Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen Of Dreams

In recent years, there have been innumerable studies regarding second generation immigrants. The present research paper explores the shaken identity of the immigrants in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams. The term immigrant refers to residents who come to U.S. from other countries. The second generation refers to the U.S. born children of immigrants, and the term third generation refers to everyone born to parents who themselves were born in U.S. Chitra Banerjeee Divakaruni is one of the remarkable women writers to have contributed on explicit fiction to the much debated vein of the narrative on cross-cultural conflicts an immigrant faces. The novel is about Rakhi, the daughter of an immigrant couple who have settled in California

It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian Diaspora. Indian Diaspora writers contributed significantly in the field of literature. All in all , recently , Indian women writers who have chosen to live outside India - like Kiran Desai , Bharati Mukherjee ,Uma Parmeshwaran, Arundhati Roy, Tanuja Desai, Meera Alexander, Meera Syal, Jhumpa Lahri, Farahan Sheikh, Ravinder Randhawa have launched the Indian literatures in English into fresh and emergent territories. All these women writers’ experiences are edged as they have to suffer double marginalisation- one as a women and another as an immigrant. They deal with the problematic of gender, issues of immigrant identity, racial conflicts and cultural confrontation. The impressive progress of the South Asian diasporic writers left an indelible impact on

The term immigrant refers to residents who come to U.S. from other countries. The second generation refers to the U.S. born children of immigrants. This particular novel Queen of Dreams narrates this hyphenated identity, the ways in which the characters chart the process of journeying: whether it is though a complete shift in life style and perspectives. Divakaruni’s writing is compared to Bharti Mukherjee’s novels Desirable Daughters and Jasmine. Queen of Dreams is a novel about Rakhi. Divakaruni’s narrative of this novel focuses on Rakhi, the daughter of immigrant couple who have settled in California and wish to bring up their only child as an American, shielding her from their past lives in India. The daughter has never been to India but is determined to identify her ‘roots’ so that she can understand her identity as an Asian American appropriately. She has imagined India only through photographs and other images available through globalised networks of communication. Though Rakhi never sees herself as an immigrant, it is a part of her parents’ lives and by logic, her own life. Thus she feels incomplete without internalised this other side of her existence. The novel emphasises how the experience of the people generates the identity of a space and how it is important to capture the spirit of the place to understand the people that