India through a lens of an expatriate consciousness

Simona Hevešiová

Abstract

The paper presents a brief analysis of one of Bharati Mukherjee’s novels The Tiger’s Daughter. The main focus of the paper lies on the transformation of the postcolonial subject confronted with a feeling of alienation in the context of emigration. Being an emigrant herself, Mukherjee described her new status as being “a transient with conflicting loyalties to two very different cultures.” (Mukherjee 1997) Tara Banerjee, the protagonist of her novel The Tiger’s Daughter, experiences a double sense of alienation, feeling completely at home neither in the United Stated nor in her homeland India. Returning to India after seven years of living in America, Tara looks critically at her own cultural heritage scrutinizing it from a rather distant perspective. By constantly comparing things and people in India to those in America and by challenging her own attitude towards them, Tara fails to place herself in any of the two confronted cultures. The notion of her imaginary homeland seems to collide with the real India she rediscovers upon her arrival and Tara is, thus, unable to grasp the foreignness of her spirit.

In this age of diasporas, one’s biological identity may not be one’s only identity. Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration. The experience of cutting myself off from a biological homeland and settling in an adopted homeland that is not always welcoming to its dark-complexioned citizens has tested me as a person, and made me the writer I am today. (Mukherjee 1997)

The questions of exile, migration and the subsequent identity crisis stemming from the separation from one’s mother country are frequently reflected in the fiction of recent years. This persistence attributed to one’s roots seems, especially in the contemporary globalized world, vital for the construction of one’s identity. Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips or Hanif Kureishi all record stories of individuals who found themselves on the verge of two different cultures, feeling a part of neither of them fully. Physical displacement then often leads to emotional alienation forcing the migrants to reconceptualize their identities in a long-term and a rather painful struggle. Since she is an immigrant herself, the India-born writer Bharati Mukherjee often explores precisely these issues in her fiction.

The writer was born in Calcutta in 1940. Her first (more intensive) contact with a foreign spirit was established at the age of eight when her family moved to Britain living there for almost four years. Later on, while studying at the University of Iowa Mukherjee experienced a cultural shock when almost everyone around her “was Christian, white, and moderately well-off.” (ibid.) The years spent at a (at that time) racially rather homogenous university have probably forced her to reconsider her self-concept in relation to her position within the American society. While in Calcutta, Mukherjee in her own words heard no talk of identity crisis nor did she have to question who she is.

“The concept itself - of a person not knowing who he or she is – was unimaginable in our hierarchical, classification-obsessed society. One’s identity was fixed, derived from religion, caste, patrimony, and mother tongue… My identity was viscerally connected with ancestral soil and genealogy. I was who I was because I was Dr. Sudhir Lal Mukherjee’s daughter, because I was Hindu Brahmin, because I was Bengali-speaking, and because my desh – the Bengali word for homeland – was an East Bengal village called Faridpur.” (ibid.)

Things have, however, definitely changed for the author who now describes herself as an American and rejects the politics of hyphenation when being referred to as an Asian-American writer. Most probably, the change was triggered by an impulsive marriage ceremony at the university when she married Clark Blaise after only two weeks of courtship. Until then, Mukherjee states, she had perceived herself “as an Indian foreign student who intended to return to India to live.” However, the “five-minute ceremony in the lawyer’s office suddenly changed [her] into a transient with conflicting loyalties to two very different cultures.” (ibid.)

At this point, we come to the intersecting passage which to certain extent links Mukherjee to Tara Banerjee, the protagonist of her novel The Tiger’s Daughter. Similarly to the author, India-born Tara was sent to Poughkeepsie in New York by her wealthy family to be schooled. After graduation, she intended to come back to India and marry an Indian man chosen by her parents. Tara, however, marries an American surprisingly and returns home only after seven years of living abroad. The novel thus focuses on the phenomenon of migration perceived through the lens of an expatriate consciousness that is unable to adjust to neither of the two distinct cultures. Tara’s sense of exile experienced both in America and her native India is astonishing not only to her friends and relatives but predominantly to herself.

Salman Rushdie’s well-known essay Imaginary Homelands ruminates precisely upon the consequences of one’s separation from the homeland. By being away from India for about half of his life, Rushdie had subconsciously created a rather deformed mental image of India derived from his fleeting memories predominantly. When revisiting his hometown, however, he was astonished by the colorful reality surrounding him which was in sharp contrast to his black and white and somewhat blurry vision he had cherished for years. He realizes that “[…] our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities and villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie 1991: 10) One is, thus, necessarily confronted with the clashes stemming from the differences between these images and reality.

The migrant seems to occupy what John McLeod calls “a displaced position” (2000: 211) since “[t]he imagination becomes more and more the primary location of home but the mind is notoriously unreliable and capricious.” (ibid.) It seems that the migrant’s memories of his or her homeland become only partial and fragmentary in time and thus unavoidably deform the person’s sense of home as well. Tara thus gradually realizes that the concept of home she had cherished all those years living abroad, was impacted by her absence so considerably that it does not correspond to reality anymore. [Interestingly, when thinking of her husband David, Tara experiences the distortion of her memory in India, now fully aware of the magical power of displacement. She can “no longer visualize his face in its entirety, only in bits and pieces in precise detail, and this terrified her.” (ibid.: 62)]

Indeed, from the very first moment of her arrival to Calcutta, Tara (perhaps unconsciously) judges her homeland from a foreigner’s, i.e. Western perspective. She finds herself oscillating between the loyalty to her homeland and its culture which she feels deeply attached to and a new way of perception brought about by her long-term stay in America. Upon her arrival, Tara inspects India critically, noticing the beggars and the shabby houses in the streets, the weather is “unbearably hot” (Mukherjee 1877: 129) and she refers to her friends as racial purists. Notwithstanding Tara’s attempt to merge with her relatives and friends, she assumes the superficial observations of strangers. “Seven years earlier on her way to Vassar, she had admired the houses on Marine Drive, had thought them fashionable, but now their shabbiness appalled her.” (Mukherjee 1987: 18) Moreover, she refers to her relatives’ apartment as “run-down” (Ibid.), she fears diarrhea, jaundice and polluted water when ordering food in a restaurant, the environment becomes “a dark scenery… merely alien and hostile” (ibid.: 25) and Calcutta continually begins to “exert its darkness over her.” (ibid.: 30)

In her letters to David, however, Tara defends India’s shortcomings, trying to explain some traditions and customs to him from an insider’s point of view but she is painfully aware that her American, democracy-loving husband will never be able to see the real India. Thus, by constantly comparing things and people in India to those in America and by challenging her own attitude towards them, Tara fails to place herself in any of the two confronted cultures. She finds herself posited in an in-between space which requires her to renegotiate her identity in order to grasp this process of transition. Neither her husband nor her family and friends understand Tara’s alienation and sense of exile, since they are firmly rooted in their environment and are not forced to cope with a new vision of themselves or their roots. Living in another culture for a longer period of time provides migrants with new insights and experiences which shape them as well. Therefore, Tara has to confront not only the India of her memories with the real one but she also has to contrast it with her new American home. Interestingly, both of the countries prove to be as alien to her as to a foreigner. “For years she had dreamed of this return to India. She had believed that all her hesitations, all shadowy fears of the time abroad would be erased quite magically if she could just return home to Calcutta. But so far the return brought only wounds…She was an embittered woman, she now thought, old and cynical at twenty-two and quick to take offense.” (ibid.: 25)

At one point in the novel, Tara asks herself an interesting question: How does a foreignness of spirit begin? Since she grew up in colonial India and was educated by Belgian nuns, she first attributes the signs of foreignness (‘the faltering of the heart’ as she calls it) to their influence. Then she continues in the contemplation and recalls her early American adventures to conclude with the moment when she fell in love with her latter husband David. Where exactly and why did her transformation occur? Unable to answer this question, Tara resolves it another way. “It was silly to ask oneself questions of the heart… There were no definite points in time that one could turn to and accuse or feel ashamed of as the start of this dull strangeness.” (ibid.: 37

Despite the fact that Tara does not seem to be able to resolve her identity crisis by the end of the novel, the author seems to possess a clear notion of who she has become due to immigration. Furthermore, the process of immigration and the consequences it brought into Mukherjee’s life have contributed to her understanding of migration as a process of mutual benefit.

“As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I […] am minute by minute transforming America. The transformation is a two-way process: It affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity. Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss, the loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as gain.” (Mukherjee 1997) The Tiger’s Daughter, however, does not reveal what that gain might be and thus invites the readers to read more of Mukherjee’ stories.

Sources

Ashcroft et al. (2006) Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London/New York: Routledge.

Ghandi, L. (1998) Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

McLeod, J. (2000) Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press.

Mukherjee, B. (1997) American Dreamer. Retrieved December 19, 2007 from

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Mukherjee, B. (1987) The Tiger’s Daughter. New York: Penguin Books

Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981 to 1991. London: Granta.

Sarup, M. (1996) Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

This publication is the result of the project KEGA 3/6468/08 Vyučovanie interkultúrneho povedomia cez literatúru a kultúrne štúdiá (Teaching intercultural awareness through literature and cultural studies).