Diaspora and Homeland: Reimagining Cultural Identity through Vikram Seth’s Narrative Praxis

Abstract

Vikram Seth’s narrative techniques in The Golden Gate (1986) and A Suitable Boy (1993) are compared in order to investigate how various literary genres express cultural identity in diasporic and homeland settings. The verse novel and realist epic, two of Seth’s formal innovations, are shown to be places of cultural negotiation rather than merely stylistic choices through thorough textual study guided by postcolonial theory. A Suitable Boy makes use of vast realist techniques to depict the diverse cultural landscape of post-independence India, whereas The Golden Gate uses the hybrid Onegin stanza form to reflect the splintered experience of the Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley.Based on Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities,’ HomiBhabha’s notion of hybridity, and Stuart Hall’s conceptions of cultural identification as ‘becoming’ this analysis shows how both novels reinterpret cultural membership as a changeable process of negotiation rather than a fixed essence. The research paper demonstrates how Seth’s divergent storytelling styles—encyclopedic realism and compressed verse—allow for different but complimentary expressions of identity development. Seth’s novels illustrate how diaspora and homeland are mutually constitutive through memory, displacement, and cultural practice, rather than framing them as binary opposites. This article advances diaspora studies by demonstrating how literary technique and cultural identity creation in postcolonial literature can be revealed through comparative formal analysis.