The Immigrant Summary

In this paper I have preferred to discuss the novel The Immigrant written by Manju Kapur a distinguished and an internationally acclaimed writer of the post-nineties era. She was born in Amritsar in 1948. She currently lives in Delhi, India. She is the one who is absolutely progressive and very just in her feministic approach almost all in her novels like Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman, Home, The Immigrant and Custody. She has secured her prominent presence for what she writes about women, their emancipation, and their role in society, most of all their individuality and sense of self actualization. She is one among other feminist writers of India who have dealt with several burning issues related to women in India almost with urban settings.

The writer Manju Kapur have discussed the term ‘immigrant experiences’ as experiences which are formed by financial positions, personal skills and biased associations between country of origin and of adaptation in her novel The Immigrant. She has depicted the immigrant experiences without herself being one. However she does not belong to the category of diasporic writer but she was the part of the migrant process during her education at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, from where she obtained her Master of Arts in English. Again in an interview with Dippa Diddi She

She has her own constructed lifestyle according to her native country which she has to deconstruct to follow the new one i.e. the reconstruction of the life pattern according to the west. If a woman is a house wife it is more difficult for her to assimilate herself with the western culture. Though both men and women feel uprooted, frustrated, dwells in dilemma but it is women who survive more than men. This is what is presented through the female protagonist Nina by the writer Manju Kapur in her novel The Immigrant. It is well mentioned by the novelist that men and women both have to face the problems while arriving to a new surroundings especially the foreign land unknown to them. In this novel Ananda a NRI dentist, Nina’s husband also faces some problems with his first encounter with the culture and livings of the Canada but soon he adjusted with that surroundings and become habitual of that. But it is more necessary to mention here the troubles, and dilemma, of a woman that is Nina who tries to find some space in that alien country by learning the culture and mannerism prevailed