While the role of orality in the constructions of diasporic identity has been substantially explored among various societies across the globe, the narrative of women‟s experiences remain largely shrouded in multiple layers, inaccessible to the larger community. This paper attempts to excavate the diasporic experience of a hitherto unexplored group of women, the wives of Gujarati traders who settled along the shores of present-day Oman, in order to examine the ways in which individual women succeeded in creating notions of the quasi-home through a period of physical isolation and long separation from family and country. The study is based on documenting oral narratives rendered through personal interviews with a group of women who arrived in Oman more than seventy years ago. The extent to which their journey from memory to narrative empowers them in the course of the interviews sheds light on the way these women situate themselves in the context of diaspora, reflecting on their own experiences as being worth the telling, creating a sense of agency to lives hitherto viewed as marginal and essentially silenced in the public domain. In this sense, exploring oral histories becomes, not only an act of unearthing the past but of establishing new, empowered identities in the continuing present.

While the role of orality in the constructions of diasporic identity has been substantially explored among various societies across the globe, the narrative of women‟s experiences remain largely shrouded in multiple layers, inaccessible to the larger community. This paper attempts to excavate the di...