Meera Syal As A Diaspora Writer

The general objective of the project is to study the representation of migrants in multicultural society and is
to establish the role of diaspora in colonial and postcolonial societies. This cross-cultural study is concerned
with the experience of diaspora in dissimilar cultures. The present study focuses on the agonizing struggle of
growing up in the crushing clash of cultures. The present work is a study of the selected novels of
contemporary British writer Meera Syal. It also seeks to increase the awareness about diasporic culture. It is
interesting to study Meera Styal as migrant and her experience of growing up with a dual cultural heritage.
The aim is to address a larger body of cultural work which engages with South Asian Culture and traditional
Indian Culture minority groups. Diasporic women writers have given us unique insights into what Renato
Rosado has called the "border zones" of culture. The periphery of those areas is based on metropolitan
cultural discourse. Academic presumption about cultural, linguistic, or stylistic norms are frequently being
put into practices that may able to seen and set out the development of an adaptation, appropriation, and
contestation that preside over the structure of identity in colonial and post-colonial contexts. The creative
processes are essentially significant in understanding the contemporary global culture, as postcolonial
writers define everyday realities and subjective perceptions of a majority whose cultural contributions are
measured to be the products of minority voices. Writers like Meera Syal are part of shrewd interpretation of
the postcolonial conditions where work published in London has been redefining UK history and literature.
They create new fiction that represents, through innovative literary techniques; both linguistic and
geographic exiles, displacement in metropolitan centre, and cross culture or inter culture exchange. Women
writers show-"from all points on the compass"- the dialectical problems between local and worldwide
cultures and between diversity and resemblance, between relativism and universalism. The proportions of
postcolonial theory, pedagogy, cultural, and canon formation show the contact of imperialism and libertarian
humanism with non-traditional literatures. Postcolonial shows the different geographical regions and
cultures, colonized or the political economy of imperialism and neo-imperialism. Cross-culturalism in
literary and cultural studies is a useful rubric for works, writers and artists that do not fit within a single
cultural tradition. The cross-cultural can also be said to incorporate the colonial and the post-colonial, since
colonialism is by definition a form of cross-culturalism. Globalization has produced new patterns of
migration and provoked divergent responses worldwide. The Question of diaspora arises with particular
tensions, between internationalism and nationalism. The relationship between place and the ways of culture
and literature interact to create new reality. New articulations of diaspora necessarily overlapping with
familiar ways of conceptualizing it, have found their way into literary writings. The Indian Diasporas a basic
term to describe the people who migrated from territories that are currently within the borders of the
Republic. The Diaspora covers practically every part of otherworld’s large number of people has migrated
from the countries of their origin in search of better economic conditions to various foreign lands forced
exiles or self-imposed exiles. Some of them have made a mark in the field of writing. These immigrant
writers reflect, on the one hand, their attachment to the motherland and on the other, their feeling of
alienation and rootlessness. As such there is a need to study the fundamentals of culture, cross-culture, inter-
culture and multi-culture of various countries in order to arrive at the right judgement of the problems of
immigrants and diaspora in the works of Meera Syal. Meera Syal is to be placed and examined in coming
chapters. The choice of this writer is intentional because she addresses the notion of home and homeliness in
her fiction and Syal, as a diasporic writer, deals with a multicultural society both from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’,
seeking to find her native identity in the adopted country. In her cross-cultural experience, she is not able to
forget her cultural past and negotiate it with her British present. In her works, the diaspora situations make
her characters think about the past and brood over the feeling of loss. Meera Syal is the living incarnation of
the cross-cultural, inter-cultural and multi-cultural paradigm in its true applications against the theoretical
concepts, being herself a migrant from India to United Kingdom. Meera Syal is undoubtedly a South Asian
actress, a strong feminist critique, a cultural critique vociferous about in between identity that an emigree
enjoys but sometime a person born in a foreign country is treated as a migrant because of the family
background in the so-called developed countries. She is a multi-faceted personality, a director, a film writer,
a script writer and actor and best known for her acting on radio and television. Her two novels, Anita and
Me (1996), set in Northern England and imbued with her memories of infancy in Wolverhampton, and Life
Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), with its urban setting and perplexed stories of Asian
‘sisterhood’, may be considered as example of the literary curve of second-generation writers, within the
Indian diasporic context. They both reflect on a chain of theme and the social transformations that happened
in the United Kingdom over the post-war decades. Meera Syal, in an interview given to the BBC, admitted
that the novel Anita and me (1996), incorporates some echoes of her childhood. The present research aims to
study some of the neo-romantic elements in her oeuvre. The diaspora writers like, obviously dwell deep in
socio-cultural mores used by their family and struggle they have to face in the society of a foreign land. This
combination of narrative fiction and memories works because she feels, "the emotional landscape is very
much how I felt growing up, being the only Asian family in such a tiny mining environment"(Adami 163).
As a female writer she states whether food and the other cultural procedures such as those viewed previously
are dividing structures that in the narrative construct a polarised dichotomy representing India and England.
The central themes with which she deals are man-woman relationship, contemporary Indian life and the
urban milieu, alienation, cross-cultural encounters, and a quest for identity. Diasporic writers like Salman
Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal have experienced the stressful readjusting of their own literary
works into scripts instead of handling them onto professional writers. This adaption witnesses the intricate
link between the artist-creator and the moulded word, between the page and the stage, between the 'inky'
character and the 'ocular' movement. Diasporic or postcolonial authors writing or adapting for cinema or
television express a throbbing anxiety by exposing the novelty of intercultural forces at work in British
society to the western showbiz.

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The general objective of the project is to study the representation of migrants in multicultural society and is

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