Negotiating Home And Identity: Migration And The Quest For Belonging In The Selected Works Of Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, And Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

This paper examines migration and the quest for belonging in selected works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, and Amitav Ghosh. Bringing together Lahiri’s The Namesake and selected stories from Interpreter of Maladies, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, and Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Sea of Poppies, the study argues that “home” in contemporary South Asian writing is neither a stable geographical origin nor a fully attainable destination. It is instead a contested relationship among memory, language, family, citizenship, class, race, and historical violence. The four writers share an interest in displaced subjects, but they distribute the pressures of migration differently. Lahiri concentrates on ordinary domestic negotiations and intergenerational translation; Rushdie foregrounds metamorphosis, linguistic excess, and the unstable authority of nations; Desai exposes the unequal material conditions hidden by celebratory accounts of globalization; and Ghosh reconstructs mobile communities that precede and exceed modern national borders. Using a qualitative, comparative, and interpretive method informed by diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural theories of identity, the paper identifies six recurring structures: the redefinition of home, divided and relational identity, memory and nostalgia, linguistic hybridity, unequal mobility, and provisional forms of community. The comparison demonstrates that belonging is not represented as uncomplicated assimilation. It is produced through repeated acts of narration, care, translation, resistance, and affiliation, while remaining vulnerable to racism, nationalism, economic precarity, and inherited colonial hierarchies. These texts therefore transform migration from a simple movement between places into an inquiry into who may claim a past, inhabit a present, and imagine a collective future.