaims cultural symbols as emotional anchors. Both engage with Indian mythology as a reservoir of belonging.

4. Gendered Voice of Exile: Joshi’s work contributes to what scholars like Meena Alexander and Chandra Mohanty call the feminine diaspora—where exile becomes an exploration of female subjectivity, not just national identity.

Conclusion:

Diaspora writing often begins with departure but ends with rediscovery. In Leaving India and Midnight’s Children, both Joshi and Rushdie show that the journey from India to elsewhere—whether literal or imaginative—is also a journey inward. Memory becomes the architecture of belonging; storytelling, its foundation.

Through different forms—lyrical poetry and postmodern fiction—both authors articulate the same truth: that identity is not a matter of roots but of routes; not of where we come from, but of how we remember. As Rushdie famously said, “The past is a country from which we have all emigrated.” Joshi and Rushdie invite us to return—not to that country, but to the stories that keep it alive.

References:

• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Psychology Press, 2004.

• Bhandari, Rajendra. “Father and My Birthday.” Indian Literature, vol. 49, no. 4 (228), 2005, pp. 112–13. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23340819. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

• Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Psychology Press, 1996.

• Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Randolph Starn. “Introduction.” Representations, vol. 26, Jan. 1989, pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928519.

• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993.

• Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. Routledge, 2007.

• Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children: A Novel. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.