Women, Folk Belief, and Cultural Negotiation in the Select Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Abstract

This paper focuses on the tensions between modern identity and folk culture in the South Asian Diaspora, as negotiated by the women protagonists in Kavita Daswani's For Matrimonial Purposes and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices. Both novels feature women who live by the symbols of tradition, communal pressure, and demands of contemporary life, trying to build a sense of self in multicultural environments. The discussion examines the role of folk beliefs, rituals, and cultural codes, including marriage practices, in the construction of female subjectivity and in shaping their activity to seek autonomy. The paper will compare the realistic Matrimonial expectations portrayed by Daswani with the magical-realist version of cultural memory and healing portrayed by Divakaruni, to highlight the role of diaspora women in redefining tradition as an active structure rather than a control mechanism. The paper suggests that such narratives indicate the presence of hybrid identities created through a continuous negotiation between cultural origins and the modern desires of the time, thus part of the wider discourses about gender, displacement, and the formation of identities in diaspora writings.