Kadaram

Key postcolonial theoretical works are Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora, and Cartographies of Diaspora by Avtar Brah. Key works on the history of lesser known religious monuments in India, include The Cholas and The History of South India by K.A. Nilakanta Sastri. Sastri had detailed Darasuram as a special territory of historical and architectural significance (1955). Places of significance become focalisation points of postcolonial identity (Ahmad.A, 1992). The researcher explored how diasporic notions of ‘home’, can influence the narrator’s own coming of age as a postcolonial subject. ‘Kadaram’ is a work that highlights connections of ‘home’ across disparate lands and cultures. In recounting a family trip to a remote location in Tamil Nadu, the work explicates an unknown history about a forgotten temple through the narrator’s relationship with her family. In witnessing her father struggle in finding a connection between the lost history and the family’s migrant identity, the protagonist understands how their diasporic identity is a concept in a state of flux. The work extends the search for identity beyond the confines of a Eurocentric diaspora, universalising both the commonality of the search and the disappointment of the outcome. The work was first published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the largest online literary journal in Asia. It has also formed a chapter in my collection of stories, Jungle Without Water, published across several countries: the UK edition by Jetstone, the Southeast Asian edition by GerakBudaya, and the Australia/New Zealand edition by GazeboBooks. The collection was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Award in 2017.