Volume : 2 | Issue : 11 | Nov 2013 ISSN - 2250-1991 143 X PARIPEX - INDIAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH Research Paper The concept of home in Manju Kapur’s Home * Shagufta Parween Literature * Senior Research Fellow, Department of English, The University of Burdwa, West Bengal Keywords : Home. That was what she wanted. ---Manju Kapur, The Immigrant. A woman’s shaan is in her home. ---Manju Kapur, Diffcult Daughters It was useless looking for answers inside the home. One had to look outside. To education, freedom, and the brightlights of Lahore colleges. ---Manju Kapur, Diffcult Daughters I want to leave this house. There is nothing for me here. ---Manju Kapur, Home. Home has been a persistent concern in the work of fction writers. Specifcally, in the novels of women writers the pre- occupation with the concept of home assumes enormous signifcance. The literary renderings of home varies from it being used as a theme, a concept, a trope, a metaphor, a symbol and an idea saturated with metaphysical dimensions. The current burgeoning of women-centric fctions by female authors have emphasised not only the primacy of home in women’s life, but also how it transforms into a prison-house, reducing them to abject submission and slavery. Etymologi- cally derived from Sanskrit aham home basically signifes a physical structure built for dwelling, an accommodating place, a domicile, a safe haven, a personal realm of retreat from the affairs of the world. Among the myriad connotations of home the most potent are the notions of belonging, the right to lay claim to a place as one’s own, the freedom to be oneself, secure spaces that emanate feelings of inclusiveness, comfort and protection. It associates with it relationship, privacy, warmth, attachment, desire, safety, happiness and freedom. Home may be the fxed and enclosed space of a house, a bungalow, a cot- tage, an apartment; or slums and caravans, shifting tempo- rary settlements; open spaces as the pavement, homes for the dispossessed; or the jungles, habitat of the animals; and even the earth that is home to all the living beings. Home also signifes the birthplace, the motherland, and the native place as in the case of displaced peoples, the migrants, the expatriates and the exiles. But even migration and relocation vary. For there is a deliberate chosen movement away from the old home to a new one in search of new opportunities and a better future. It brings with it a host of nostalgia, longing, and desire, as the feelings it evokes for the diasporic people. Home may be transposed from a territorial plane to a psycho- logical and abstract one as the memory of a lost home as in Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth. Home assumes great poignancy as the expatriates strive to assimi- late to their new land and make it their new home while con- fronting discrimination and marginality. For Avtar Brah home becomes, “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagina- tion. In this sense it is a place of no return even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of “origin” On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of locality (Brah, 1996, p. 192). It is also the sense of being at home at a particular locale while actually not residing and away from one’s real home. There is also the forced, unwilled movement, a feeing away from home when survival is at stake and home becomes a dangerous site portending death and disaster. As Lal and Kumar say that the, “border crossings in war zones, life in refugee camps and feeing from the fanatical rhetoric of ethnic cleansing are directed by the exigencies of survival” (Lal & Kumar, 2007, p. ix). In such unexpected and abrupt dispos- session of home, it becomes a source of constant yearning, trauma, and a crisis. Home in such life-threatening circum- stances becomes unlivable, unhomely, necessitating a move- ment away from home. Such choices of leaving one’s home, though consciously made are forced and unwilled, and hence become an agonising and haunting presence for those who leave it. It arouses senses of unbelonging, deprivation and homelessness. Banwari Lal and Yashpal in Home painfully recount the pain and horror of losing their home and home- land, with the partition that created new homes for Hindus and Muslims. This nostalgic reiteration of affuence of their pre-partition days and their traumatic uprooting reverberates in the novel during moments of crisis. Their attempt to resettle in a new homeland across the border and begin their lives anew is conveyed through the image of constructing a home: At thirty-two he felt great rage at being forced to start again, but that made it all the more necessary to bury his feelings in the determination to recreate every brick, every shelf, every thread of that which had formed the substance of his life from the age of fourteen. (Kapur, 1998, p. 4-5) Displacement, dispossession, unbelonging, quest for home, and resettlement dominate the novel’s matrix. The family’s home is shifted from Lahore to Delhi. Women leave their na- tal homes to settle in their married homes. Nisha is shifted to her aunt’s house, and returns back after more than a decade to ultimately reallocate herself in her husband’s house. Vicky leaves, “the house his mother’s death had made hateful to him” (77), to live in Banwari Lal’s house where he is despised. Finally he leaves his grandfather’s home to settle elsewhere. Individuals are thus, uprooted from their environs and are forced to house themselves in new places. Ancestral ties are severed and new attachments made while struggling to cope with the isolation and unhomeliness that swathe the people. The opening unveils the centrality of the home in the lives of the novel’s characters. Amidst the conficting existences and multifarious resistances, home assumes a preponderance sublating the dissenting collectivity into an acquiescing unity. Utmost care is taken to preserve the customs of the house with no scope for transgression. But as the story unfurls, both the home and its occupants seem untenable. The novel be-