Abstract
Bharati Mukherjee’s novels The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife tell stories of first-generation Indian immigrants to America. The female protagonists of the novels are women who are in flux between their birth and adopted homeland. However, they are thrown into a struggle of creating a new identity and/or trying to go back to their past traditions. In both cases, the immigrants fail miserably as they no longer belong to any land. This lack of connection builds a constant struggle within the immigrants, driving them to paranoia or detachment.
Introduction
Bharati Mukherjee’s writings are semi-autobiographical as they reflect her personal experiences as a woman confined between two cultures. Mukherjee was an Indian-born American author. Educated and subsequently settled in the US, she insisted on being read as an immigrant American writer and not as an Indian or expatriate writer (Grewal 181). Her writing is uniquely post-modern and talks of issues of identity and acculturation (Dascalu 66).
Most of her works project an expatriate consciousness and identity. Mukherjee’s novels show a duality that the immigrants face once they are uprooted from their culture. The main problems faced by immigrants are those of assimilation and acculturation. Ingrained in them is the constant struggle for the identity of the protagonists who feel alienated in a foreign culture. In her novels, most of the protagonists (the central characters of her novel are all female) migrate from India to America sometimes as a student, a homemaker, or simply someone in search of a dream.
This essay is a thematic discussion of two novels, Wife (1975) and A Tiger’s Daughter (1971), written by Mukherjee. Most of her novels are about first-generation Indian immigrants to America, but they are different in their treatment and narration. For instance, The Tiger’s Daughter is about a woman who is despondent in her rootlessness, while Wife is a tragedy of an unrealised dream. This paper shows that the two novels by Mukherjee are about first-generation immigrants to America who are unable to adjust to the culture of the new land.
Though the stories are completely different, thematically both The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife reflect the loneliness and rootlessness one feels once uprooted from their own culture. The Tiger’s Daughter moves one step further to demonstrate that the first-generation immigrants are not only alienated from the culture of their adopted homeland but also with that of their own country.
Central Theme
All immigrants travel to America with a dream for a new and better life. Thus, whenever one writes a story specifically about immigrants, it is bound to be about the conditions that lead to their migration and how it has influenced their identity. Maybe the stories do not talk of a dream, yet they are about the perception of the new land that the migrant has on their mind and how it influences their identity formation. The theme of immigrant identity formation, assimilation, and acculturation reverberates in almost all of Mukherjee’s literary oeuvre and in the works of other immigrant writers like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, and Jhumpa Lahiri. William A. V. Clark points out that the main intent of all immigrants, irrespective of their country of origin, is to seek a “better way of living and achieving success” (3-4).
Thus, the immigrants who move to America come with the belief that they will have a fair chance to better their lives, as there are ample opportunities if one is willing to work hard. According to Mukherjee, the idea of “America” is an image that exists in the mind of the immigrants as a “dream or nightmare … romance or plague, constructed by discrete individual fantasies, and shaded by collective paranoias and mythologies” (“Beyond Multiculturism: Surviving the Nineties” 29).
Here, the key to the issues faced by first-generation immigrants is the “fantasies” that they have. These fantasies paint a picture in their mind that they believe in, however, when the reality differs from this fantasy, they face a crisis. Thus, Mukherjee’s novels deal with that liminal stage when an Indian expatriate, severed from her homeland, faces depression due to their inability to adapt to the new culture or feel cut off from their roots. In their process of Americanization, these immigrants belong nowhere. The assimilation process is conflictual as it creates tension and conflict that arises mostly when there is interaction or when there is no interaction between the two groups of people (i.e. the immigrant and the original inhabitants) (Clark 166).
Where there is a lack of assimilation, the immigrant retreat within a cocoon that becomes the breeding ground of mental instability or disillusionment. They are trapped in their own fantasies about the world. They are disconnected from their homeland as well as their adopted land, thus, facing a crisis of identity. The process of finding an identity is one of great struggle, especially if one is in awe with the horrors of the new cultures or is in a struggle with their past traditions. Mukherjee’s characters face a similar dilemma in their process of Americanization.
Mukherjee’s novels express both dreams and crisis of identity formation through its protagonists. All the protagonists migrate to America with a dream. For instance, Tara travels to attain higher education and Dimple for liberty and freedom. However, they react differently when trying to assimilate into the alien culture. In The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee’s protagonist, Tara, a first-generation migrant to America, travels back to her city to reconnect with her past.
She has toiled in her adopted land to make a better life for herself. But she always felt alienated and marginalised. Thus, when she returns after seven long years to her homeland, she comes with an expectation to return to her old life. But even here she feels the same rootlessness, a lack of connection. She feels peripatetic as her identity is split between two cultures. She becomes a foreigner among her kith and keen.
Her alienation is aggravated when she is greeted by her family as “Americanwali” and her husband as “melechha,” meaning an outcast (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 33-4). Tara’s experiences turn from bad to worse when she is seduced by a friend in a guest house, leaving her an alien to her own culture. She decides to leave the country for good but is trapped in a riot, where her friends are violently attacked by mobsters. Thus, the story recounts an account of Tara’s journey from the old India that has the image of love, trust, and safety etched on her mind to the new India that resembled menace, disarray, and bewilderment.
In Wife, Mukherjee portrays a more complex dimension to the immigrant experience. Here, she deals with the complexity of having been uprooted from one world and thrown into another and the strength and courage it takes to survive. The protagonist, Dimple migrates to America with her husband Amit, dreaming of freedom and liberty. Her intent was to free herself of the suffocating Bengali traditions. However, when she reaches New York, she is left behind in the house to spend her days with the wives of other Bengali immigrants, and she suddenly finds herself in a similar Bengali society. Trapped in a foreign land, she feels restless, alienated, and distraught.
Her loneliness and fear of violence increase and drive her to the brink of insanity. Dimple’s neurosis is a reflection of her rootlessness. She finally kills her husband and justifies it by saying, “women on television got away with murder” (Mukherjee, Wife 213). Thus, her intent to kill was her distorted way of becoming an American.
Clearly, the two novels deal with the immigrants’ dream of America, but the consequence of chasing this dream differs drastically for the two protagonists. Their fragmented identity creates a desperate need to identify to something, and in their effort to do so they find disappointment (as in the case of Tara) or insanity (as in the case of Dimple). The next section the paper discusses in detail the similarities and dissimilarities between the two novels in treating the recurring theme of the American dream.
Thematic Similarities and Differences
The similarities between the two novels are almost apparent. In both novels, Mukherjee shows the struggles and concerns of migrant Indian women who try to adjust to their adoptive home. They try and fail to recreate home in a land that they do not feel is their own. In her novels, all her protagonists are found at various stages of acculturation. Both The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife were written when Mukherjee had migrated to Canada as the wife of an American of Canadian parentage. There she received Canadian citizenship. This was probably a phase of alienation for Mukherjee for in both novels the protagonists are in a continual battle with their new identity.
Like her, the characters too travelled to the US in search of a better life. Tara sought higher education while Dimple sought freedom and liberty. However, both of them ultimately faced alienation – Tara on returning to her homeland and Dimple in her Manhattan apartment. Tara is ultimately disappointed as she was unable to reconnect to her country while Dimple becomes the prey of depression and neurosis that ultimately drives her to madness. Tara’s process of acculturation has created a fragmented identity that belonged to nowhere as was unable to identify with her old or new life, while Dimple felt alienated in the new land and lived within the confines of her house, unable to assimilate into the new culture.
Clearly, the two novels involve issues faced by the expatriates in America trying to recreate their identity as Americans. However, both novels deal with two different problems involving first-generation immigrants in America. For instance, Tara was sent to America by her father the “The Bengal Tiger” to study at the age of fifteen (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 10). As a student in America, Tara feels alienated and marginalised. She feels homesick and pines for her country: “For Tara, Vassar had been an almost unsalvageable mistake… she would have rushed home to India at the end of the first week” (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 10).
In the foreign land, the homesick girl creates a little India in her small room to make it feel more like home. However, when she returns to Calcutta, she feels rootless and it evokes images of her perfect adopted homeland in her mind:
New York, she thought now, had been exotic … there were policemen with dogs prowling the underground tunnels. Because girls like her…were being knifed in elevators in their own apartment buildings … 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. (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 33-34)
Most of all she is dismayed by her mother’s altered attitude towards her: “… her mother … no longer loved her… After all Tara had wilfully abandoned her caste by marrying a foreigner” (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 56). Though Tara and David have a peaceful life back in New York, yet she feels alienated in his company. She is apprehensive of her husband because of his western origin. Thus, Tara feels unconnected to both her past and her present. She no longer feels a part of the Indian culture nor can she find peace with her American husband. Thus, when she returns to America, she fears “their tone, their omissions, their aristocratic oneness” (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 43). Thus, Tara belongs nowhere, a woman who was rootless and fragmented, haunted by her own split identity.
Wife presents a more disturbing account of immigrant alienation. Dimple migrated to America with the intent that her husband would “find a job so that after a decent number of years, he could take his savings and retire with her to a two-story house in Ballygunje Park” (Mukherjee, Wife 89). Thus, Dimple’s intent was to return to her homeland, which shows why she was unable (or maybe unwilling) to accept a new identity. Her alienation is intensified due to her neurosis and sedentary life as a homemaker. In America, she immerses herself to watching television throughout the day and in the end fails to differentiate between fiction and reality. Dimple has been depicted as a girl who lived in her own fantastic world. She aborted her pregnancy, as she did “not want any relics from her old life” (Mukherjee, Wife 42). However, once she reaches America she feels misplaced in the alien land:
She was caught in the crossfire of an American Communalism, she could not understand. She felt she’d come very close to getting killed on her third morning in America. (Mukherjee, Wife 60)
She is bewildered with America and longs for her sheltered childhood and homeland. Her longing for her country becomes apparent when she fails to understand “how could she live in a country…where every other woman was a stranger, where she felt different, ignorant, exposed to ridicule in the elevator?” (Mukherjee, Wife 11). Thus, in her inability to adjust to her new situation, Dimple is embittered in her marriage and all her wrath falls on Amit who she thinks had failed her:
She was bitter that marriage had betrayed her, had not provided all the glittery things she had imagined, had not brought her cocktails under canopied skies and two A.M. drives to dingy restaurants where they sold divine kababs rolled in roti (Mukherjee, Wife 102).
Dimple has a picture of Americanization in her mind, but when she faces a different reality, she fails to adjust to it, which creates a fractured identity. Her disaffection and fragmentation become so intent that she fails to accept the American way of life. She finds it difficult to adjust to the people who “didn’t understand about Durga Pujah” (Mukherjee, Wife 114). This loneliness is manifested in her depression, which is expressed as a passive rage. Her darker thoughts start emerging as “her body seemed curiously alien to her, filled with hate, malice, and insane desire to hurt, yet weightless almost air borne” (Mukherjee, Wife 117).
The violence that had to remain subdued in her mind found a voice when she came to America. She started to believe that murder was commonplace in this country: “talking about murder is like talking about the weather” (Mukherjee, Wife 161). To her violence was the American way of life and she acts on this belief to fit into her new identity as an American. Thus, both Tara and Dimple feel alienated and pine to return home. But Tara, after returning home, fails to find it while Dimple, in her psychosis, resigns to her dark fantasies.
The process of acculturation and assimilation is one of the most difficult phases of an immigrant’s new life. The void that is created due to cutting off of past roots and inability to accept the new culture in its entirety creates a duality. Robert G. Dunn propounds that this duality in the personality of the immigrants is a manifestation of the process of fragmentation and pluralism indicating a complete breakdown of the assimilation process that brings disconnect, confusion and discontinuity of experience (144). The identity crisis in the characters of Tara and Dimple is created due to cultural fragmentation and pluralism in the process of creation of a new identity. Disorientation and a sense of emptiness is a constant companion of an individual trying to assimilate to a new culture.
A sense of marginalisation and decimation plagues the heart of an immigrant trying to adjust. Tara feels homesick and completely out of sorts during her first few months in America. She feels discriminated and marginalised even at slightest instances such as when her roommate refuses to taste a mango pickle she had brought from home. For Tara, that bottle of pickle was the last straw of connection to her roots and in refusing to accept it the roommate had caused grave disrespect to her sensibilities. As a girl who was proud of her country, family, and genealogy, she quickly defends her country even at the slightest instigations. Tara has nightmares that reverberate her ingrained fear of discrimination:
She saw herself sleeping in a large carton on a sidewalk while hatted men made impious remarks to her. Headless monster winded at her from eyes embedded in pudgy shoulders … She suffered fainting spells, headaches and nightmares … She complained of homesickness in letters to her mother, who promptly prayed to Kali to save Tara’s conscience, chastity and complexion. (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 19)
Even when Tara married David she feels a lack of connection with him, as he is unable to understand her sentiments about her lost homeland. She thus says, “Madison square was unbearable and her husband was after all foreigner” when David asks a naïve question about the Indian culture (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 15). However, she feels the same rootlessness when she returns to India to meet her family. Her alienation is not only towards her adoptive homeland but also towards the land, which she calls “another Calcutta” (Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter 199).
Dimple too feels alienated in her Manhattan home, unable to adjust to the new culture. She feels trapped in her own fantasies and ultimately succumbs to her paranoia. Both the women represent the fragmented identity of a first generation immigrant during their acculturation process.
Conclusion
Immigration in America brings different experiences to the lives of first-generation émigrés. In Mukherjee’s novels of becoming American, we see two such women who had migrated from their homeland to America and were trying to adapt to the new culture. These women are offshoots of their previous self – dislocated and marginalised (Tandon 169). Mukherjee’s foremost concern in the novels is that of assimilation in an alien culture.
Though both novels have a common central theme, they differ in their essence. Tara mimics the life of Ulysses. Like the wandering hero, she too returns to her homeland only to find disappointment while Dimple gives into her neurosis, trapped in a foreign land. Both Tara and Dimple travelled to America with a dream but their choices made them what they eventually became. Both Tara and Dimple face fractured identity due to the fragmentation of their culture. Thus, the sense of rootlessness and pluralism create an identity crisis among the first generation migrants during the process of acculturation. Tara tries to return to her roots only to be disappointed, while Dimple creates a distorted idea of Americanization.
Works Cited
Clark, William A. V. Immigrants and the American Dream: Remaking the Middle Class. Guilford Press, 2003.
Dascalu, Cristina Emanuela. Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V.S. Naipaul. Cambria Press, 2007.
Dunn, Robert G. Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Grewal, Gurleen. “Born Again American: The Immigrant Consciousness in Jasmine.” Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Garland Publishers, 1993, pp. 181-198.
Mukherjee, Bharati. “Beyond Multiculturism: Surviving the Nineties.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, 1996, pp. 29-34.
—. The Tiger’s Daughter. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971.
—. Wife. Penguin Books, 1975.
Tandon, Sushma. Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction: A Perspective. Sarup & Sons, 2004.