Dislocation and Voice: A Comparative Study of Subaltern and Immigrant Consciousness in the Tiger's Daughter and Difficult Daughters

This paper attempts to analyse the portrayal of the gendered subaltern in select works Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters. The analysis is made to examine how dislocation produces, supresses, and reconstructs the voices of the subalterns in connection with the theoretical framework of subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and feministic perspectives to examine the representation of marginalized voices. This paper also tries to trace out how the writers address the issues of gendered subaltern the women in particular and also addresses the question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. The term subaltern has been used in this paper to refer to the marginalized individuals and the marginalization in terms of gender. The study argues that immigrant consciousness in Mukherjee emerges as the unhomely experience of being out of place at home, while subaltern consciousness in Kapur surfaces through acts of everyday defiance that contest patriarchal, class, and communal disciplining. The paper contributes a model for studying South Asian women’s writing that aligns questions of space, body, and archive to map the ethics of speaking from the margins and the costs of being heard.