‘How can She Feel at Home in so many Places?’

The city, as Blunt and Bonnerjee comment in “Connected Communities,” is a distinctive site of diasporic dwelling, belonging, and attachment. In diasporic imagination, a city often functions as a homeland. People in diaspora often want to visit and even temporarily return to the towns where they were born and nurtured. In the case of Sujata Bhatt, one of the leading diasporic poets of South-Asian origin, these spaces are those of Ahmedabad, Poona, Baroda, and Bombay. The representation of these cities in the poems of Bhatt speaks of a poignant diasporic consciousness. In her diasporic imagination, the cities of India merge with the cities across the world. She is able to find India in unexpected places like ‘a street in Bath’ or ‘a bus in Medellin’. Following Bhatt’s own articulation in ‘Well, Well, Well’ the question may be raised: ‘How can she feel at home in so many places?’. The present chapter will attempt to find an answer to this question among many others and try to locate the role of city in Bhatt’s diasporic consciousness.