‘MOTHER’ INDIA AND ‘FATHER’ ENGLAND – THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN LAWRENCE THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN LAWRENCE
‘MOTHER’ INDIA AND ‘FATHER’ ENGLAND – THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN LAWRENCE THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN LAWRENCE

Summary/Abstract: For Walsh Clifton, the protagonist of Durrell's novel, negotiating a transnational identity will necessarily embed the feminine India on his mother’s side and patriarchal England on his father’s. This negotiation will take him from the country of his birth – his motherland in colonial India – to the fatherland in England. The writer’s own experience as a colonial and his tense relation with England were in part the inspiration for his first novel published in 1935. Consequently, his love-hate relationship with England was fraught with doubts and Durrell called the lifestyle there the “English death”. Walsh Clifton’s ambivalence regarding his colonial identity is revealed through his encounters and interactions with Indians and other Europeans, but more importantly, through his visit to England. Thus, the writer reveals Clifton’s alienation and his sense of loss. The collision of his two identities occurs in his motherland and in his fatherland, thus the protagonist is unable to reconcile and reclaim the two homelands. Consequently he is stuck in a transnational in-between dealing with a ubiquitous conflict.

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