In recent short stories written by diasporic Indian women writers, changes in terms of location or national identity are generally depicted as providing significant opportunities for Indian women to challenge and revise culturally-inscribed gender roles. Maybe because they portray women who are in transit between different selves and who sit uneasily between past and present, an impressive number of these texts is haunted by ghosts and ancestral doubles, thus literally exploring what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “uncanny moment of cultural difference.”
In two collections of short stories written respectively by Ginu Kamani and Shauna Singh Baldwin, Junglee Girl and English Lessons and Other Stories, not only are ghosts employed to rupture boundaries between the living and the dead, but they also represent enabling presences which authorize female voices by resurrecting stories of women that have been silenced or forgotten. In these two books, the emergence of the archaic is recurrently tinged with liberating undertones since it opens up new spaces for identity by countering gendered expectations of ‘acceptable’ behaviour and by constructing alternative realities. My paper will therefore focus on the central metaphors of female ghosts and doubles as transitional figures through which women in transit empower themselves. My aim is to show how culturally displaced women appropriate the uncanny so as to engender new identities and assert the value of individual female experience. In these haunted narratives, I will contend, women move from a ghostly time of repetition to a ‘hauntology’ of new becomings.