Diasporic Dilemma: A Quest for Home and Belongingness in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Abstract

The Diasporic Indian is like the banyan tree, the customary pictogram of the Indian mode of life, he extends out his roots in numerous soils, getting sustenance from one when the rest dry up. Far from being homeless, he has several homes, and that is the only way he has increasingly come to feel at home in the world. Diasporic writing raises questions regarding the definitions of 'home' and 'identity'. In ''Maximum City : Bombay Lost and Found '' the journalist and fiction writer Suketu Mehta, newly returned from New York and searching for a way to understand the place he left as a youth, similarly faces identity crisis and sense of belongingness. The gentle and genteel world of Mehta's remembered childhood no longer exists and he arrived with a simple question: can you go home again? In this paper, I will examine the identity predicament and struggle for existence faced by the protagonist in the novel.