CHAPTER II

INDIAN DIASPORIC TRADITIONS IN CANADA :

QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER AND WIFE

Migration directly influenced the culture of new societies. It not only

transforms their culture but also influenced the older left ones. In the present

global scenario when the frontiers and borders have disappeared or their meaning

keeps on changing, immigration has its own effect on the social, political,

economic and cultural dimensions. In this regard, Canada situated in the North

American Continent, currently is accepting more immigrants than any other

country in the world. It has been attracting people from all over the world with

varied socio-ethnic background. Thus, Canada has evolved out to be a racially

and culturally diverse society today.

History has witnessed the long transformation and evolution of present day

Canada. The hunting nomads from the steppes of Siberia or the mountains of

Mangolia, arrived in North America in search of food, specifically animals as their

diet. Eventually the different parts of the continent were inhabited by them. In the

due course of time each genetically related tribe evolved out its own language,

customs and culture. In the fifteenth century Europeans landed in Canada and at

that time throughout the different parts of Canada, these tribes were spread in

small concentrations.

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Canada was occupied by French in 1543. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 it

was given to Britain, thus it became the part of British Empire. After Britain’s

victory over, France; the North American colony of France (Quebec) was

surrendered to the British in the middle of the nineteenth century. British settlers

started flooding in the newly acquired colony, thus, resulting into mass emigration

from Britain and Ireland. In the later part of the nineteenth century, i.e, 1887, the

Federation of Canada was born by merging together the Upper Canada (Ontario),

the Lower Canada (Quebec), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Ireland

and British Columbia. Since then Canada has been witnessing different waves of

immigration and it would be no exaggeration to call it a ‘land of Immigrants’.

In the nineteenth century and through the mid-twentieth century explicitly

racist policies were adopted to exclude Asians from migrating to Canada. The

specific groups targeted were Chinese, the ‘East Indians’ and the Japanese. There

was strong opposition to immigration from Asia and at times it took the form of

anti-Oriental riots on the West coast of Canada, alongwith legislation to exclude

tax, or impose quotas on Asians. There was a strong preference for British and

Western European immigrants and discrimination against Asian, African and

Caribbean immigrants who at that time were subject to quotas. Such were the

painful circumstances prevailing in Canada for Asian immigrants. In order to get

relieve from their circumstances they turned towards creative writing. Thus, they

formed a separate body of literature named as Asia-Pacific Canadians, through

which they express their sentiments and ‘in initial phase idealizing and glorifying

the country left behind, the hardships in the adopted country, feelings of alienation,

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loneliness, and bitter anger at racist discrimination” (Begum 219). This literature

has leap-frogged into prominence only from the 1960’so onwards and “many

capture the spirit of the early days of migration and concerns and experiences that

have been extrenched in their memories or handed down to them by their

ancestors” (219).

The remarkable feature of Canadian literature of nineteen sixties is its

voicing nationalist feelings, due to flow of immigration and “while the English and

the French ‘Canadian’ identity, their overt superiority complex of white European

skin kept their Asian and African brethren invisible as ‘brown’” (Mishra 33).

Adoption of ‘multiculturalism’1 as nation’s policy in 1988, allowed these invisible

people to get officially recognized as ‘visible minorities’. By the eighties the so-

called visible minorities had already produced enough literature to vocalize their

diasporic experiences, the grinding poverty of their predecessors that made them

a prey to colonial exploitation both in Caribbean plantation colonies and the

Canadian farms. The experience of being an immigrants or child of immigrants has

become a major concern of the late twentieth century Canadian Immigrant

literature ensuing from various ethnic groups. The South Asian and Caribbean

writing has either turned into recording the nostalgic experiences of the past or the

bitter experiences of living in Canada. The South Asians have found not only the

physical environment cold and hostile but also social environment. In her

introduction to Geography of Voices , Diana McGifford rightly notes: “The

alienation of immigrant and the bitter sting of racism are two of the painful realities

shaping the lives and art of South Asian Canadians” (13).

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At the dawn of the twenty first century South Asian writing in Canada forms

a significant strand in the arena of Canadian literature by its sheer quantity and

quality. Uma Parameswaran, an eminent South Asian Indo-Canadian writer

christened this body of writing as South-Asian-Canadian Literature (SACLIT ).

Commenting on the creative process of immigrant literature, She had observed:

“Every immigrant transplant part of his native land in the new country and the

transplant may be said to have taken root once the immigrant figuratively sees the

river that runs in the adopted place, not the Ganga or the Assiniboine as the

Ganga, both of which imply a simple transference or substitution – the confluence

of any two rivers is sacred” (80). In the ethno-centered, multi-cultural fabric of

Canada, Canadian literature do not speak of diversity alone; there is a desperate

striving for a cultural synthesis as well as a cultural and creative space. Arun

Prabha Mukherjee is quite hopeful :

The act of making the dominating culture self-conscious is in itself a contribution that should allot South Asian poetry, alongwith the literature of other racial and ethnic minorities in Canada, an important niche in Canadian literature (95).

Today Canadian Literature is a rich literature that treasures experiences of

colonial and post-colonial conditions of the white dis-empowerment and non-white

empowerment. The diverse ethnic writing which speaks, suppression, exploitation

and other historical and cultural impositions through racism and violence which is

a part of the history of Canada that no one can deny. Among South Asians, Indian

immigrants have been quite inevitable and they are an integral part of it. Indian

immigrant writers have occupied enviable position in this body of literature. They

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are acclaiming world-wide recognition and earning laurels for themselves. The

super-structure of South Asian Diasporic Tradition of Canada is standing on the

sound edifice created by Indo-Canadian Diasporic Tradition, providing it a sound

footing, upon which the whole body of South Asian Diasporic Tradition rests.

Indo - Canadian immigration history in a nutshell would provide for a wider

perspective which justifies their struggle and success. “The immigrant writer is not

merely the author who speaks about the immigrant experiences, but one who has

lived at, one whose response is an irruption of words; images, metaphors, one

who is familiar with some of the inner as well as the outer working of these

particular contexts” (Itwaru 25). These lines of Arnold Harrichand Itwaru explains

‘the expatriate sensibility’ that is the impulse to take the literary journey home,

towards ‘history’, towards ‘memory’ and towards ‘past’ from home. This expatriate

sensibility is best revealed in the Canadian context as Canada is the destination

for many aspirants from the South Asian countries and specifically from India.

The first South Asian immigrants entered Canada in the 1890’s and they

liked what they saw that the news of the virgin land waiting to be cultivated; of the

forests waiting to be felled in British Columbia. So, there were voluntaries, who

were willing to settle down in Canada. Immigration from India started after a visit of

Sikh soldiers to British Columbia after their participation in Queen Victoria’s

Diamond Jubilee in England in 1898. By the year 1907, there were approximately

two thousand Indians in British Columbia. They were mistakenly called Hindoos

even though almost all of them were Sikhs. Their odd appearance and struggle to

make a living with unease created dislike, consequently in September of 1907, a

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large segment of the white population, which at that time numbered approximately

two lakhs; mounted attack on the Asians who consisted of about fifteen thousand

Indians. This led in 1910 to Orders - in – Council – being passed that effectively

curtailed Asian immigration and above all measures were taken to stop the

immigration of the so-called Hindoos.

In 1908 Immigration Act was reversed not allowing Hindoos to enter in

Canada. After 1908 Canadian Immigration laws effectively barred South Asians

from settling in Canada. The Immigration Act of 1910 explicitly restricted British

Indian immigration. Thus, the stage was set for one of the worst racist episodes in

Canadian history and it was ‘The Komagata Maru Incident’. The Komagata Maru

was a Japanese ship, which reached Vancouver harbour on May 23, 1914. It was

chartered by one Gurdit Singh who enlisted 376 passengers and had also

negotiated with a Hong kong merchant who would purchase Canadian lumber

which the ship would carry on its return voyage. The ship and its passengers were

quarantined off the Coast for two months. The government under Government

General Lord Greg and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier figured out how best they

could get rid of the ‘Brown Peril’, and then the ship was sent back. Only a few of

the passengers who were returning immigrants and therefore could not be refused

entry, were admitted. Hence this black and unforgettable Komagata Maru incident

best describes the deplorable plight of the Sikhs in Vancouver. This incident on the

one hand represented for Canadians, their right to determine their national

priorities within the British Empire. On the other hand it shook their collective moral

conscience; for the treatment given to the Indians in the ship was inhuman and

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broke all the rules of decency of a civilized world that Canada was aspiring for.

Ted Ferguson has commented on this event as :

Canada’s treatment of the Komagata Maru passengers … should have shamed us into trying to understand and accept Asian immigrants. It did not. We have held on to our prejudice as though it were a cherished heirloom that should be passed from generation to generation (186-87).

Apart from this the first world war from 1914 to 1919 halted virtually all

immigration to Canada from any country; and emigration from the Indian

subcontinent, in particular. The advent of second world war (1939 to 1945)

decreased the Indian immigration to Canada , at that time only twenty one Indian

entered Canada.

After India, Pakistan and SriLanka’s independence in 1947 and 1948,

Canada was pressurized to relax its immigration policies. Consequently, a special

quota agreement was passed between the Canadian Government and Asiatic

members of the British Common Wealth in1951. This quota agreement remained

in effect until new Immigration Regulations were introduced in 1962. The 1967

Immigration regulations confirmed a universal racially non-discriminatory

immigration policy and created a nine-point assessment and admission system for

immigrants, according to which main emphasis was given to skills and educated

background, coupled with occupational need in Canada.

In 1974, the Government conducted a complete review of immigration

policy to meet the political, economic needs of Canada. The Immigration Act of

1976 was made to set the annual immigration levels and further the 1978

Immigration regulations revised the point system to place more emphasis on

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practical training and experience than on formal education. New directions for

Canadian Immigration and refugee protection legislation and policy were

announced on January 6, 1999.

Since the removal of racially discriminatory immigration policies, there has

been a significant change not only in the volume but also in national, regional and

ethnic diversity of South Asian immigrants. The first South Asians who migrated to

newly-developing British Columbia a century ago were mainly; male Sikh Punjabi

farmers. The South Asian immigrants of recent decade have comprised a

heterogenous population in terms of their occupational experience. This

experience has further enhanced the literary world giving birth to diasporic writing,

which in its turn is continuously enriching the diasporic Indian writing in English.

Today it enriches every continent and part of the world. It is an interesting paradox

that a great deal of Indian writing in English is produced not only in India but in

wide spread geographical areas of indenture, Indian diaspora in the South Africa,

the Caribbean, the South pacific, Mauritius, and the contemporary Indian diaspora

in U.S.A., the U.K., Canada, Australia and Newzealand. Today in the Canadian

context the South Asian diasporic tradition has occupied an important position and

it would be no exaggeration to call it as the part and parcel of Canadian Literature.

The success of South Asian writers of Indian origin is the result of their hard

labour and their instinct to survive among the odds, thus, literally cherishing ‘sweet

are the fruits of adversities’. Their present position is the outcome of their initial

rejection giving birth to temporary mood of dejection, but ultimately overcoming

this phase. They made their existence felt and begin to be heard with visibility and

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they are not only accepted in that norm but they have created a niche for

themselves and Bharati Mukherjee is no exception as she has proved her mettle in

this field.

II

In the first phase of her literary career which is named as the phase of

expatriation, The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife are published. Trying to find solace

in the company of words, Bharati Mukherjee took refuge in the realm of literature

and literary pursuits. In 1971, with publication of The Tiger’s Daughter she

started her literary voyage. Her maiden work is a reflection of herself and with it

she initiated a trend of revealing her personal experiences in words directly or

indirectly. Therefore, it would be more apt to call Mukherjee a subjective writer,

who through her writings reveal herself as a woman caught between two cultures.

Mukherjee’s maiden novel The Tiger’s Daughter is her genuine endeavour of

digging out her identity in her Indian heritage. The Tiger’s Daughter comes out in

the infant stage of Mukherjee’s evolution as a writer. That is why it is very genuine,

immaculate and autobiographical with great attachment to Bengali and especially

Calcutta Bhadra-Lok Society. The Tiger’s Daughter is considered in Times

Literary Supplement to be “skillfully wrought with lively dialogue and full

descriptive passages” (736). About her first effort Mukherjee reveals to her

interviewer Sybil Steinberg : “It is the wisest of my novels in the sense I was

between both worlds. I was detached enough from India so that I could look back

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with affection and irony but I didn’t know America long enough to feel any conflict. I

was like a bridge, poised between two worlds” (46-7).

In her earlier works Mukherjee has tried her best to give us the glimpse of

postcolonial complexities and problems. In the postcolonial era it is the cultural

shock giving birth to isolation which in its turn further augments different sorts of

complexities. Jasbir Jain feels that Mukherjee’s earlier novels deal with isolation.

They are of and about isolation. These novels explore that sensibility which make

the protagonist unable to express oneself clearly due to lack of proper

communication. …

[F]or these voiceless emotions arise out of a questioning of cultural issues and the journeys that Tara and Dimple undertake, are journeys at cultural level. Mukherjee’s novels are representatives of the expatriate sensibility. This alone offers an understanding of the ambivalence present not only in the psychology of the protagonists but also that of the author; this helps us understand the satiric interludes, the ironic juxtapositions, the shifting point of view and also the final disintegration” (12-18).

The main theme of The Tiger’s Daughter is efforts for adjustments in a

new culture. Bharati Mukherjee has admitted that an issue very important to her is

“…the finding of a new identity… the painful or exhilarating process of pulling

yourself out of the culture that you were born into, and then replanting yourself in

another culture” (Indian Express 16). During this phase, immigrant has to go

through many trials, tribulations, turmoils and traumas while trying to make it in the

new world. In this way Bharati Mukherjee seems to have probed into the psyche

of the culturally uprooted people and she also tries to present some of her own

experiences through them. Therefore, it would be no exaggeration to call The

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Tiger’s Daughter the account of Bharati Mukherjee’s own self. Linda Sandler

feels Bharati Mukherjee’s action is far more intense and although her heroine

shares much of her own sensibility, she treats her with toughness. This novel

parallels Mukherjee’s coming back to India with her Canadian husband Clark

Blaise in 1973. During their stay in India, like Tara, they were concerned about the

social, political, religious and economic issues of Indian day to day life. Later on

Mukherjee’s memoirs Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) gives expression to

these concerns at length. It is an autobiographical sum-up of Mukherjee’s return to

her native country after a long stay in North America and discovery of the fact that

the long absence of fourteen years has distanced her not only from her community

but also from her country. Mukherjee in The Tiger’s Daughter through the main

protagonist Tara Banarjee Cartwright projects that inner chaos which she herself is

going through. Like Tara, Mukherjee’s visit to India widens the chasm between her

and the mother country she had left behind.

The writer documented her journey back to India with her husband in the

memoir Days and Nights in Calcutta , the title itself is very suggestive. On the

outer level it appears to be the account of Bharati Mukherjee and her husband

Clark Blaise’s joint authorship but its deeper meaning shows “the juxtaposed

perspective of the outsider (Blaise) and the insider (Mukherjee). On a more subtle

level, however, the title reflects Mukherjee’s own internalized double perspective in

her observations of India, she is at once a native and an alien” (Sunitha 263).

The first half of the book deals with Blaise’s experience of India; while in the

latter portion Bharati Mukherjee has given the account of the upper-middle class;

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during their one year stay in Calcutta in 1970. It is not the account of one year that

she writes about; but the urgency of her life, the life of a particular class at a

particular time in Calcutta’s history. While writing this book that she realized that

inspite of all the racial trauma she was undergoing in Canada, it was still the new

world2 that she wanted to live in. There has been a considerable amount of

difference in attitude regarding India between Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise.

The chaos, the poverty and mistreatment of women in the name of tradition deeply

shocked and affected her, “what is unforgivable is the lives that have been

sacrificed to notions of propriety and obedience” (DNC 217). However, her

husband was awe-struck by the magic of the myth and culture that surrounded

every part of Bengal. Her shock and pain and his awe is the outcome of different

attitude observed by both of them. Mukherjee looks at her own country with

eastern bent of mind whereas Clark Blaise has a western perspective to look at

eastern world. In the postcolonial era the fusion of cultures may have both positive

and negative repercussions. Positive effects are good for the growth and

development of a culture whereas, negative repercussions gave birth to

complexities, which harness the smooth functioning of a culture and creates

confusion. Bharati Mukherjee’s memoir Days and Nights in Calcutta thus,

records the dilemma of belonging to two cultures and two nations that gives birth

to a fractured identity like Tara Chatterjee of The Tiger’s Daughter .

This negotiation of identities is initiated by Mukherjee in The Tiger’s

Daughter which aptly reflects the postcolonial expatriate consciousness through

migrancy, belonging and characterization. Art of characterization is one of the

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most significant aspects of literature. Bharati Mukherjee excels in this field. Her

characters reflect different shades of her own personal life. They reflect her

personal concerns and circumstances that have helped in developing her identity

as an American. It would be more apt to call Mukherjee a subjective writer as the

autobiographical element is quite evident in her works. Regarding the

autobiographical tone of The Tiger’s Daughter, she explains to Ameena Meer :

When I wrote I certainly didn’t think of it as autobiographical. But my father felt he recognized himself in the portrait and there were other people just as well. In The Tiger’s Daughter I was writing about my class, a certain period in Calcutta’s history about a class and a way of life that’s become extinct. Calcutta soon after changed; the government became a communist government. I felt my world was that kind of nineteenth century world that became outmoded in the twentieth century, a class aware of the enormous changes about to come and hoping those changes would not come (Interview 26-7).

Mukherjee wrote The Tiger’s Daughter during her Canadian days, where

she was constantly haunted by the idea of being ‘a brown woman in a white

society.’ A feeling of being an outsider was thus always in her mind so is in the

case of Tara. Tara Banarjee Cartwright realized that New York horrified her, less

of its violence than for the omnipresent fear of violence. “The waiting to be

mugged” (Linda 75-6). The Tiger’s Daughter is the story of Mukherjee itself. It

presents that segment of society in which Bharati Mukherjee has her upbringing

and she is acquainted with. She explains in an interview to Ranjita Basu :

It is the autobiography of a class rather than an individual. I was writing about the passing away of a way of life that I and many young Bengali women growing up in the Calcutta of the fifties experienced. Many of the characters are meant to operate both

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believably and symbolically. There is a nouvean rich class coming in and that is personified by one principal character. There are those who have been prepared by their westernized education for a gracious Calcutta that is on the eve of disappearing and there is a new people with a great deal of political vitality with reformist ideas … It is a nostalgia, for Calcutta that has already collapsed (Times of India ).

Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel The Tiger’s Daughter is an attempt by the

writer to show that attitude of the immigrants which they develop in the earlier

phase of their immigration vis-à-vis their mother country while living in the different

culture. Through Tara she tries to explore the possibilities of maintaining a balance

between Indian Expatriate and a person inclined to be merged into the India of her

past :

In The Tiger’s Daughter (1973) the protagonist presumes that her marriage to a non-Indian or non-Hindu has distanced her from her community’s traditions, but her return to India for a short time proves to be more disastrous. Back home she realizes that she cannot partake of the excitement of her friends or relatives and is unable to answer the innumerable questions about the newfound land, America, and its affluence (Sunitha 263-4).

Tara is the protagonist of the novel, who acts as a mouthpiece of Bharati

Mukherjee. Its Tara who is The Tiger’s Daughter in the novel. Her father is a

wealthy Bengali Brahmin, who is known as Bengal Tiger in the higher gentry of

Calcutta. He belongs to a mercantile aristocracy with its root in the Victorian age.

Bengal Tiger thus, stands for the upper strata of the society; whose existence is

under threat from the forthcoming social upheaval through socialist and

Communists uprising. Here Mukherjee is forecasting about a social movement

which is about to take place in the west Bengal. The fact also reflects Mukherjee’s

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awareness regarding political and social life of Bengal in the early 70’s. Calcutta,

being the Capital of West Bengal becomes the centre of such political and social

activities. In, New York Times , Book Review, Levins write that, “Tara’s passage to

India is a better barometer for 1972 than most of the alleged non –fiction pouring

from the press “(17). Tara is the only issue of her parents and she is sent to

America for higher studies barely at the tender age of fifteen. Her seven years long

stay at Vassar made a sea-change in her attitude regarding life and her native

country. It even changed the very course of her life, as she married an American

David Cartwright. Initially she is awe-struck to find herself among aliens and

America did not fascinate her :

New York, she thought now, had been exotic. Not because there were policemen with days prowling the underground tunnels. Because girls like her, at least almost like her, were being knifed in elevators in their own apartment buildings: Because students were rioting about campus recruiters and far away wars rather than the price of rice or the stiffness of final exams. Because, people were agitated about pollution. The only pollution, she had been warned against in Calcutta had been caste pollution. New York was certainly extraordinary and it had driven her to despair (TD 34).

Gradually she is able to complete seven years in America; in the company

of her American husband. In her heart Tara for long has been dreaming of going

back to her native country. Finally, after seven years, at the age of twenty two, she

is able to fulfill her wish. The novel deals with her return journey; her homecoming

which turns into an uneasy one. It proves to be futile and a great disappointment

for Tara. For years she has been dreaming to return, but on returning she finds

herself imbued with the ‘foreignness of spirit’ which was the result of not only her

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American domicile but also due to her early education at private school run by

Belgian nuns in Calcutta. Tara’s return journey stands for the literal journey

commenced upon by Mukherjee to describe how Tara is pushed to the edges of

her old world, and yet exiled from the new, and how she tries vainly to reconcile

the two worlds in her heart.

Tara’s return journey from New York to Calcutta via Mumbai gives us the

glimpse of a changed Tara. Her sojourn in the America made her a woman of

different attitude. Once she used to admire ‘the houses on Marine Drive’ but now

“their shabbiness appalled her to her Bombay’s railway station appears ‘more like

a hospital’ (18-19). She becomes supercilious and behaves contemptuously with

her co-passengers a Marwari and a Nepali. She ironically remarks :

The Marwari was indeed very ugly and tiny and insolent. He reminded her of a circus animal who had gotten the better of his master, and the other occupant, a Nepali was a fidgety older man with coarse hair. He kept crossing and recrossing his legs and pinching the creases of his pants. Both men, Tara decide, could effortlessly ruin her journey to Calcutta (20).

Among these unwanted co-passengers, even the scenery outside the train

appears to her ‘merely alien and hostile.’ At first Tara considers her homecoming

to her father’s palatial remain with its Victorian atmosphere pleasant.

Sivaramkrishna remarks that this home may have proved soothing to Tara, but ‘it

could not insulate her from the short circuits of external reality’ (33). The reality

makes her restless and this restlessness compels her to search beyond the

aristocratic circle; the loathsome and naked truth about the poverty-ridden, riot torn

city. “Now she was in a city that took for granted most men were born to suffer,

17

others to fall asleep during committee meetings of the Chamber of Commerce”

(34).

Tara finds refuge in ‘Catelli – Continental Hotel’ as it provides escape from

Calcutta and its chaos; but she realized that it is impossible for her to escape from

Calcutta or harsh realities of life. To her, Calcutta seems to be a city with riots;

class-struggle, labour unrest and workers seizing the warehouses. That’s why

Tara observes :

Calcutta is as good or as bad as over. Newspapers are full of epidemics, collisions, fatal quarrels and starvation. But even at close quarters she finds tragedy looking large squatters occupy private property; near naked people sleep on pavements with rats and cockroaches for company, a handcuffed young man is slapped in the face, processionists break into a bakery shop, a friend is hit on the head with a soda bottle by a frenzied mob - ; “Calcutta is a deadliest city in the world (210).

How ironic it is for Tara that she finds her native place as highly disorderly

and anarchic whereas in an alien culture amidst the omnipresent fear of violence,

‘the waiting to be mugged’ she is at ease. She adjusts to her new surrounding and

even marries an American. Apart from the external happenings, internally Tara is

under the influence of the ‘foreignness of the spirit’, which makes it impossible for

her to enjoy the company of her old friends with whom she had played with “seven

years ago, done her homework with Nilima, briefly fancied herself in love with

Pronob, debated with Reena at the British Council” (43). Tara finds herself in the

grip of the ‘foreignness of the spirit’ that widens the chasm between her and

Calcutta more. This particular situation reflects one of the most common

postcolonial complexities where the immigrant is unable to cope with the native

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country due to lack of proper understanding and interaction with the local

surroundings. The different types of postcolonial complexities are explored by

Mukherjee through the type of immigrants such as elite immigrants and the

common middle-class immigrant. In The Tigre’s Daughter , the attitude of the elite

immigrant towards her primary space i.e. Calcutta is specifically mentioned. Tara

represents that class of urban upper class, social elite, which never internalize the

primary space, the country of birth. She has never been the common girls of

Calcutta. All through her fifteen years span in Calcutta, Tara has not been

exposed to the real Calcuttan life. Living in Calcutta just meant to her, living in a

huge house with comforts on Lamae street, getting education at St. Blaise,

watching movies at the metro and enjoying a safe, protected life. This effective

insulation which Tara receives from her parents creates a secondary space where

she lives untroubled. This is the reason that all her relatives develop an intense

aversion to Tara and through her towards all the values that her secondary space

that is America represents. She appears like a, “carefully bred tadpole that is

transferred from a small aquarium to a larger one as it grows” (Ravichandra 85).

Even after her return from America, she is involved in the activities of leisure.

Gathering at the Catelli Continental with her wealthy friends, drinking endless cups

of tea with useless chatting :

Tara has not come face to face to face with the real Calcutta of poverty and squalor, industrial unrest and increasing crimes. Even when she is surrounded by friends and relatives, she feels totally isolated and completely alone. By not being able to fit back into Calcutta society, Tara realizes that she is a misfit at both places. She is always troubled by nostalgia for the life left

19

behind and this leaves her in a catch-22 situation (Nityanandam 69).

The conflicts between the primary and the secondary space in Tara’s life is

the main theme of the novel. Without having a proper knowledge of her native

land, the secondary space or the foreign country with its own codes of survival

appears attractive and desirable. It is often the result of an experience of

marginality within the primary space. It could also be racial, class or gender. [S]He

imagines the secondary space sometimes better because it offers him or her new

liberties and possibilities, but in Tara’s case she is not well-equipped to adjust in

the secondary space or her orientation at the primary space was not proper. She

belongs to the upper elite class of Calcutta and having arrived she finds her

secondary space quite demanding as she married with a person belonging to this

space. In this situation her secondary space is a primary space for her husband.

Because of this inevitable synchronicity of these conflicting loyalities the people of

her primary/secondary space feel neglected. This is fundamentally a neo-colonial

situation. It could happen within nation boundary, among ethnic boundaries and it

could happen in transnational situation as between the immigrant and the

dominant groups. Being Mukherjee’s maiden novel Tara does not seem to develop

any strategy of survival in her either of spaces. The heroines of her later novels

make use of several strategies of survival which are sometimes ideological and at

other times unethical available within the primary space. Tara feels that her

marriage with an American has distanced her from her community and friend

circle. After her return from America she is even afraid of her friends’ opinion and

attitude regarding her. She fears “their tone, their omissions, their aristocratic

20

oneness” (43). Tara’s relatives do not approve of the way she is leading her life.

Her relatives “attribute her arrogance to her American attitude to life and think that

her seven years’ stay in America has transformed her thoroughly into a strutting

peacock” (Sunitha 264).

When Tara along with her mother visits to her aunt Jharna, who is in a

miserable condition as she has lost her husband in cancer and worse than that

she has “saddled with a club footed child” (TD 35). Tara tries to sympethesize with

her and suggests plasters, casts and special shoes as a cure, but she is

humiliated by the aunt: “You have come back to make fun of us; haven’t you?

What gives you the right? Your American money? Your mlechha husband” (36).

Thus, Tara is completely misunderstood and she is even brutally charged with the

allegation “why do you hate us? Tara is unable to express herself and it is her

incommunicability which is responsible for the wrong impression of her image

among her relatives and friends. She fails to reply her aunt against the allegation.

She would have replied: “I don’t hate you, I love you and the miserable child, the

crooked feet, the smoking incense holder, I love you all” (38).

Tara finds herself incomplete and fragmented due to her incommunicability

with her native people and places. Further two more incidents which she comes

across make her voiceless. One incident happens during her visit to Darjeeling,

when accompanying her mother she meets a holy woman called Kananbala Mata.

Her Darshan makes her speechless and she finds herself in a state of ecstasy; an

epiphanic relevations which is inexpressible. Tara’s meeting with Mata Kananbala

proved to be very effective as it left on her heart an unforgettable impression. “Like

21

her religious mother she too believed in miracles and religious experience” (136).

For Tara this incident becomes a memorable one but the second one becomes a

traumatic experience, sexual violence inflicted upon Tara by Tuntunwala. Tara

visits Nayapur with her friends. It is here that Tuntunwala tries to seduce her in her

room. This derogatory act of Tuntunwala makes her cynical about him and Tara

becomes disillusioned about India :

Tara’s first reaction was to complain Sanjay and Pronob, to tell them Tuntunwala was a parasite who would survive only at their expense. But the outrage soon subsided, leaving a residue of unforgiving bitterness. She realized she could not share her knowledge of Tuntunwala with any of her friends. In a land where a friendly smile, an accidental brush of fingers can ignite rumours – even law suits – how is one to speak of Tuntunwala’s violence? (TD 199).

This incident makes her shocked and she finds herself voiceless. Her

dumbness becomes unbearable for her. She becomes a victim of internal violence

but her pain and agony remains with her due to her lack of communication. Tara

finds her inner voice arising from her injured inner self, which is the outcome of

internal violence; Calcutta city like herself is a mute victim of violence, who is

ready to bear the pain of being torn apart by a violent mob. Under these terrible

circumstances Tara finally decides to return to her husband in America. But she is

caught in the upsurge of the violent mob and the story remains inconclusive. Tara

is, thus, “portrayed as a tigress at bay in the forests of dried up imagination”

(Sivaramkrishna 71-87). The abrupt, inconclusive end of the novel is almost like

the immigrant who is not sure about his or her destination and existence, swinging

in between rootedness and rootlessness.

22

This condition of Homelessness is further aestheticized through the tropes

of journey. In this way journey often becomes a metaphor for human condition and

in postcolonial literature it is of vital importance. It is often used symbolically by the

writer to show the quest of the immigrant regarding its existence and identity. As

C. Vijaysree feels that “some writers thematize an actual return to the idealized

home and record the irrecoverability of the host ‘patria’, for example Bharati

Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter ” (226). The novel begins with the return

journey of the main protagonist, Tara Banarjee to her native country after a long

stay of seven years at America. On reaching Bombay she again takes a train

journey from Bombay to Calcutta. It is through this journey Tara’s attitude

regarding her passengers; Bombay city and the scenery out is reflected. There

has been a sea change in her views, which is the outcome of her stay at America.

During her stay at Calcutta so many trips are being organized in order to make her

stay comfortable at home. Her friends organize a picnic trip for her, where she

becomes hysterical over a harmless water snake expecting tragedy where there is

none. Tara befriends with Joyonto R. Choudhary and with him she goes to see the

funeral pyres on the Ganges. She even visits Choudhary’s compound to see a

squatter establishment that has established itself. For a change Tara along with

her parents visits the hill resorts of Darjeeling. She goes to the new Township of

Nayapur with her friends; where Tuntunwala tries to seduce her and Tara is

disillusioned about India. She decides to go back to her husband David Cartwright

in the United States but she is unable to do so as she is trapped in the midst of the

23

mob, wondering whether her husband “will ever knew that she loved him fiercely”

(TD 210).

Journey is, therefore, of utmost importance not only in Tara’s life but it also

plays a significant role in Mukherjee’s life. She has used journey symbolically on

two levels. On the one level it is the journey which the heroine, Tara Banarjee

undertakes and finds herself caught between two cultures. Though Tara’s journey

proves to be a failure yet it can be said that the restlessness of the immigrant

gives birth to the desire for search and investigation. On the other level, journey is

used as a tool by the writer for her self-expression. Mukherjee through Tara, who

acts as her mouthpiece tries to create a balance between the two worlds and for

this she herself undertakes a journey. Mukherjee through this literary voyage has

shown the different aspects of day to day life which she herself has gone through.

Like Tara, she too finally fails to create a reconciliation between two different

cultures. The unfinished end of the novel reveals like Hamlet , Mukherjee’s own

dilemma of ‘to be or not to be’ the part of the indigenous culture or the alien one.

This quest for identity and existence through journey is widely and well-expressed

in the later works of Mukherjee such as, Jasmine , The Holder of the World and

Leave It to Me, which will be discussed at length in the later chapters.

An immigrants is therefore, a permanent wanderer, the fact which is even

accepted by V.S. Naipaul. Wandering in search of his identity as he is often faced

with the problem of identity crisis, which is also apt in the case of Tara Banarjee

Cartwright. Mukherjee has given Tara the same colouring of an eternal wandering.

“Wandering between two worlds/one dead, the other powerless to be born;/ with

24

nowhere to rest my head.” The above said famous lines by Mathew Arnold aptly

described Tara or expatriates dilemma of becoming a nowhere man. M.

Sivaramkrishna blames her western education for her feeling of rootlessness and

lack of identity :

Tara in The Tiger’s Daughter finds it difficult to relate herself to her family, city, culture in general since her marriage to an American, her western education are enough signs to brand her as an ‘alienated’ westernized woman. The implicit logic is that since she is exposed to the West and has absorbed its values she must be necessarily alienated. Therefore, even when she tries to ‘voice’ her continuing attachment for and identity with India, the voice does not carry conviction for it is at variance with the usual stance – of indifference and arrogance – one generally associates with the ‘westernized’ (exiled) Indian (74).

Tara considers herself more like an outsider rather than a native, though in

her inner conscience she always regarded herself as an Indian who is concerned

with the poverty, politics, class-struggle; hierarchies of power and class in India.

However, all these social issues at times shocked and baffled her. Her

“westernization has opened her eyes to the gulf between the two worlds that still

make India the despair of those who govern it” (Time Literary Supplement 736).

Tara wants to bridge the gulf between her native country and the new

world. She could not fit into that role because to her, “it was impossible to be a

bridge for anyone… Bridges had a way of cluttering up the landscape” (TD 201).

Despite her efforts of reconciliation she is not able to maintain the equilibrium due

to her ‘foreignness of the spirit’. It is this spirit which has gripped Tara making her

unaccessible between her own family and her friends. Tara’s homecoming

symbolically stands for the ‘enigma of arrival’ which in itself presents the question

25

of belonging. Tara behaves as a part of a new breed of immigrant post-colonials

with a conscience. She takes a return journey to search for herself, her belonging

and to prove that Return of The Native is going to find out Jude the Obscure

that is her belonging.

Tara reacts like a foreigner and this feeling of foreignness envelops her

completely. Under its influence, when she arrives in her country; then her arrival is

marked by her reactions as a foreigner, having an air of Americanness :

[A]fter the welcome from her parents, after the teas and celebrations of her St. Blaise’s friends to think of the 120th street apartment as home. Each aerogramme caused her momentary panic, a sense of trust betrayed of mistakes never admitted. It was hard to visualize him because she was in India, Tara thought. In India, she felt she was not married to a person but to a foreigner, and this foreignness was a burden (TD 62).

Stay at Vassar further augmented her westernization and “that first winter in

Poughkeepsie she had been given Sartre and Camus, Rilke and Mank and the

Joyce” (59). This ‘foreignness of spirit’ made her realize that she has become

rootless and irrelevant not only in India but also in America. Even in her friend

circle she feels uneasy. Her westernized friends do not approve of a western

husband. One of her friends do not want to lose class-power and a privileged

position by becoming an immigrant. “I would hate to be an immigrant… I would not

mind giving up the factory, but I’d hate to be a nobody in America. How do they

treat Indians, Tara?” (59). Therefore, she feels quite alienated and the trivializing

passions and attitudes of her so called westernized friends irritate her. She finds it

not only difficult but also impossible to relate herself to her family, friends, city,

country and culture. Tara’s state is comparable to, though not identical with, that of

26

an expatriate who stands apart from the emotional spiritual tenor of the country

that had once been her own. It is also difficult for Tara to communicate with her

family. Her parents do not consider her as one of them. “She finds that her father,

though slightly disappointed her, had said nothing; of course, but then had never

really talked about important things. They had covered up misgiving with loyalty

and trust” (TD 29). Tara even becomes suspicious of her mother. She thinks that

her mother no longer loves her for having willfully choosing a foreigner as her life-

partner. Thus, offending her more as now she ceases to be a real Brahmin. In

such a tyring situation, she feels herself caught in the web; the more she tries to

come out, the more entrapped she finds herself. F.A. Inamdar observes: “Tara’s

efforts to adapt to American society are measured by her rejection and revulsion of

Indian modes of life” (187-96).

Due to cultural displacement Tara’s homecoming makes her dislocated. Her

husband’s face appears to her in bits and pieces as she fails to visualize it fully

and whole. She is even unable to write a letter to her husband about her

experiences in India because of her incommunicability which makes her voiceless.

“Her voice in these letters was insipid or shrill, and she tore them up, twinging at

the waste of seventy five naya paisa for each mistake (TD 65). Her American

husband David Cartwright is an American liberal who makes fun of her friends. He

does not believe in the class system and for him clearing bathrooms is general

part of daily chores, for which he does not give Tara much credit, as she considers

it her wifely duty. She knows it well that all the poverty-stricken sights and scenes

of refugees and beggars in Shambazar, that disturbs her will also have a bad

27

impression on David about India. Her love for her husband is not sufficient enough

to make him bear all these loathsome realities.

Tara considers herself rootless and irrelevant both in India and America.

Her rootlessness and irrelevancy is expressed when David bought books about

India. This act of David makes Tara suspicious of his designs, “so David had

bought books on India. This innocent information enraged Tara. She thought the

latter was really trying to tell her that he had not understood her country through

her, that probably he had not understood her either” (50). This revelation gradually

leads her to develop a split personality as she makes out that David does not

consider her wise or reliable enough to provide him sufficient knowledge about her

native country. She even becomes afraid that David, “no longer wanted to make

her over to his ideal image, that he – no longer loved her” (50). Tara, Thus, goes

through a crisis which further gets more deepens when she thinks herself

unwanted and irrelevant among her family and friends. Tara tries hard to reconcile

the two worlds that is the Western one with its secular orientation and the Eastern

one with its traditional non-secular orientation. But her efforts are not successful,

thus, she tries vainly to reconcile the two worlds in her heart; whereas, Bharati

Mukherjee as a writer with that first novel as a writer was very comfortable in both

India and North America. She considered herself as a bridge between the two

worlds at that time. Mukherjee reveals to Ameena Meer that “both being fully

poised in my perfect equilibrium: I would remember my Calcutta with a distance

humour and affection and I was functioning” (26).

28

No doubt the novel is one of the wisest one written by Bharati Mukherjee,

but it is not a perfect one. It also suffers from certain flaws and faults. The first and

foremost flaw of the novel is that its heroine, Tara Banarjee Cartwright seems to

be a quite weak character. The critic finds her lacking “because Bharati Mukherjee

controls her emotions with such a skilled balance of irony and colourful nostalgia.

Her novel is charming and intelligent and curiously unmoving… Tara herself

remains so ineffectual a focus of distress and is so unwilling a catalyst, it is hard to

care whether or not she will be able to return to her ‘hamburger husband’” (Times

Literary Supplement 736). Regarding her style, she recalls in an interview to

Alison B. Carb : “I used the omniscent point of view and plenty of irony. This was

because my concept of language and notions of how a novel was constructed

were based on British models” (619). Narrative technique of Mukherjee creates

distance between the heroine and the readers although the author is accessible to

character and scene. The novel lacks the assurance of style and incisiveness of

voice which is one of the striking features of Mukherjee’s work. It is uneven in

place and texture. Sivarama Krishna considers the novel ‘voiceless’ and

‘colourless’. Western education of the heroine and her marriage to an American

made it difficult for her to relate herself to her roots. Thus, she becomes an

alienated woman. Her continued efforts to show her attachment for, and identity

with India, have no weight. The usual stance of difference and arrogance made

her voiceless. That’s why Sivaramakrishna finds the novel ‘a dramatization of the

resulting ambivalences” (71-86). Despite its shortcomings it can be said that with

her first novel succeeds in portraying the experience of exile who when returns to

29

its country is ill at ease. After the year Mukherjee spent in India in 1973 had forced

her to view herself ‘more as an immigrant than an exile’ (Blaise and Mukherjee

284).

Refuting the charges regarding the novel, Jasbir Jain sums up that the

novel appears to be moving in a circle thus, giving it a complete and a

comprehensive meaning: “Beginning with her arrival the novel ends with her

proposed exit, rejecting India and her Indianness, unable to grasp its meaning and

equally unable to understand America she plans to go back to” (Jain 12-18). The

first part of the novel deals with Tara’s responses to India. In the second part

Mukherjee deals her ancestral past, which both Tara and her father rejected, a

past which is pushed aside by westernization. The third portion of the novel is

about Tara’s early experience of loneliness in America due to her attempt to stick

to Indian ways and her acculturisation that leads her to marry David Cartwright. In

the fourth section of the novel emphasis is again laid on “Tara’s move from

Calcutta to Darjeeling with its own particular brand of foreigners. Here, in

Darjeeling she is seduced and this act of seduction is symbolic of her foreignness

which is an experience which cannot be undone” (Jain 12-18).

III

In recent times there has been a drastic increase in the magnitude of

migration either to metropolitan centers or foreign lands. Naturally it’s the women

who have to leave behind their secure homes, support systems and go through

30

social, conventional, climatic changes as well as different cooking and food habits.

Sometimes it proves fatal for the newcomer’s psychological well being. C.

Vijayasree feels that, “these immigrant women’s struggle to negotiate a new

territory, culture and milieu are often wrought with pain, fragmentation and psychic

alienation. Dimple Dasgupta of Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife (1975) is a classic

example of this category” (134).

Bharati Mukherjee published Wife in 1975; which right from its publication

became controversial and the political feminists rejected it outrightly. It was even

said , “Some books can be allowed to die but others have to be killed” (Klass 83).

Among waves of rejection, Mukherjee dared to speak in defense of her work,

“Wife was written so long ago. It was very painful for me. It was very confusing, I

hadn’t expected such controversy. The village voice reviewer had however, loved

the book” (7-32). Later in Days and Nights Mukherjee again gives her views in

favour of Wife . : “I was writing a second novel; Wife , at the time, about a young

Bengali wife who was sensitive enough to feel the pain but not intelligent enough

to make sense out of her situation and break out. The anger that young wives

round me are trying to hide had become my anger. And that washed over the

manuscript. I write what I hoped would be a wounding novel” (237-39).

Dimple Dasgupta is the protagonist of the novel. She is indeed the wife

upon which the title of the novel is based. The novel deals with her gradual

grooming into a woman ready to perform the wifely acts and trying to evolve out as

an ideal wife. Dimple is thus, the typical Indian, Bengali girl waiting anxiously for

her marriage, though she does not have any say as far as views regarding her

31

future mate are concerned. It shows the subsidiary position of the females within

the patriarchal systems. “She had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but

her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads” (W 3). She is

therefore, always lost in day-dreaming about her marital bliss. She thinks that

marriage is going to prove a panacea for all hurdles in the way of fulfilling her

dreams. She takes marriage as a means to attain freedom, cocktail parties, love

and a lavish life style :

Marriage she hoped, would bring her freedom, cocktail parties; on carpeted lawns, fund raising dinners for novel Charities. Marriage would bring her love. Dimple was happy about that decision, she thoughts of premarital life as a dress rehearsal for actual living (3).

Mr. Dasgupta finally selects a suitable boy, Amit Kumar Basu, for her, who

is a consultant engineer with seven years experience and is interested to

immigrate either to Canada, U.S. or Kenya. Though Dimple marries Amit as her

father has seen the high future prospects in him, yet she is not satisfied with his

looks. According to her, he lacks standard of movie stars :

In those hours that he was away, any face in a magazine was fair game. She borrowed a forehead from an aspirin ad, the lips, the eyes and chin from a body builder and shoulders ad, the stomach and legs from a trousers ad and put the ideal man herself in a restaurant on park street or by the side of a pool at a five star hotel (13).

She even finds the atmosphere at Basu’s flat on Dr. Sarat Banarjee Road

horrible and to her disappointment she finds the apartment ‘h-o-r-r-i-d’. She does

not like the life within the four walls of the apartment. Life with Amit in the stifling

atmosphere of cramped flat suffocates Dimple.” Dimple faces further complications

32

with the prospects of pregnancy. She considers the coming baby as a hurdle in

her way of new life. So she does the most inhumanly act of killing it by deliberately

skipping “rope until her legs grew numb and her stomach burned” (W 42). Here

Dimple reminds one of her Goneril who desires her body to be cursed with sterility.

Dimple’s violent and improper behaviour as far as motherhood is concerned

shows that she suffers from a psychic disorder as she began to think of the body

as unfinished business. It cluttered up the preparation of going abroad. She did not

want to carry any relics from her old life. This horrendous act by Dimple can be

considered as her attempt towards moulding her own destiny.

Dimple and Amit Basu finally emigrate to New York, where initially they

have to stay with Jyoti Sen and his wife Meena Sen in Queens which can be

called a little India. About this tendency of immigrants Van der Veer remarks that

“those who do not think of themselves as Indians before migration become Indians

in the diaspora” (7). Dimple tries her best to learn more and more from Meena

Sen, the manner of shopping, cooking, the way of talking particularly speaking

English fluently. She even goes to the party held at Vinod Khanna’s apartment.

Here she gets an opportunity to mix up with so many Indians. She is specially

attracted by Ina Mullick and her bold life style; Dimple is wondered to see the

Indians abroad were so outgoing and open-minded. She is offered a job of a sales

girl by Khanna but Amit does not approve the proposal. He thinks that with “so

many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman should not have any

time to get crazy idea” (69). But ironically its through American magazines and

televisions that Dimple’s crazy ideas are formed. Amit’s indifference towards her

33

efforts of adjustment in the new world fills her with disappointment and depression.

Lack of good friends, her failure at communicating properly, Amit’s neutral attitude

towards her physical and emotional upheavals, finally make her to take the drastic

step of murdering her husband. Dimple with the determination of killing Amit

“brought her right hand up and with the knife stabbed the marginal circle once,

twice, seven times, each time a little harder; until the milk in the bowl of cereal was

a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any

advertiser” (212-13).

Mukherjee has thus, tried to show the darkest repurcusion of displacement

on people of weak determination and will and the weaker sex. Victor Ramraj

observes that “immigrant writing is preoccupied with the complexities,

contradictions, and ambivalences associated with leaving one society and

adjusting to another” (102). Ramraj’s observations suits to the temperament of

Dimple who faces the trauma of displacement in manifolds. Being an immigrant,

being a female, being neglected as an identity, and above all being denied an

opportunity for self-dependence. “Bharati Mukherjee, in her second novel Wife

writes about the extreme case of women, who when transplanted into another

culture, lose their bearings. Her young heroine, Dimple’s final act of violence is

unconvincing on a realistic level, yet really is an attempt at trying out a mode other

than realistic” (Meenakshi 237-39).

Right from the beginning of the novel Dimple is presented as a girl lost in

her own world; who is least interested in the realities around her. She lacks ‘down

to earth’ instinct and that is why she has to face the self-created crisis in her life

34

due to which she takes the drastic step of murdering her husband. Like an

escapist she is always dreaming about her unfulfilled longings regarding sexual

awareness and thinking about the ways of stepping out of the limits imposed by

the Sita legend rather than making efforts for attaining economic independence or

self-realization. Jasbir Jain feels that “it is difficult to treat the novel as a study of

cultural shock for even while in Calcutta, Dimple is an escapist and lost in her

private world of fantasy” (12-18).

Being an escapist she anxiously waits for marriage because she thinks that

through marriage she can be able to fulfill her most of the ambitions. It proves to

be a great disappointment for her as it does not being her freedom, cocktail

parties, lavish life style and above all a well to do competent better half, whereas

Dimple has always wished for a different sort of life altogether. Due to her middle

class background she craves for affluence, which later on becomes a psychic

need. Besides this she is over-fed on the diet of advertisements and the fantasy

world created by them; which makes her over conscious about her figure and

complexion as she finds them inadequate. Her obsession for physical beauty gets

further reflected when the beauty experts fail to give her a satisfying advice

regarding an under-developed bust, therefore, she turns to Miss Problemwala, for

seeking advice and how to get rid of the problem. According to the definition of

beauty set by her, even her good looking husband, Amit Basu, does not fit in those

parameters. Dimple, therefore, appears as an average hollow adolescent whose

head piece is always filled with straw of glossy ads. She lacks the desirable gravity

of a mature person and it can be said it expresses a sort of disorder in her

35

personality. Therefore, she is basically a psychic study of an almost abnormal

person driven to extreme by her immigrant problem. “It is the gloomy corridors of

her psyche, that Mukherjee probes with a keen and penetrating psychological

subtlety. Dimple moves from a state mute resentment to an escalating disgust and

intolerance which finally culminates in disaster” (Swain 84).

From the very beginning of the novel Dimple appears to be far from normal.

Even the meaning of her name that is any slight surface depression approves of it.

“The word ‘Dimple’ is quite symbolic, suggestive of beauty and to be more

accurate ‘flawed beauty’. The name Dimple is quite scintillating and enticing but

lexico-graphically, it means any slight surface depression. This depression on the

surface is again symbolic of the depression within her psyche, which is born out by

her irritable responses to the things around her” (Swain 83). This inmate flaw of

her is quite evident in day to day incidents of normal life. Like she is afraid of lake

as it reminds her of death. “She hated the lakes, thought of them as death” (W 18).

She is a day dreamer, always dreaming about marriage for she thinks marriage is

going to prove a blessing in disguise. Dimple “thought of premarital life as a dress

rehearsal for actual living. Years of waiting had already made her nervous,

unnaturally prone to colds, coughs and headaches” (3). Amidst this sort of

psychology, she is unable to finish her University education as the sight of books

irritate her and she became an escapist lost in her private world of fantasy :

In the beginning at home in Calcutta, Dimple is dreaming about marrying – anybody – but preferably, a neurosurgeon and her father is combing the matrimonial ads for an engineer. She is twenty and already afflicted with signs of passive anger. The tension between her actual powerlessness and forms

36

of freedom suggested her by the changing Indian culture have made her sick. She reads, “the ‘Doctrine of Passive Resistance’, for her University exams and expects to employ domestic passive resistance, for instance without holding affection to win the love of the unknown husband, who is the only hope of adult freedom she has” (Sathupathi 79).

But marriage does not fulfill her long cherished dreams and when her

dreams crumble one by one she is deeply upset. She makes out that waiting for

marriage is far better than really getting married. She does not feel easy at Amit’s

residence at Dr. Sarat Banerjee road as she thinks their house lacks proper space

and is less attractive. So, she does not love the house she lives in. “The ‘lace

doilies’ are for her so degrading that she wishes to be back in her own room at

Rash Behari Avenue” (W 30). The new name ‘Nandini’ given by her mother-in-law

is not to her liking. “The name just doesn’t suit me” (18). The new surrounding,

new people and even her husband Amit does not fascinate her. She does not

show her deep affection and love for Amit, when he takes her out to Kwality, she

feels, “He should have taken her Trinca’s on Park Street, where she could have

listened to a Goan band play American music, to prepare her, for the trip to New

York or Toronto or to the discotheque in the Park Hotel, to teach her the dance

and wriggle” (21).

When Dimple becomes pregnant there has been an aggressive change in

her behaviour. Though she does not like being in the family way, yet she seems to

enjoy the sensation of vomiting. She deliberately vomits and at all hours of the day

and night locks herself in the bathroom not to let any opportunity missed. She feels

a strange sensation. “The vomit fascinated her….Vomiting was real to her, but

37

pregnancy was not.” (30-31). She even thinks about abortion and the vision of the

neurosurgeon is thus replaced by the ghastly vision of the ‘abortionists.’ All this

traits of Dimple confirms that she is undoubtedly woman of an abnormal behaviour

and mind. F.A. Inamdar rightly says, “Dimple is a psychic study of an abnormal

woman. She has nothing to do with the problem of immigrants. Therefore, she

angers her husband by making fun of his dress, spilling curry on his shirt front.

She goes to the extent of condemning the gifts he brings for her. Her abnormality

reaches the climax when she skips her way of abortion” (69). Dimple, being a

woman of abnormal psyche has not shown even the slightest mark of repentance

for the inhuman and above all unwomanly act done by her. She prepares fully for

the new life which she is shortly going to begin her husband in America without

any barriers.

Bharati Mukherjee considers violence as an essential experience in terms

of the new immigrant aesthetic for the remaking of the self. Therefore, violence

here too plays a vital role in the construction and shaping of the course of the

narrative. The protagonist Dimple Dasgupta has been shown as pro-violent

character. “A sadist as she is, she derives self-satisfaction by harming others. We

may interpret it in another manner. She inflicts pain upon others and wound their

feelings because she wants to assert her authentic self-hood as a woman, assert

her identity” (Swain 85).

For Dimple violence is an outlet through, which she tries to show her anger,

helplessness and mere frustration. Therefore, violence here can be seen as an

expression of identity assertion. “Mukherjee’s heroines like Dimple and Tara too

38

assert the autonomy of their self through violence. They find vision in their life by

voicing the voiceless” (Swain 85). As the novel progresses Dimple appears to be

much more than a mere depression. For “she leaves more of a gash than just as a

dimple” (Levin 17), on the surface of her life. Infact her aggressiveness proves out

to be a whirlpool in which every bit of her life is immersed. Dimple owns a violent

nature, becomes clear when she reacts towards ‘the dead baby lizard (7), found in

her pillow case in her parental home. Her violent nature is further expressed when

she kills the mice which looks pregnant as if she is not feeling ease with her own

pregnancy. Without any reason she becomes almost hysteric in killing that tiny

creature. “She pounded and pounded the baby clothes until a tiny gray creature

ran out of the pile, leaving a faint trickle of blood on the linen. She chased it to the

bathroom. She shut the door so it would not escape from her this time…. “I’ll get

you” she screamed. “There is no way out of this, my friend…”. And in a outburst of

hatred, her body shuddering, her wrist taut with fury, she smashed the top of a

small gray head” (35). Through this incident the homicidal tendency of Dimple gets

disclosed and this act of killing is a manifestation of violence that is developing

inside her. She refuses to be in the family way and her refusal is born out of her

hatred for Amit who fails to feed her fantasy world.

Apart from this she considers her pregnancy as an obstacle in her way to

USA and she thinks of getting rid of ‘whatever it was that blocked her tubes and

pipes’ (31). Like Goneril she wants her body to be blighted with infertility. “She

gave vicious squeezes to her stomach as if to force a vile thing out of hiding.” She

skips until she gets rid of the child showing the climax of her abnormal behaviour :

39

She had skipped rope until her legs grew numb and her stomach burned; then she had poured water from the heavy bucket over her head, shoulders, over the tight little curve of her stomach. She had poured until the last of the blood washed off her legs; then she collapsed (42).

Her decision of rejecting her motherhood makes it clear that it is a

manifestation of masochism. It also shows that “her tendency to reject everything

that falls outside the scope of her comprehension is perhaps responsible for her

rejection of the pregnancy” (Rajeshwar 94), because, as she admits nobody has

consulted her “before depositing in her body” (W 31).

In America Dimple’s inner violence gets further accentuated as she

witnesses there murders and day to day violence. America the land of dreams now

appears to Dimple the land of crimes. “The sense of violence and aggression is

heightened in Wife by the persuasive violence of American life. Dimple confesses

that in America talking about murders was like talking about weather. ”It is here in

between this pervasive ambience of crime that her own feeling of guilt is mitigated”

(Swain 86). As M. Sivaramakrishna says that “this pervasive atmosphere of crime

dulls the edge of her own guilt” (184).

Dimple fails to adapt herself in the alien atmosphere and above all lacks a

proper communication with Amit eventually surrenders her mind to be totally

conditioned under the influence of T.V., its unrealistic glamour world and

magazines :

The New York appears to prove particularly destructive to Dimple. First it sets her romantic notions about America at naught and then usually activates her inwardly directly martido by constantly carrying to her gory murder stories. To Dimple death appears to

40

present itself in myriad forms. Sleepers look to her more like corpses than as people under temporary suspension of consciousness (Rajeshwar 95).

It is through T.V., the idiot box, she gets acquainted with love, murder,

violence in the middle American style. The incredibility of violence which she

watches on T.V. multiplied that passive violence which is lying in her spirits. “It

becomes a diabolical trap, a torment without hope of either release or relief”

(Sathupati 80). Dimple is over-gripped with violence. Once while chatting with

Amit, he instructs her that in case of a calamity if he dies, then according to Hindu

tradition after his cremation, he wishes that his ashes should scattered over the

Ganges. Normally a Hindu wife never tolerates this sort of talk, but Dimple

callously asks about the type of container to keep the ashes; whether plastic bags

or plastic boxes would be more suitable, and even wonders about, “the bits of

bones and organs that were charred but not totally consumed” (168).

As a consequence of excessive T.V. watching Dimple loses control over her

nerves. Her addiction derails her psyche: “It was becoming the voice of madness”

(176). The violence outside makes its way inside and awakes the hitherto passive

one into an active, alive one. Dimple starts thinking about killing her husband and

the idea fascinates her: “she would kill Amit and hide his body in the freezer. The

extravagance of the scheme delighted her, made her feel very American

somehow, almost like a character in a T.V. series” (195). When Dimple is unable

to hold on her intense feeling of violence eventually she exercises the utter violent

act of murdering Amit Basu, her husband :

She touched the mole very lightly and let her fingers draw a circle around the detectable spot, then she

41

brought her right hand up and wit the knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser, and then she saw the head fall off – (212-13).

Through this final explosive release of the pent-up tension, Mukherjee has

tried to show that “the psychic break-down of an Indian wife in America and the

concomitant deep cultural-shock leading to neurosis” (Swain 88).

Wife speaks about and is related with the postcolonial complexities of day

to day life arising due to cultural dislocation and displacement. The author

“reverses the pilgrimage, journeying from East to West, she confronts personal

and social violence head on, and she splits her complex self into facets, creating

characters who shatter like glass” (Sandler 75-6). Being a weak character she fails

to cope with the situation and finally succumbs to her circumstances. The culture

which refuges to provide her space and which she fails to comprehend shocks her,

making her almost insane. Her insanity leads her to commit the gruesome act of

murdering her husband, which is quite an abnormal act and it’s a blow to Indian

aesthetics. She is the case of “the failure of adaptation, in the extent of

displacement, she is the complete resident alien” (Leong 487-500).

This situation of a resident alien is the prediction made about her future in

the West, by one of her friends. It turns out to be a harsh reality, which Dimple

realizes when she finds herself caged in an Indian immigrant colony in New York:

“You may think of it as immigration, my dear… but what you are a resident alien”

(46). Dimple’s realization that whatever she has imagined of life in the west has

only proved out to her a great disappointment, makes her restless. Her isolation

42

from her husband further increases her restlessness and she badly starts missing

the security and warmth of traditional Indian family life :

The close-knit family becomes one of the central metaphors in the novel. The core of the essential self remains as an inner world, but this is modified by changed circumstances and decisions. Being an expatriate, she has to live in two different worlds – the one within, the one without. Lost in the no-man’s land, she is skeptical about her past and has a sense of living from moment to moment in a changing world in which older values and attitudes are often seen as unrealistic ( Sunitha 271).

Dimple appears to be trapped between two cultures, belonging to none and

aspiring for a third one that is her world of immigration and fantasy. It is here she

tries to explore for her existence. Her habit of day-dreaming and too much

involvement in T.V. serials makes her unable to communicate properly with her

husband and others. When her inner desires, ambitions and problems remain

unexpressed, they take the shape of both physical and mental ailment. Gradually

she begins to consider herself as a victim of double marginalization, firstly as a

woman and secondly as an immigrant. For her, life seems to be meant for

pleasing others and not herself. Dimple feels that “he never thought of such things,

never thought how hard it was for her to keep quiet and smile though she was

falling apart like a very old toy that had been played with, something quite roughly,

by children who claimed to love her” (W 212).

She begins to hate Amit for she considers him the root cause of all

problems. Her ‘otherisation’ is the result of Amit’s denial to give her a proper

position, and his too much expectation from her to lead a role of an immigrant

woman in America, Dimple is helplessly caught in the gripping quest for a new

43

female American identity. She fails to create a balance between her Indian ethics

and the American life, which leads herself towards a state of shock and finally

despair. That is why “her fear of Amit’s restrictions on going American is in excess

of her freedom and liberty that she enjoys with Amit. Therefore, the novel falls

short of its thematic intent. Tara and Dimple are troubled spirits, belonging no

where in the end” (Inamdar 187-96).

One may say in conclusion of the study of these first two novels that,

Mukherjee has tried to describe the problems and complexities arising due to

expatriation, which has become a widespread phenomenon in the present age.

According to Jasbir Jain: “Mukherjee’s novels are representative of the expatriate

sensibility” (12). Both Tara and Dimple reveal their expatriation in terms of location

as well as spirit. They are the victims of cross - cultural dilemmas, faced by

expatriates. They show the main characteristic of unbelongingness both to their

native country and the adopted one. Roshni Rustomji-Kerns considers that in

these two novels, Mukherjee presents, “some of the more violent and grotesque

aspects of cultural collisions” (659). The trend of depicting the postcolonial

complexities through her works like The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife , has been

further carried on by Bharati Mukherjee in her next publication of short stories

called Darkness . Through these stories, she has described apart from expatriation

other postcolonial complexities in detail alongwith humanitarian approach.

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Notes

1. Multiculturalism - The Term “multiculturalism” carries the implication

that each cultural group, while contributing to society, remains separate and

distinct. It is used to denote Canada as the cultural pluralism of the country is

recognized and supported by the Canadian Multiculturalism Act that proposes to

promote respect, unity and harmony among the diverse groups that compose the

“Canadian mosaic”.

Canadian Multiculturalism Act 3. (1):

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Government of Canada to

(a) recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism

reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and

acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to

preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage.

2. New World – West stands for New World, which is full of promises,

advancement, knowledge and progress. Whereas, old world reflects traditions,

moral and ethical limitations, puritanism and conservative outlook. East represents

these traits. Mukherjee elaborates that by “Old World” she refers not only to the

national and cultural contexts of Canada but also to those of India and England.

45

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