Diasporic Cultural Dilemmas and Ecological Insight in Taslima Nasreen’s Fera

Fera by the controversial author Taslima Nasrin examines the chronicle of a migrant who has been searching for her true identity. This novel stresses upon the emotions of a Bangladeshi emigrant whose memory oscillates between romanticizing over idyllic past days spent in Bangladesh and confronting hardcore reality in India as a refugee. This paper intends to explore the traumatic sufferings and psychic torments of the protagonist while trying to synthesize the cultural dilemmas of two nations: cultures inherited by birth and customs adopted in host land. Caught between an emotional imbroglio and the fervent desire to visit her motherland Kalyani travels back to Bangladesh in search of her roots. The paper takes the initiative to analyze her journey from the point of view of diasporic literature while giving a stress to some cognate issues like societal constraints, cultural difference, the ethos of diverse communities and identity crisis. This paper interrogates how ecology and her association with her surroundings loom largely over defining her identity. It also focuses how camaraderie is shared by human beings with natural phenomena like river, trees, land etc. This trait of the novel gives a way to analyze the text from ecocritical angle too. The border between two nations i.e. India and Bangladesh, doesn't remain a spatial character; its pervasive presence is felt in the hearts of the citizens residing in two countries. The corpus of this paper also highlights the binary between the thoughts of two women: Sharifa, Kalyani's childhood friend, who is relegated to the status of producing children and looking after the household chores and Kalyani, who travels to her motherland to reclaim her native identity.