Diasporic History and Transnational Networks in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

Abstract

Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay adopts the perspective of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor and of a former cabaret performer to connect the histories of Germany and India. This paper examines how these characters –witnesses to a multiplicity of stories and receptacles of a variety of cultural instances – engender a diasporic network that dismantles the solidity of official history and grants a meaning to the desolate experience of exile.