Vol. 1, Issue 7, Part C (2015)

Abstract
The varied migratory movements attempt to give some indication of the ideologies, choices, reasons and compulsions which may have governed the act of immigration. While ‘immigrant’ defines a location, a physical movement and a frontward attitude, ‘exile’ indicates an unavoidable isolation and a nostalgic anchoring in the past. The word exile evokes multiple meanings covering a variety of relationships with the mother-country such as alienation, forced exile, self- imposed exile, political exile and so on. In the Indian context the migratory movements are governed by the movement of indentured labour and of the trading communities; the same is also governed by the pursuit of higher standard of living, opportunities for work, education and corporate service assignments among others. In the trans-cultural global context a migrant is an important postcolonial subject. In her novels, Mukherjee has designed a new diasporic narrative to define the American system which is shaped by original, foreign and occult and reinvents a semiotics of American citizenship and ethnicity with defiant challenge to traditional ways of conceiving the national.