Identity Crisis of an Immigrant in Desai’s Bye Bye Blackbird

One important aspect of postcolonial studies is the experience of Diaspora, which has been a common theme in English literature. Diaspora is not only a physical mobility of the immigrants from their homeland to the foreign land, but a kind of psychological dislocation in which the immigrants experience a sense of displacement, marginalization and a loss of identity. Some immigrants experience ambivalent feelings of in-betweeness and are torn between the two cultures, thus they suffer from a broken and split identity. On the other hand, other immigrants try to fully adjust themselves and assimilate with the new culture and live as expatriates. The image of a journey to settle down somewhere else is central to the notion of diaspora. Diaspora has habitually been comprehended as a yearning for a lost home. It is a phenomenon, which is associated with the process of shifting, moving, settling and unsettling of the person or community involved in the act. Bye Bye Blackbird deals with the experience of an Indian man who lived in Britain and married to a British wife