8 - ‘Shreds of Indianness’: Identity and Representation in Manju Kapur's The Immigrant

Summary

In The Immigrant (2008), Manju Kapur sets out a complex network of multiple relationships that affect its protagonists not only as human beings, but also as political subjects and societal members. As the title indicates, these individuals find themselves in the process of naturalizing their migration experiences in a world of increasing global interconnectedness. Indeed, Nina and Ananda's experiences, two Indian-born citizens permanently moving (albeit in different times) to another Western country, are shaped by at least two major institutional and cultural apparatuses: India and Canada. I want to suggest here that Manju Kapur's novel participates in discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism by making the complexity of the immigration experience and its multiple ambivalences the crucial focus of her story. Addressing the influence and significance of Western and Indian societal and cultural structures on the protagonists' selves, I shall argue that the locus of a private, political and societal shift in identity, as well as the ambivalence of this construct, is explored through the polyphonic function of fluctuating models, such as the immigrant venture and the experience of marriage. Kapur invites the reader to consider that both ‘global’, and to an extent essentialized, models need redefining as they are no longer adequate for describing the protagonists' sociopolitical realities in a postliberalization Indian context and in diaspora.