Introduction

If ‘ “return” is a prevalent theme in post-colonial literature’, South Asian Atlantic narratives certainly present India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as a powerful force for members of the diaspora. Makarand Paranjape has argued that ‘diasporas and homelands are locked in peculiar, dialectical relationships’; and indeed it is difficult for cultural producers to ignore this relationship, however problematic. As Gargi Bhattacharyya has put it, ‘the South Asian diaspora looks to the sub-continent as an anchor for identity formation, however mythical and uncomfortable’. But what happens when ethnic South Asians return to the ancestral homeland, or indeed visit it for the first time? Building on the examination of home and nation in Chapter 1, I will now consider the discursive treatment of travel and return within diasporic literary works: an œuvre in which the precarious balance between writers' critiques of South Asia and the adoptive nation (discussed in the previous chapter) is taken several steps further.

This chapter will begin by briefly addressing return as it is articulated through the notion of a ‘deferred home’, interrogating writers’ use of this trope and asking why it appears more in British Asian than South Asian American writing. I will then analyse at greater length the way in which writers handle ‘return of the native’ moments: actual first-generation encounters with the originary homeland. In a contemporary review of Bharati Mukherjee's novel The Tiger's Daughter (1971), J. R. Frakes noted the ‘conventional’ nature of ‘ “return of the expatriate” fiction, structured on the familiar pattern of trembling expectation, shock of unrecognition … disillusionment, and final sad acceptance of one's alien position between two worlds’.