Probing Identities Amid Racial and Cultural Conflicts: Kamala Markandaya's The Nowhere Man and Some Inner Fury

Kamala Markandaya, a pioneer member of the Indian Diaspora occupies an outstanding place among the Indian women novelists writing in English. She belongs to the body of writers who, by choice or otherwise, have left their countries of origin and made their homes elsewhere. Since the 1950s she had been living in Britain and has written novels about India or about Indians in England. She thus takes her place alongside the writers such as Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri to name a few, all of whom trace their origins to India. In a wider context, she comes under the umbrella of third world post-colonial writers. Her strength as a novelist comes from her sensitive creation of individual characters and situations which are simultaneously representative of a larger collective. Cross-cultural and interracial conflicts are the recurring theme in her novels. Her novels deal with different predicaments of identity. This paper highlights identity crises in the two of her novels: Some Inner Fury which dramatizes the lives of young people lost in the political confusion of Independence struggle; and The Nowhere Man that foreshadows many diasporic issues with which we are preoccupied today and in which she astutely critiques an Indian immigrant’s experience in Britain. Here the identity crises arise out of political and sociocultural background, as the struggle for independence in India enters in to a violent phase. As a multicultural, diasporic, post-colonial Indian living in London, Kamala Markandaya’s works portray what constitutes her experience — the expatriate dilemma. In The Nowhere Man, Markandaya delved insightfully into the diasporic issues and problem of expatriation twenty years before others spoke of it. In post-colonial societies, the crisis of identity often seems to override all considerations. The social identity of people is rooted in their culture while at individual level it is determined by personal achievements. The