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IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 324

Peer Salim Jahangeer

M. Phil. (English) and [Link].
Ph. D. Research Scholar

Malik Muzamil Muzaffar

Lecturer in English, School
Education Department J&K, India

DIASPORA AND ITS RELATION WITH ENGLISH LITERATURE

Abstract: - Diaspora as an expression has developed into omnipresent concept as it does not
remain confined only with the Jewish Diaspora. Thus diaspora relates with the dispersion or
spread of people from their original motherland to other foreign land. As from the Greek
word meaning, 'to scatter,’ diaspora is defined as any community of people who do not live in
their own country of origin, but maintain their heritage in a new land. Many of them can
probably relate to this issue, since they have ancestral roots from one country but reside in
another country. With the beginning of globalization, movement was the norm and people
eagerly move in search of job, education, business etc. making the term more general. In
postmodernist age, migration is mostly encouraged by economic benefits and luxurious life
style. The new diaspora in modern times usually summons from trained experts and upwardly
moveable people. Thus the idea of 'diaspora' in modern time has undergone modification.
There is scientific development in all fields of life. Time and space have shrunk on account of
scientific inventions and improvement of communication means. Modern progress of social
networking has made an easy for men to move from one place to another place. The diaspora
people faced diasporic consciousness in their diasporic life which they expressed with the
help of literature as literature reflects life. The focus of this paper will be “Diaspora and its
relation with English Literature”.

Keywords:- diaspora, dispersion, Jews, literature.

The word ‘diaspora’ has been derived from an ancient Greek word “diasperien”,
which is combination of two words ‘‘dia–across” and “sperien–to sow or scatter seeds’’1. So,
for Greeks diaspora was horticulture term as the concept refers to the scattering and dispersal
of seeds. This is what actually happens with the diaspora people as they scatter throughout
the earth from their motherland. So for the Greeks the concept of diaspora was used to
describe the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. As in the Archaic period
(800-600) people migrated from Ancient Greeks to Asia Minor; that type of migration was
due to poverty, or war, so it had positive connotation. In Hebrew it was called Golah or
Galut, meaning "Exile" (that is from the Holy Land).2 . The term was firstly used in Greek
translations of the Hebrew Bible Septuagint (Deuteronomy 28:25) in phrase esē diaspora en
IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 325

pasais basileias tēs gēs ‘thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth’.3 Thus, it was
used for the Jewish communities who went outside Israel after the Babylonian and Roman
conquests of Palestine. The Jewish state comes to an end in 70 AD, when the Romans drag
out the Jews from their motherland. The Jewish Diaspora had its origin before that when the
Assyrians conquered Israel in 722. Actually 597 is considered the beginning date of the
Jewish Diaspora. So, in the beginning the term “diaspora” was used by the ancient Greeks to
refer to citizens of a grand city who migrated to the subjugated land with the purpose of
colonization to incorporate the territory into the Empire. In the beginning the term ‘diaspora’
(often with Capital ‘D’) referred to the Jewish diaspora representing the scattering of the Jews
from Israel back in the sixth-seventh century B.C. and later in the second century A.D. from
Jerusalem. Also the term diaspora (often not capital ‘D”) was used for the dispersion or
spreading of the people belonging to one nation or having a common culture. So, it is clear
that the concept of “‘Diaspora’ refers to spreading of Jews from Palestine all over the globe.
Since the Jewish people refused to assimilate and were confronted with repression, they
moved out of Israel”.4 Thus Diaspora is related with those Jews who lived their life outside
the motherland Israel due to immigration, adjustment to the new countries and sticked to their
faith and traditions. So diaspora until the recent past has been particularly used for Jewish
dislocation when they were forcefully banished from Babylon in the century BC by
Nebuchadnezzar II. Babylon is a main symbol in the lexicon of diaspora. After the
destruction of the Temple in 586 BC, the Jews were banished from the city of Babylon. It is
also mentioned in Hebrew scripture, that Babylon conjures up images of sorrow and despair.
Babylon has a great cultural creativity in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Along with
physical scattering of the Jews, the word carries religious suggestion, in as much as a
particular relationship is implied to be present between the land of Israel and Jewish people.
This relationship serves finally in gathering of the exiles to the classic view of Reform
Judaism. Some of the Jews submerged themselves in non-Jewish environments more
completely than the others. Because of adjustment and acculturation diaspora Jews were the
Jews in a religious sense only.

The model of Jewish Diaspora was followed by the Armenian, Chinese, African
(slavery) and Indian communities. The difference with the Jewish Diaspora is that the other
communities have been separated due to their selected countries of migration. Thus in the
beginning the term ‘diaspora’ suggested the Jewish Diaspora; later from 200 A.D. to 900
A.D. there was great amount of migrations between different countries for job and learning
besides spreading of religions also occurred as one of the important cause of migration.
Colonial period out looked migration due to interior as well as exterior difference, slavery
and colonial repression. Another early historical reference is the Black African diaspora, in
16th c., with slave trade, which exported West Africans out of their resident province and
secluded them in the “New World” - parts of North America, South America, and the
Caribbean and in a different place. Spreading of Africans, Armenians, Irish, Palestinians and
the Jews visualized their spreading as starting from a disastrous occurrence that had surprised
the group in total. Their scattering was not deliberate, miserable and terrible. After the World
War II, the concept of diaspora has become omnipresent to a great extent. One of the most
important causes for its development was decolonization. So the term ‘Diaspora’ is used to
IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 326

refer to any one forced or tempted to leave their traditional national homelands; being
isolated throughout other parts of the world; and the succeeding developments in their
scattering and civilization. Thus the term "Diaspora" was derived from a Greek word,
meaning dispersion, was used by the Jewish people, denoting their world-wide dispersion
outside their homeland, the Land of Israel is not specific for them but became general concept
of migration. So, it is used for any group of people who spend their life outside the land of
their ancestors in which they had lived for a long time. In other words ‘diaspora’ is used for a
group migration from one country to another country of the people who belongs to one nation
or have the common culture and tradition.

The word Diaspora have so many synonyms such as dispersion, dissemination,

migration, displacement, scattering etc. and its antonym is return. The word ‘diasporic’ is
used as an adjective for ‘diaspora’ and its plural is ‘diasporas’. Diasporas are recognized as
exiles, refugees, guest workers, expatriates, immigrants, and transnational’s. They are
differently recognized due to their cause of resettlement and their response to displacement,
which form their emotional response and diasporic consciousness in exiled life. Diaspora
communication is full with the words, concepts, and terms such as emigrant, expatriate,
immigrant, migrant and transnational. It seems that the expressions: migration, emigration
and immigration are identical in meaning i.e. to move from one country to other, but these
words have different meanings. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary the term migration is
explained as the "movements from one place to another"5, i.e., from one country to another
country. The migrants who go through journey, longing, homesickness, nostalgia and
experience rootlessness, unbelongingness, isolation, double consciousness, are called
expatriate. While as the term immigration means, "coming as permanent resident into a
foreign country"6. So, “Immigrant” is someone who comes to live in a country from another
country. The term emigration expresses, "leaving one country to settle in another"7. So,
“Emigrant” is somebody who leaves his country in order to live in another foreign country.
Immigrant is one who tries to reroot, enhouse, reconstruct the home, incorporate or
acculturate, and replant himself in the new soil. Expatriate is somebody who lives ‘abroad’
for a long period or who is debarred or moved from his inhabitant country or who departs
‘himself’ from its nationality. The transnational is able to live and incorporate in the countries
of origin and destination; and is the man of every place. He considers - ‘one world, one
people.’ In Social Sciences, "in communities which are encapsulated in larger and social
units, migration has always been one possible mechanism for coping with internal and
external problems"8. This is the reason that people move from one country to another. There
are different reasons for migration; it may be expulsion or attraction. In view of the fact that
the immigration countries are famous fertile for their profit and social system so people prefer
to go in these countries for earning more. The migration has different reasons they may be
willing or unwilling and push or pull etc. "Migration of people has been transmuted into
mobility of individuals".9 Man as the mover of civilizing possessions transports it into new
civilizing environment where he arranges out his knowledge and becomes familiar himself in
a new country. The word diaspora has been in style for the past more than 30 years. It means
brain drainage and as well as loss and dispersion as the result of a powerful displacement of
peoples from countries or regions diverse as their civilizing and historical centers. The
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importance of the word has very much changed depending on situation, and extends to do so.
Recent researchers have prove that diaspora entrepreneurship can help in the development
of the original mother land of diasporic persons by creating businesses and jobs, using
innovation, and transferring the political and financial capital. Diaspora shares the culture
and tradition of his country of origin through different ways such as: art, music, films,
literature, crafts, etc. These can be used as tools by the diaspora people in the form of cultural
diplomacy. When the culture and tradition of the diaspra ones are known in the host country
they help the motherland in broader sense.

The most commonly conservative definitions of the expression diaspora can describe
four wide periods: ancient times, a time in which it had different meanings; the Middle Ages
to the Renaissance; the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1970s; and the 1980s to the
present modern age. During antique times (800–600 BC), the phrase was used to explain the
Greek migration of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean; it referred to business development
and had a positive suggestion. It was in the beginning used for Jews throughout the third
century BC in a Greek translation of the Bible as it was used for displacement of Jews from
Babylon after the eradication of Jerusalem and its temple (586 BC). So “the conditions
diaspora and Babylon came to mean being cut off from one’s roots and being forced to live in
a foreign place”.10 This type of Diaspora expressed the view of anguish and anxiety and of
banishment from a position of source, at the same time it also represents the divine
punishment of the Jews. This meaning changed because Jews settled in the peripheral of
Palestine and diaspora came to suggest the gathering of all Jews by the will of God. By the
third century BC, the phrase had rejected its negative connotation and nominated Jews living
in the Greco-Roman world and speaking Greek, as well as the Jews living in Mesopotamia
and speaking Aramaic. But with the Roman destruction of the second temple in BC 70, it
became connected once again with exile (galut) from a historical and cultural centre, while
this sense declined through the centuries to follow. Jews experienced devotion and
interruption in Europe with the rise of Christian anti-Semitism in the middle Ages. Then from
200 A.D. to 900 A.D., there were enormous migrations in the whole world for the purpose of
business, employment or education. Thus people moved from one country to another for
living their life in comfortable environment. As it was always the motive of man to spread his
religion so this also became one of the vital reasons of migration. Colonial period witnessed
migration due to war, slavery and colonial oppression. People from occupied countries
moved to other colonies as indentured laborers. The colonizers also confined the Africans and
delighted them as slaves. During the cold war era, people from Third world Countries became
immigrants in the UK, the USA and the other European countries. So, Diaspora, in simple
words can be defined as spreading or resettlement of a people, by choice or compulsion, from
its motherland, where the reason may be trade, battle, natural calamity, slavery, labour,
employment, education etc. This migration has the consequences of longing, partition,
homesickness, and fondness towards homeland; and this diasporic consciousness for the roots
is one of the peculiarities of diaspora. Thus home becomes a heart and focal point and it
troubles them like anything else. As Lim puts it "'Home'...could be a domestic site of comfort
and security... [or] mythic homeland left behind... [or] multilocal, yet it is, paradoxically,
never fiilly ours for all times ... [and] Lacan would call "the neverhere," since "it is here when
IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 328

I search there; [and] it is there when I am here".11 During the World War II Nazi Germany
exiled, murdered, and enslaved millions of Jews Ukrainians, Russians and other Slavs. Most
of the victims moved to the West, including Western Europe, and millions seeking refuge in
the United States and other Western counties. Also the Palestinian diaspora resulted from
Israel’s creation in 1948, in which 750,000 were exiled from their mother land. Many
Palestinians people still continue to live in refugee camps maintained by Middle Eastern
nations, but others have resettled in the Middle East and other countries. From the late 19th
century, Japan made Korea a colony country for their benefit and millions of Chinese fled to
western provinces not occupied by Japan for the safety of their life.

Modern social media such as Face book and Twitter have searched for people their
lost associates and relatives living in distant land. This every moment communication and its
easy user-friendliness have helped people to get familiar in remote lands happily. The
disturbance that went along with dislocation among the diaspora has gone out of track. Safran
identifies six features of the diaspora: “dispersal, collective memory, alienation, longing for
the homeland, a belief in its restoration and the act of self-defining with the homeland.”12
The original meaning of ‘Diaspora’ was changed from that of the present meaning. The
diasporic ‘scattering’ is changed into ‘gathering’ by Homi Bhabha. According to Homi
Bhabha diasporas are “gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refuges; gathering on the edge of
foreign cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centers;
gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues or in the uncanny fluency of author’s
language, gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines;
gathering the memories of underdevelopment of other world lived restoratively; gathering the
past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present.”13 In contemporary diaspora, we may not get
all these characteristics but some new happenings such as replacement, adjustment,
understanding and so on. The second generation diaspora literature focuses on the ‘third
space’ which is the space of bargains between two contrasting cultures. Then there is the
subject of individuality, which is ‘hybrid’ individuality. It merges pluralities and
multilayeredness. There are diverse individuality groups among the diaspora depending upon
the causes of migration and their reactions to foreign countries. The experience of
displacement depends upon the factors like the production of diaspora one belongs to, the
attitude of the host countries, the causes that direct to migration and in current situation the
result of globalization. In contemporary times, the USA, has turn out to be the second largest
home of Indians in the world with more than two million people living and working in the
there as diasporic citizens. In the age of globalization, there is less dislocation but the
psychological dislocation is the dominating trait of the all men in the whole universe.
Nowadays, ‘Diaspora’ refers to a diversity of national population and a variety of groups of
people like – political and war refugees, migrants, ethnic and racial communities, immigrants,
expatriates and transnational communities. According to Steven Vertovec (1999) “Diaspora”
is the term often used today to describe practically any population which is considered
‘deterritorialized’ or ‘transnational’ - that is, which has originated in a land other than which
it currently resides, and whose social, economic, and political networks across the borders of
the nation-states or, indeed span the globe”14. Diaspora can perhaps be seen as a description
IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 329

of the ‘other’ which has historically referred to dislocated population who have been
dislocated from their inhabitant motherland all the way through the actions of migration, or
expulsion. Diaspora advocates turmoil from the nation-state or physical position of source
and transfer in one or more nation-states, provinces or countries. ‘Diaspora’ now addresses to
different groups of moved people and communities moving across the world. This term has
been used by different persons to explain the group migration and displacements in the
second half of the 20th century.

Diasporic life, whether enforced or self-imposed, is in many ways a tragedy. Yet, a

strange but a powerful point to note is that writers in their displaced endurance generally be
prone to do tremendously well in their works, as if the changed atmosphere acts as a tonic for
them. These writings in dislocated circumstances are often named as diasporic literature. The
study of globe literature might be the study of the way in which cultures distinguish
themselves through their projections of ‘otherness. So it is clear that the term ‘diaspora’, from
the Greek, meaning dispersal, distribution, or spreading has been applied for many years to
the global spreading of the Jews; in more recent times it has been applied to a number of
national and cultural groups living far-away from their conventional homelands. As a result
of the fast development of the term and its use, establishing the meaning of ‘Diaspora’ in a
broad manner can be difficult. ‘Diaspora’ has undergone changes in the meaning, it retains
some of the features such as ‘homelessness’ ‘alienation’ (temporary) ‘rootlessness’ and love
for the mother country. Kim Butler opines, “The definitions and understandings of ‘Diaspora’
get modified ‘in translation’ as they are applied to new groups”15. John Simpson in The
Oxford Book of Exile writes that exile “is the human condition; and the great upheavals of
history have merely added physical expression to an inner fact”16. So, home becomes the
centre of the diasporic writers; as they express their feelings and emotions about their ‘home’
with the help of their creative writing. The diasporic writers have nothing about their ‘home’
except imagination and nothing substitutes it; or it becomes, as a place of haunt for the
diasporic consciousness. In the foreign land the writers built their home with the help of their
art of writing. The diaspora means to reexamine remind the meaning and remembrance of
home, its different senses of where, what, and how. This means they are always haunted with
the questions regarding their original home. Diasporan peoples find themselves among the
dilemma of which is their home the original or in which they spend their lives. They are
comparing their new and old homes, their new and old lives and identities not in physical
sense but in imagination. In short, the term ‘diaspora’ points out groups of people transferred
from their resident motherlands during migration, immigration, or banishment as a result of
colonial expansion, imperialism, employment, trade, superior prospect, globalization etc. The
causes of migration may be intentional or unintentional. There are so many causes which are
responsible for the diaspora such as business and trade etc. As the whole world has become a
global village due to the modern scientific technologies and the whole earth has become the
yard for man.

1
Henry George Lidell; Robert, Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon Pertsues Project.
IJELLH Volume V, Issue XI, November 2017 330

2
The New Encyclopedia of Britannica (vol.3).

3
The New Oxford American Dictionary , s.v. “diaspora.”
4
Joan, Comay. The Diaspora Story: The Epic of the Jewish People among the Nations. Tel
Aviv: Steimatzky. 1981.7.

5
J.B, Sykes. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: London: Book Club
Association. (ed.) 1977. 690.

6
Ibid.537.

7
Ibid.338.

8
Leonard, Kasdan. Introduction in Robert F. Spencer and L. Kasdan (eds.) Migration and
Anthropology. Proceedings of the 1970 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological
Society. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. 1970. 1.

9
Robert, E. Park. Human Migration and the Marginal Man in Robert. E. Park (ed.) Race and
Culture. Glencoe: The Free Press.1950. 349.

10
Robin, Cohen. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. 118-19.

11
David C. L. Lim. The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings
of Ben Okri and K.S. Maniam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

12
William, Safran. Diasporas in modern societies; myths of homeland and return. Diaspora:
A Journal of Transnational Studies 1991. 83-99.

13
Homi, Bhabha. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. (Excerpts in www.
Prelecture. Stanford. Edu/lectures/bhabha/ excerpts. Htm)

14
Steven, Vertovec. (1999), Three Meaning of ‘Diaspora’, Exemplified among
SouthAsiaReligion,

15
Butler, Kim, Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse, Diaspora 10 (2001), No. 2, pp. 189–
219.

16
John, Simpson. (ed.). The Oxford Book of Exile. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.