Beyond Individual Space: The Symbolic Place of Indian Women in the Land of Diaspora in Anita Rau Badami’s Tell It to the Trees

Recent writings by Indian women authors suggest that Indian women who emigrated to the West (mainly the U.S. and Canada) have been claiming their space in the diasporic place, believing that a change of location is a significant opportunity for them to challenge and revise culturally-inscribed roles. In my article, I argue that the dynamics of Indian postcolonialism have crossed national borders, thus forcing women to the margins in the foreign land, too. Since they stand for the national territory, their relationship with space is deeply symbolic, as I will show in my analysis of the novel Tell It to the Trees (2011) by the Indo-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami. Besides studying the women characters’ positions in both real and symbolic space, my article focuses on how women accept, resist, or modify men’s expectations in terms of identity preservation in a Western environment.