Negotiating Identities in Tabish Khair's the Bus Stopped and M G Vassanji's the Assassin's Song

As Heidegger (1971, 154; emphasis added) puts it, boundary is not that at which something stops but, as Greeks recognized, boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. Borders are not merely geographical limits; they signify lot more. Identities are related to these borders in various ways. With immigration, these borders come to new places as well. Virtual borders are quite visible in countries that have accommodated different cultures, languages, and religions. These borders may become blurred when two cultures coexist peacefully, or they may become more visible, more concrete when they are hostile terms. It is individuals who represent, mostly inadvertently, distinctiveness of their respective cultures, but in necessarily composite society, these borders no longer remain rigid because of inevitability of exchanges and negotiations through social interactions. Exchanges between two cultures transform identities and result in blurred borders becoming fuzzier.The geographical location, combined with race, ethnicity, religion, etc., constitutes apparently inseparable elements of an individual's identity. When one migrates to new country, perhaps one becomes conscious of these various elements because of fear that one's original culture is at risk. On other hand, often, it is also observed that immigrants, in order to be more acceptable to their new place, try to come to mainstream. Tacit negotiations continue to take place resulting in generation confused with identity and victim of conflicts within. A boy born in US to South Asian and Canadian parents, for example, inherits elements shaping his identity from parents and also imbibes from where he is being brought up. This dynamics of cultural interaction leads, at social level, to peace and amicable adjustments, but at individual level to search for one's identity.Those who live in alien lands cherish fond memories of their motherland, recall their near and dear ones, their friends and family and associations,1 and are lost in nostalgia and sense of uprootedness. Their sense of uprootedness and alienation is caused by an awkward situation in which they are placed, by their transplantation. In words of Bande (2003, 8), Transplantation connotes relocation and in its turn relocation presupposes existence of location, and dislocation therefrom.The diasporic writings, being born and bred out of an overpowering sense of isolation and alienation, usually carry with them an imprint of immigration and expatriation. It has been suggested that words like immigrant, and refugee are often used to describe diaspora. Of these words, immigrant points to location, an alien settlement, and physical movement; exile shows a variety of relationships with mother country-alienation, forced exile, self-imposed exile, political exile, and so on (Jain 1998, 8); and refugee indicates person taking shelter in another country for security and self-promotion.The aesthetics of diaspora is nothing new and dates back to colonial days when repressive measures or exploitation of ruling colonizers, who in majority of cases happened to be powerful Europeans, forced many persons of colonized country to migrate to another country to seek happier prospects there. In due course of time, immigrants came to leave an impact culture, society, and history of land of promise. This they could do through their religio-cultural and societal ways of behavior that attracted people of country of their settlement. Said (1978, 36) maintains that gives power, more power requires more knowledge and so in an increasingly profitable dialect of information and control. Bhabha (1994, 177) formulates theory of Hybridity in cultural context. Bhabha seems to pooh-pooh Said's notion of centrality. His idea of disjunctive temporality, in way, agrees with Yeats's (1994, 158) belief that the centre cannot hold and creates signifying time for inscription of cultural incommensurability. …

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