Creating a Space of Their Own: Diasporic Women in Ravinder Randhawa’s 'A Wicked Old Woman'
Creating a Space of Their Own: Diasporic Women in Ravinder Randhawa’s 'A Wicked Old Woman'

Summary/Abstract: A Wicked Old Woman is the first novel published, in 1987, by Ravinder Randhawa, a first-generation immigrant writer of South Asian descent, residing in Britain. In it, she recounts the wanderings of the female protagonist called Kulwant among her friends and family members in London. This fragmented account of her past and present focuses on her desire for identification and struggle in a life lived in between cultures, that of the metropolis and that of her ancestral land on the Indian subcontinent. As the life-stories of Randhawa’s characters unfold, London itself is seen being transformed into a multiracial and multicultural location, becoming the site where fictional hybridization takes place. Hybridity and liminality are experienced in multiple ways in the diasporic space where new identities are formed. While raising the issues of authenticity and colonial stereotypes, Randhawa represents identity as an unfolding process rather than a static given. Her topics also include arranged marriages, mixed marriages, abusive relationships, as well as healing as a communal activity, and the possibilities of accommodation of a diasporic community by the mainstream society.

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