Leena Dhingra’s novel, Amritvela (1988) is about a women’s struggle with her personal identity and spirituality. In this novel, the reader is able to follow Meera’s personal growth by witnessing Meera’s interactions with family and friends, as well as through the journal that Meera keeps. The story begins when Meera, who has lived in London for her whole teenage and adult life, decides to return to India in search of finding answers about who she is and where she belongs. Meera, a middle-aged woman, has not visited India since her parents death when she was at eleven years of age. At the beginning of her journey, Meera holds high hopes of finally finding the place where she feels she truly belongs and hopes to find answers to some of the questions that have been left unanswered her whole life. To Meera’s dismay, she finds out that India, in reality, is not quite the way she had cherished her memories of- and that maybe she had been gone too long, and has become more English that she fully noticed. This means that Meera has idealized her Indian homeland in has created a vision of India that is now in the past, and no longer a reality. At the end of the novel Meera, in a moment of Amritvela, finds peace and decides to return home and let herself truly settle in England, while keeping her heart closely tied and loyal to India. Throughout the novel, Meera recognizes that her inability to let go of her former homeland, which is India, as an idealized place, has created a homing desire as well as disabling her from fully settling in England, leaving her in a bitter struggle to resolve her identification as either British or Indian.
Amritvela was about Meera’s process of personal and spiritual change and growth, concerning who she is as an individual. This theme present in the novel is consistent with Stuart Hall’s (2003) theory of identity in that Hall explains that, “identity is a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process” (p 222). It is also consistent with the definition given by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003) who state that ethnicity is, “always in a state of flux; far from being static, unchanging and immutable”. As the novel is wrapping up, and in a conversation between Dr. Shankar and Meera, the doctor he explains, “The promise and idealism you remember- it’s all still there and can be found there are many India’s you know! And India exists in you too – trust that, and other things will become more clear” (Dhinga, p 153). What Dr. Shankar may have been trying to convey to Meera is that India may be different than how she remembers it, but it is important to remember that one can keep Indian in their heart even though they do not live there; furthermore, she can preserve the culture of India even while she is living in England. In the closing scene of the novel, as Meera is in the plane on her way back to England, Meera writes something in her journal that gives the reader the biggest hint of her newly found self-identification, “I am on my way home. From my home in the East, to my home in the West, safely through my space my home in the clouds. Yes, I have come and I am going home. For now I can sleep safely on the plane. For a plane is always safe: whichever way I am going, it always carries me home” (Dhingra, p 177). This quote, and final statement in the novel, powerfully illustrate Meera’s resolution (for now) about her former troubling question of belonging.
References
Dhingra, Leena. Amritvela (1999).
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Theorizing Diaspora. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
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