Sense of Loss, Identify Crisis and Construction of Imaginary Homeland in Hridaya's Letter from A Lhasa Merchant to His Wife

Abstract

The present study in Chittadhar Hridaya’s novel Letter from A Lhasa Merchant to His Wife deals with the diasporic experience of Lhasa Merchant who is out of his homeland Kathmandu to host country Tibet. As a member from a culturally rich Newar community of Kathmandu, the Merchant’s identity is shaped and formed with his own culture. When he moves to Lhasa, he assimilates the Chinese culture, tradition and way of life. As a diasporic man, his identity becomes hybrid because of the influences of Tibetan socio-cultural environment. In Tibet, he gets the diasporic experience like hybridity, memory, nostalgia, sense of dislocation, rootlessness, alienation and identity crisis. To escape from the bitter reality of displacement and rootlessness, he uses memory as an ultimate tool. That is, this thesis shows how the earnest and lovesick Lhasa Merchant develops into a bitter, confused and uprooted man after the adaptation of Tibetan culture and way of life.