Replication of the Cultural Scripts in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions

Abstract

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a diasporic writer who migrated to America from West Bengal. Though settled down in the new land, she sees the country India as her native village where she had spent her early days of life. This is the connection of the writer to her native land. She visits her place Kolkata as a place of her olden roots with her American husband. Divakaruni in her novel The Palace of Illusions talks of the social conditioning of a woman who descends her positioning in the cultural paradigm. She also talks of the significance of cultural scripts, which provokes a woman to negotiate her with space created through undergoing agency. The agency helps the society to have the desired result. Under the paradigm of discourse literary assignments correct the agenda from time to time. Through her text, Divakaruni tends to establish that the migration in the life of a woman is very significant as it liberates her from tradition as well as scripts. The new land’s experience generates fluid of renegotiation which can be accessible only after abolishing the olden, traditional space. Jasbir Jain posits the condition of a woman who wants to be diasporic, “wishes to renegotiate both the cultures simultaneously primarily because it is not possible to relate to the new reality without altering inherited constructs. You simply cannot relocate them as they are” (Jasbir Jain Writing Women Across Cultures, 141).

Keywords: Cultural scripts, fluid of identity, affirmation, myth, legend, history, tradition and modernity, Mahabharata, social structure and political agency.