Shattered Moonlight, Sticky Marzipan: Diasporic Consciousness and Fractured Identities in Sunetra Gupta's Moonlight into Marzipan

In her 2002 novel, Moonlight into Marzipan, Sunetra Gupta is playing with the question of the diasporic condition, and the lyrical narrative of her work is a non-linear type of narrative, which reflects the disjointed reality of the exilic subject. The study opines that the key metaphor used by Gupta is the metaphor of marzipan that is a sticky and suffocating character of cultural hybridity; this metaphor is made using a synthetic, malleable confection. By performing a qualitative close reading of the main text and applying the postcolonial theories to the works by Homi Bhabda, Stuart Hall, and Avtar Brah, the study explores how scientific alchemy of the main character Promethesh corresponds to the efforts of the immigrant to transform the moonlight of nostalgia into the Western identity. The research indicates that the novel is a protest against the glorification of hybridity, but it points at the separation and mental fragmentation of the Bengal-Britain migration. The study makes contributions to the South Asian studies by aligning the experimental prose of Gupta as such a linguistic expression of the third space.