| Modern contemporary literature is replete with alienated and estranged beings. It mirrors the general disillusionment and spiritual barrenness felt by man in a world that seems bizarre and unfathomable to him. This sense of alienation and unbelongingness however, gets even more pronounced in diasporic writings. The present paper is an attempt to tease out and present a kaleidoscopic view of one’s origin, which gets unrelentingly represented as “identity” in terms of a variety of categories like one’s language, class, race, gender and sexuality in two most celebrated works of diasporic experience, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M G Vassanji and Half a Life by V S Naipaul. The paper aims to explore the rootlessness, angst, dilemma, alienation, the heart wrenching queries about origin, colonization, the resultant expatriate experience, and its effect on their identity, culture, history and overall existence. This study will throw light on how in the present day world, the expatriate has become the modern wandering Jew, vacillating between two worlds, “one dead the other powerless to be born”, hankering from place to place in order to settle down for some identity and find some place that they could finally call ‘home’. |