Belonging and Identity in Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories

Aarose Nicy S L¹

¹UG Student, Department of English, Holy Cross College, Nagercoil. aarosenicysl@gmail.com

Abstract

Home is where one can situate themselves and foster a sense of belonging. This idea of home is challenged in Aruni Kashyap’s novel, The House with a Thousand Stories. This novel deals with Assam socio-political issues and the domestic dwellings set amidst it. The private space in the novel acts as a converging point where social life collides with personal life, making it both a safe space and a battleground. The ancestral house functions beyond being a physical structure. It becomes a non- physical entity that holds memory, identity and trauma. The home, the supposed safe space becomes an arena constantly challenging the identity and belonging of its inhabitants. The walls of the house fail to act as barriers from the social unrest, instead it lets the outside world bleed into the house making it a microcosm of the larger unit. The ‘out there’ space gets recreated within the private enclave. The house mirrors the society’s system of exclusion and inclusion. Within the walls, this system is based on gender roles, relationships and personal histories. Considering the fleeting nature of home, this paper redefines home through Kashyaps’s narrative, as a borderland. It is filled with constant struggles and forms a central site where the inhabitants find it difficult to embrace their identity and self. By bringing forth the idea of domestic space transforming into a conflicted arena, the paper challenges the conventional notion of home. It also uses home as the place where answers to the questions of belonging, identity, memory and survival can be found.

Keywords: Postcolonial Literature, Belonging, Domestic space, Home, Assam.