Loneliness, Rootlessness, and Diasporic Consciousness: A Psychological and Postcolonial Study of Anita Desai's Fiction

This paper examines loneliness as a central psychological and cultural condition within diasporic experience, locating it within the broader history of human migration. Drawing on perspectives from Yuval Noah Harari and Avtar Brah, it argues that migration, though historically universal, generates profound emotional and existential dislocation. Focusing on Indian English fiction, the study highlights how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kiran Desai depict alienation, rootlessness, and fractured identity offering a focused analysis of Anita Desai’s major works—Bye-Bye Blackbird, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Fasting, Feasting, and The Zigzag Way—to demonstrate how loneliness operates across psychological, cultural, and gendered dimensions. Through her protagonists, Desai represents diaspora as an experience marked by estrangement, racial anxiety, and existential uncertainty, thereby redefining it as an internalized condition rather than merely a spatial phenomenon. The study concludes that loneliness is a critical lens for understanding diasporic identity and underscores Desai’s significant contribution to postcolonial and transnational literary studies, while also indicating scope for interdisciplinary future research.