The Diasporic Identity Of Indians In Post-colonial Trinidad

V.S.Naipaul,the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001,is one of "the three greatest immigrant writers in British literature".Naipaul grew up in a multicultural background and due to his complex growing experience,most of his works are based on the rootless sense of alienation,with a characteristic of diasporic.In his masterpiece,A House for Mr.Biswas,Naipaul describes the life of an Indian immigrant family in Trinidad in the decades before and after World War Ⅱ.Based on critical Intercultural Communication perspective,this paper employs Clifford’s "roots-routes" diasporic theory to analyze how the Indian diasporic groups reconstruct their identity in the multi-unequal power discourses.The paper analyzes the Indian diasporic identity searching in three dimensions.Firstly,Mr.Biswas as an individual,after the failure of finding "root" in the Indian community,intends to "route" by acquiring a house of his own with a hope of gaining an identity in the western community,but it ultimately comes to a bad end.Secondly,the Tulsi family defends their Indian roots by constructing a completely self-enclosed Indian community,but in the envelope of the colonial culture,they gradually lose their traditional value system.Lastly,the entire community of Indo-Trinidadians is in a state of dislocation.Their identity is ambiguous.Along with the socioeconomic changes of Trinidad,the trend from maintaining traditions to pursuing modernity is inevitable.The paper reveals their contradictory psychology of resisting and absorbing the western culture and ideological at the same time.They are unable to get rid of the incompleteness of identity construction.Finally,this paper points out that only by self-improvement and removing the prejudice and preference to both the mother and the western culture,can they transform their diasporic identity to a hybrid one.