10. Fragmented Selves: Negotiating Identity and Adaptation in Kiran Desai's Diasporic Narrative

Diasporic literature offers one of the most nuanced reflections on displacement, belonging, and the complex negotiations of identity. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss captures these tensions with remarkable depth, portraying characters whose lives are shaped by migration, colonial history, and the demands of globalization. This paper investigates how Desai’s diasporic narrative dramatizes identity fragmentation and cultural adaptation through the dual frameworks of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity and John Berry’s acculturation model. While Bhabha conceptualizes the “third space” as a site of negotiation where new hybrid identities are formed, Berry identifies four strategies of cultural adaptation—assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization. Reading Desai’s characters, particularly Biju, Sai, and Jemubhai, through these frameworks illuminates how diasporic subjects grapple with alienation, mimicry, nostalgia, and resistance. At the same time, the novel humanizes these theoretical constructs by anchoring them in lived experiences of longing, exploitation, and fractured belonging. Ultimately, the study highlights Desai’s contribution to diaspora studies: the recognition that diasporic identity is never settled but always evolving in response to shifting cultural, political, and emotional terrains.