Understanding the Nation: Mystifying, De-Mystifying India in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams

This paper discusses the concepts of Myth and Nation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams. Against a narrative backdrop of immigrant community life in America (Indian family moving to the West and settling there) this paper analyses the roles these concepts play in the life of the immigrants. It also focuses on the relation between these two ideas. We shall see how the perception of second or third generation immigrants in America (or any other Western country) regarding their nation (their native land) is based on formulation of myths. The paradigmatic concerns they face and manipulate while trying to understand their nation are also analysed. The paper also portrays the articulation of an existential flux which such individuals or communities feel from a ceaseless struggle between Western value-systems and their traditional Eastern ethics. We shall see how in trying to understand the nation the immigrant community eventually resorts to an Orientalist discursive practice; that of defining the East which is readily available for their interpretation. We shall also witness how when they are faced with a crisis of identity, myths can break down revealing the true nature in which a nation works.