Daughters Between Worlds: Trauma, Memory and the Formation of Diasporic Identity in the works of Saba Tahir and Anita Rau Badami

This paper aims to explore the cross-sections of trauma, memory and diasporic subjectivity in prominent texts by Saba Tahir and Anita Rau Badami with the figure of daughter being the central point of cultural negotiation and gendered subjectivity. Based on the postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and feminist literary criticism, the paper aims at discussing how the diasporic female identities are constructed based on inherited histories of violence, displacement, and migration. The article presents the results of a qualitative, comparative analysis of literature to demonstrate that the processes of trauma explored in the literary methods of each of the two authors is a dynamic and continuous process that breaks the linear temporal, though allowing resilience, cognitive of ethical integrity, self-definition, etc. In the major works, the intergenerational forms of memory are theorized in terms of post memory and are found to be the pivotal process through which the daughters of the diaspora remake as well as reconfigure the histories of the collective into generative and sustaining forces. Whereas Tahir locates trauma to the periphery of the allegorical and speculative displays of war, exile and systematic oppression, Badami locates it to the periphery of domestic and family spaces largely informed by Partition and Migration. Regardless of the differences that are vested, both the authors represent hybridity as well as liminality as fruitful mediums of ensuring identity formation. Further, the analysis also depicts the essential aspect of using strategies viz. realist, multigenerational narrative and Tahir’s allegorical and dystopian modes, as the feminist and postcolonial acts of resistance, which reduces storytelling to a form of reasserting agency and negotiating belonging within the transnational worlds.