Intersecting Histories and Lives: The Holocaust Trauma and Displacement in Migration Novels “Baumgartner’s Bombay” and “Two Lives”

Abstract

This article focuses on “multidirectional memories” and trauma theory in Indian English Literature written after the 1980s, depicting the Jewish migrant as a displaced and a deterritorialised protagonist. It engages with intersecting histories, hybrid memories and traumas arising from horrendous events as well as border crossing of the Jewish migrant/refugee. It illustrates the consequences of forced dislocation i.e. how has the horrific event of the Holocaust fashioned the German Jewish psyche across the globe. This essay will not only elicit the consequences of staggering violent memories on diasporic mobility and but also the politics of belonging. Hence, the essay will move on to adopt a wider stance beyond the postcolonial dichotomies to depict the changing scenario. Taking examples from Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, which have focused on the victimisation and alienation of the migrant protagonists, the essay investigates how do these deterritorialised characters grapple with the holocaust, the colonial and the dislocation trauma in Indian English Fictions. The article also analyses the role of literary imagination in delineating the Holocaust trauma. It will focus on how does the act of writing become a site of redemption or wish fulfillment or expressing the “unspeakable” for the author and how does the trauma arising from the Holocaust mark the beginning of the dislocation of their migrant protagonists. The aim of this paper is also to examine the connections between the Holocaust narratives, the involuntary displacement patterns of the migrants/ refugees in the second half of the twentieth century and Indian English Literature.