Published Online:June 2026
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES030626
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2026.21.2.27-38
Author Name:Athira Baburaj, Dhishna Pannikot and Kiran Raveendran
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:27-38
Migration affects how and what is remembered, and displacement intensifies the investments in memory. Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return (2002) depicts the “painful process of cartographic reconfigurations of state boundaries along ethnic lines and the resultant violence, uprootedness, alienation” and persistent memory of displacement (Sarma, 2016, p. 130). It is a story of archival research where the protagonist seeks memories in personal archives. Memories are immediately linked with the surrounding space of the environment. This study examines ‘memory’ that has migrated or has been exiled from its local habitations. It focuses on how memory travels, archiving itself rhizomatically for the internally displaced in Northeast India through the novel The Point of Return. It also analyzes how mnemonic archives influence traveling memory and the possibility of localizing traveling memory for the internallydisplaced population.
Memory plays a crucial role in “migration, immigration, resettlement, and diasporas, for memory gives continuity to the dislocations of individual and social identity” (Creet, 2011, p. 3). It is essentially a phenomenon of migration. It is fluid and is constantly on the move, archiving itself rhizomatically.