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.
2
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).
4
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
5
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
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
13
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
14
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
15
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
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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.
44
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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