Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels

Migration and education are recurring motifs in contemporary South Asian writings in English as well as processes constitutive of transcultural literatures. Both migration and education bring about culture contact and lead to a negotiation of cultural differences. This study examines the functions of migration and education in a corpus of anglophone novels by writers of South Asian origin. Texts discussed include the following: Moyez G. Vassanji's novel No New Land (1991), Yasmine Gooneratne's A Change of Skies (1991), Bapsi Sidhwa's An American Brat (1993), Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag (1993) Adib Khan's Seasonal Adjustments (1994), Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters (1998) and Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens (1998). With regard to concepts such as exile, expatriation, diaspora, border, cosmopolitanism and nomadism this study shows that a development is under way which gives up oppositional discourses in favour of transcultural flexibility.