Diasporic History and Transnational Networks in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay
Abstract
Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay adopts the perspective of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor and of a former cabaret performer to connect the histories of Germany and India. This paper examines how these characters – witnesses to a multiplicity of stories and receptacles of a variety of cultural instances – engender a diasporic network that dismantles the solidity of official history and grants a meaning to the desolate experience of exile.
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