International Journal of Linguistics and Literature (IJLL) ISSN(P): 2319-3956; ISSN(E): 2319-3964 Vol. 2, Issue 5, Nov 2013, 35-42 © IASET
EXPLORATION OF DIASPORICWOMEN IN BHARTI MUKHERJEE’S DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS AND JHUMPA LAHIRI’S UNACCUSTOMED EARTH RICHA BIJALWAN Assistant Professor, Department of English THDC-IHET, Tehri, Uttarakhand, India
ABSTRACT The diaspora writers in particular interweave the Indian and the global that marks the development of cultural combination at a mass level in the times impacted by globalization and unique growth in the field of technology and communication. Their writings show how the developments in one part of the world have instant and broader impact in different parts of the world. Their fictional works become more significant for giving expression to cross-cultural encounter from a different perspective. The writings of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Kavita Dasvani, M. G. Vassanji, V. S. Naipaul to name a few, provide an inside view of the difficulties faced by the displaced people in their adopted homes in a way that questions the traditional understanding of the ideas like home, nation, native and alien. These writers challenge essentialist nature of the difference between cultures premised on double division informing the east and the west. Whereas the earlier writers depicting cross cultural encounter often created conventional forms of life and characters to mark the essential difference between the cultures, diaspora writers often contest fixed notions of identity and stable norms that govern life at home and abroad. Diaspora fiction highlights an altogether different attitude of the people from the erstwhile colonies in the postcolonial times.
KEYWORDS: Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth INTRODUCTION The writings of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiriinterpret the situations faced by migrant women live outside India. The cross cultural dilemma, alienation and ethnic struggle of diasporic women are revealed in their writings. Their writings concentrating on the problems of women and explore with a view to discover how far they support women’s struggle for liberation from patriarchy. In her book Desirable Daughters Mukherjee illustrates the situations confronted by diasporic women. The main protagonist Tara after her divorce stays in San Francisco with her teenage son. Her journey as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother and moreover as a woman is well represented by Mukherjee. The writings of these two writers concentrate on the life and problems of the women kept at the margins due to the compulsions of gender, caste and ethnicity. JhumpaLahiri’s second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, paints a powerful picture of life in the Indian American Diaspora. She describes the lives of the first and second generations of Indian immigrants who have settled in America, most of her protagonists are second generation characters. These characters face the opportunities and challenges of belonging to two different cultures, and must continuously negotiate an intermediate position within and between two cultures. They occupy a middle ground which could easily turn into a battle ground between the Indian and the American parts of their identities, but the characters in Unaccustomed Earth strive to maintain ties to both cultures, identifying themselves as Indian Americans. Thus, no matter how predominantly Indian or American they feel, Lahiri’s characters still retain a sense of self as Indian Americans. The continuous renegotiation of their identities lies at the core of Unaccustomed Earth, offering an interesting perspective on the stories.
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Mukherjee in her writings explores the phenomenon of migration, nostalgia, cultural hybridization and cultural transformation. In Desirable Daughters there is a significant portion of both the places India and America. How a young girl and her sisters are born and brought up in Indian Bengali family with its traditions and cultures and later shifted to America in a different culture, is well illustrated by Mukherjee in this novel. Migrations is a recurring phenomenon in the writings of diasporic writers about being and belonging, producing a self with multiple and partial identification which is simultaneously both adapted and community oriented. Thus the diasporic writer occupies a space of exile and cultural solitude which can be called a hybrid location of resentment, continuous tension and expecting chaos. Here the reality of the body, a material production of one local culture, and the perception of the mind, a cultural sub-text of a global experience, provide the interweaving threads of the diasporic existence of a writer. In fact writing allows individuals to regain control over the self, the world and their own life story narrative. It provides a unique safe space in which new identities can be created and linguistic transitions accomplished. Therefore the writer begins by mapping the delineations of their own transited identity that are in constant negotiation and transformation because of the interaction between the past and the present. This peculiarity is also seen in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee, who is one of the most celebrated writers of the Asian immigrant experience in America. Her writings are largely refined by the multiple dislocations of her personal biography, which itself has been described as a text in a kind of frequent immigration. Lying at the heart of Mukherjee’s cultural poetics is her adoption of the immigrant aesthetics, integral to which is a rejection of fixed conceptions of national cultural identity. In Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters, the creation of identity emerges as a continuous process, forever transforming and never truly complete. Tara is a woman migrant who belongs to cosmopolitan world having beauty, brain, wealth and a privileged life as the wife of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. She emmigrates after marrying Bishwapriya Chatterjee, and arrives in America submerged in Indian culture presenting the behaviour of the typical Indian wife. Back at home, she had led a protected life where she was surrounded with Indian culture, tradition and values though instructed by the Catholic nuns during her education. Thus when Tara reaches America she feels the jerk between tradition and freedom as she tries to meet expectations that are often wildly contradictory. But then she immediately tries to embrace American culture taking advantage of the opportunities it affords and endeavours to assimilate as best as she can to the new culture. Yet how much ever she endeavours to amalgam in with the multicultural population of San Francisco she is constantly aware of being different. She finds it impossible to express to American friends -- citizens of comparatively classless, mobile society how restricted and static Indian identity is: “[It] is as fixed as any specimen in a lepidopterist’s glass case, confidently labelled by father’s religion (Hindu), caste (Brahmin), sub-caste (Kulin), mother-tongue (Bengali), place of birth (Calcutta)...” (Desirable Daughters 78) It goes on and on in ever decreasing circles. Although Tara and Bish had left Calcutta decades ago, she is always on the alert interpreting names, manners and accents whenever she meets strangers of Indian origin. But Tara’s frustration at her endeavours to assimilate and Bish’s lack of it eventually leads to a divorce. It marks her transition into a new identity and a liberated self. She soon recognizes that her sexuality is also an aspect of her identity, which she can possess and hold, after being confronted by the same men who had been courteous towards her during her marriage. She realizes the sexual double standard, the unfair difference between male and female sexuality in the Indian culture. Yet her life remains surrounded by her ex-husband Bishwapriya Chatterjee, her son Rabi, and her lover Andy Karolyi, a Hungarian Buddhist. It is only with Andy that her observations of sexuality get reformed as for the first time she becomes selfish, intimate and involved in a relationship without any expectations. She creates a new sexual identity that does not come in conflict with her previous self-perceptions. They merely get replaced by the new and different perceptions. In parallel projection are the
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two men in her life who symbolize two diverse cultures and her cultural dilemma. Initially she tries to seek relief by clinging on to the past through people, memories, visits or calls and by bonding with her two elder sisters, Parvati and Padma, who serve as links to a past that Tara has begun to forget. But the appearance of the mysterious Chris Deyreveals the shallow intercontinental relationship of the three sisters. He acts as both Tara’s liberation and opponent. Finally Tara is shaken out of her contentment, her emotional paralysis shattered, as her family is stalked by threat. Tara’s boyfriend Andy warns her about the consequences of investigating the past, as it has the power to dominate one’s entire present. Nevertheless Tara continues with her quest and as the secret unfolds Tara is forced to face her family, her past and a culture that she has distanced herself from, resulting in a conflict between old modes of thinking and new forms of consciousness that have been created. When her house is firebombed she is completely exhausted making her desire for homeland and traditional life more acute. A trip back to India rekindles a desire to find her family’s ancestral roots and their place in the history of pre-independent India. Hence we find Tara Chatterjee trying to discover herself and how she fits into her place in the universe. This urge to recover past is not simply archeo logical, as it renews the past, refiguring it as depending, in-between space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The outcome of this interaction between past and present, this reworking, is the production of cultural identities that are in transition and in negotiation and transformation. To extend the explanation, writers situate their work in the past, a space other than presently lived in, not as an act of nostalgia alone, but of recollection, a process to know past time or place where fact is not much recovered or even discovered, but brought into being, invented, made and unmade so that it helps to understand the concept of home as a mythic place of as pirate on in the diasporic imagination. The Indian American community that Lahiri describes consists almost exclusively of Bengali characters especially women. Unaccustomed Earth consists of eight stories that all feature central characters that are second generation Indian Americans. Though these stories show the obstacles that Indian Americans must overcome in order to pursue the lifestyles of their choice, they also show some of the advantages that come with the space. For instance, many of the women characters grow up to be high achievers who have been raised in a traditional manner and taught to enjoy family meals, to respect their elders and to honour the tradition of marriage. Thus growing up as Indian Americans is not without its benefits. Lahiri’s stories offer many alternative ways of living and negotiating identities as Indian Americans. In the story “Hell-Heaven,” Usha speaks of a happy outcome of such an identity process: “My mother and I had also made peace; she had accepted the fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well” (81-82). A harmonious mother-daughter relationship has been re-established only when Usha’s mother admits the fact that her daughter has double identities, and understands that these identities can be negotiated peacefully. The mother daughter conflict is just one of the many fights over identity that is found in Unaccustomed Earth, and these conflicts and compromises take place in different spheres. But gradually the identity transformation and hybridization is adapted by the first generation women of Indian Amarican migrant women. Eventually they start adjusting with their unaccustomed land. Both Tara of Desirable Daughters and Ruma of Unaccustomed Earth have adjusted in American culture so well that after knowing the secrets of extra marital affair of her father Ruma does not react furiously while Tara when comes to know about her son being gay also does not get angry. This is balanced by Tara's life in the democratic USA, where she copes with the news that her son Rabi is, yes, yes, we know this is what happens in San Franciscogay. The title of Lahiri’s last collection of stories is borrowed from a passage in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which is quoted on the opening page of Unaccustomed Earth. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne presents the narrator as anarrative voice, and the quoted passage as well as the rest of the book thus reads as his personal recollections and opinions.
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Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth (13). This quotation encompasses many of the central themes and projects in Lahiri’s collection. Hawthorne mentions generations and children, and this is a central concern in Unaccustomed Earth He goes on to talk about the project of human life, using agricultural imagery, and contemplates the fortunes of his children. A possible interpretation of this is that like the Indian American parents in Lahiri’s stories, Hawthorne too has great ambitions on behalf of his children, wishing them successful careers, although he too realizes that his children’s destiny is not necessarily within his control. Lastly, Hawthorne’s description of how and where his children will “strike their roots” is an image of settling down. These three points in Haw thorne’s statement corresponds with central aspects of Unaccustomed Earth and Lahiri’s choice of an opening quotation thus serves as a fruitful context for her collection of short stories. The design of my thesis with its structure of three chapters on Career, Family and Home, also corresponds with the passage from Hawthorne. At first glance, Lahiri’s second collection of short stories seems to be structured very much in the same way as her first, Interpreter of Maladies. On closer inspection however, Unaccustomed Earth is different due to the collection being divided into two parts. Part one consists of five stories whose characters seem wholly unrelated, although the settings and the themes are to a certain extent similar. Part two, on the other hand, is made up of three stories that describe the lives of the same two characters, Hema and Kaushik. The first story, “Once in a Lifetime,” is narrated by Hema, whilst the second, “Year’s End,” is narrated by Kaushik. What makes these two stories special in terms of narrative technique is that the narrator in each story addresses the narrator in the other story as “you.” Thus the stories taken together seem like two monologues, two stories the narrators tell each other. The third and final story sees Kaushik and Hema reunited as adults and they quickly become lovers. This story, “Going Ashore,” is narrated from a third person point of view, shifting between Hema and Kaushik as focus. The final trilogy of stories that makes up Part Two of the collection reads as an unfolding love story, and its cyclical form, beginning and ending in death and birth, makes it a departure from the style of the preceding stories. This second part of the collection will be discussed in detail in the chapter on homes, as especially “Once in a Lifetime” and “Year’s End” show the contrasting ways that homes can influence identity formation. These stories again represent the complexities of identities of Indian immigrants. The opening and title story is, aside from the final trilogy, the one which is perhaps most complex in terms of narrative style. This complexity stems from it being focussed through two different characters, who take turns as main negotiators in the story. First, we are introduced to Ruma, a thirty-something wife and mother who has recently moved to Seattle and who is coming to terms with her existence as a stay-at-home-mother. We gain access to her inner thoughts, which include sadness over the recent death of her mother, and uneasiness about her new pregnancy and the demands of motherhood. Then the focus shifts from Ruma to her father, who has come to stay a week with his daughter and grandson, and who unbeknown to his daughter, thinks about the Bengali woman with whom he has initiated a relationship in his old age. The story continues through a series of shifts in focusing, with frequent leaps back in time to Ruma’s childhood or the early days of her father’s marriage. Thus when the week of her father’s stay is over, and the story comes to an end, as readers we feel as though we have been privy to the whole life story of these two characters, rather than merely a week in their lives. Lahiri’s narrative technique of shifting focus and leaps back in time means that she is able to skilfully convey two life stories within the frame of a short story.
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Lahiri’s fiction is frequently labelled as postcolonial, and it is interesting to discuss her fiction in terms of identity and diasporic identity. Diaspora and diasporic identity are best described as the sense of communion felt by people who emigrate from for example India and who build their lives elsewhere, while still identifying themselves as Indian. The sense of communion with other members of the Diaspora and the transnational networks that exist between diasporic subjects also play a part in the formation of diasporic identity. What seems to lie at the core of diasporic identity is a sense of nostalgia for the homeland while simultaneously embracing life in the new homeland. In Unaccustomed Earth the main characters almost all belong to the Indian Diaspora in America, and as such qualify as postcolonial subjects. Their ancestors were colonial subjects who belonged to a part of the Indian people who were privileged under colonial rule. Her previous collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies consists of nine short stories. These stories also explore the perspective of diasporic women. They feature different protagonists of varying age and gender and the point of view also differs between the stories, shifting from children to adults, Indians to Americans and to Indian Americans. Most of the protagonists are first or second generation immigrants living in America, and all these stories are set on the East Coast of the United States. These are recurring themes throughout the stories, and the story entitled “Mrs. Sen” is a good example. In it, a young American boy remembers the period of his childhood when he spent his afternoons after school in the Indian American home of the childless Mrs. Sen. Through his position as a child who observes the life of this newly arrived immigrant and her working husband, he is privy to the lack of communication between the two. Mrs. Sen is clearly unhappy in America, and yet the only way in which she seems to communicate this unhappiness to her husband, is that she demands the fresh fish that she was accustomed to in India, and that a failure to procure this will make her unhappy. This is clearly a breakdown in communication, as the fish, or lack of it, is only a symbol of the true sense of estrangement that she feels. The contrast between carefulness and carelessness becomes evident in the story when the young American boy watches Mrs. Sen carefully preparing the elaborate family meal every day, making sure that he is at a safe distance from her cutting equipment. This carefulness is suddenly replaced by carelessness when Mrs. Sen decides to rush out to buy fresh fish, taking the boy with her into the car that she is not accustomed to driving, and instead of her customary carefulness, she drives recklessly, crashing the car. This is one of several stories where an initial carefulness is replaced by carelessness, often leading up to a climax and an uneasy ending to the stories. Like Unaccustomed Earth, Interpreter of Maladies directly or indirectly speaks about the South Asian diasporic community with the notion of identity loss. Diaspora literally refers to the dispersal or scattering of a people who feel alienated in their host country resulting to the identity loss or identity crisis as well. This living in-between condition becomes painful and marginalizing for these diasporas. These are frequent themes throughout the stories, and the story entitled “Mrs. Sen” is a good instance. This story is narrated by a young American boy who remembers the period of his childhood when he spent his afternoons after school in the Indian American home of the childless Mrs. Sen. Through his position as a child who observes the life of this newly arrived immigrant woman and her working husband, he feels the lack of communication between the two. Mrs. Sen is clearly unhappy in America, and yet the only way in which she seems to communicate this unhappiness to her husband, is that she demands the fresh fish that she was accustomed to in India, and that a failure to acquire this will make her discontented. This is clearly a failure in communication, as the fish, or lack of it, is only a symbol of the true sense of separation that she feels. The contrast between alertness and negligence becomes evident in the story when the young American boy observed Mrs. Sen carefully preparing family meal with full involvement every day, making sure that he is at a safe distance from her cutting equipment. This caution is suddenly replaced by negligence when Mrs. Sen decides to rush out to buy fresh fish, taking the boy with her into the car that she is not well-known to driving, and instead of her expected alertness, she drives carelessly, crashing the car.
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The Bengali characters and the subject matter of Unaccustomed Earth are interesting from a postcolonial vantage point, as the stories all deal with first and second generation Indian Americans who mediate their identities in their new homelands, as members of the Indian Diaspora. Thus postcolonial theory that deals with identity is highly relevant to a discussion of Lahiri’s fiction. I will offer a brief survey of some of the central postcolonial theorists and how their ideas might be applicable to Unaccustomed Earth, particularly in terms of identity and the Diaspora. These ideas will be elaborated upon and contextualised in the subsequent chapters. The Bengali men who come to the USA in order to study and work are all of marriageable age, and with the exception of Pranab Kaku, they marry Bengali wives and bring them over. These wives form a significant group of immigrants, who in contrast with their husbands do not have any working career outside of the home, either as students or as working professionals. They are expected to cook, clean and otherwise care for their husbands and children, and their only success lies in the careers of their husbands and the extent to which their children excel. Many of these female first generation immigrants seem to turn into desperate housewives and detest suburban American life. Being suburban stay-at-home mother seems to equal an unhappy and isolated existence. The desperateness of this state is most pronounced in “Hell-Heaven,” where feeling trapped in a loveless marriage leads the wife to attempt suicide. Her daughter comes to pity her mother and the desolate life that she leads with no other source of employment than housework (76). At one point when the wife complains about the loneliness of living in the suburbs, her husband merely suggests that she go back to Calcutta (76). This suggestion is more like an empty threat: if she is so unhappy, she can do as she pleases. He knows that going back to Calcutta by herself is not an option and his response might cause her to feel ashamed and angered by her dependency on him. In this sense they have the opposite discussion from the couple in The Namesake, where it is the wife who threatens her husband with going back to India. In “Hell-Heaven” the roles are reversed and the husband threatens his wife with his lack of care. However, by the end of the story, her life seems to have taken a more positive turn, a development which is highlighted by her pursuing a degree in library science at the age of fifty (82). This turn of events indicates that a major source of the unhappiness and loneliness that these women feel is due to their lack of an independent career. When their children begin school and later move out, they are left to their own devices for most of the day, and do not have much to do except prepare the family’s evening meal and watch soap operas, daily rituals that do not fulfil them. Tara after time travelling finds that she is comprised of multiple selves accepting or rejecting certain aspects of both Indian and American culture. She comes to terms with the idea that she never will have a single identity but rather be dispersed between being Indian and American. She does not fight with her multiplicity but rather accepts it as part of her progressive capacity. The Sanskrit poem in the novel’s foreword itself lays out Tara’s mission: “No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone’s path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way. ” It suggests a space of liminality and also portrays identity as a continuous journey rather than a fixed construction. Unlike Jasmine, in Tara there is no struggle between the emerging selves that caused Jasmine to remain always on the move and invent completely new identities. Instead Tara’s multiplicity evolves in a continuous process that she welcomes. She recognizes that living in the past, whether temporally, spatially or both, is dangerous to the development of one’s identity. She keeps on changing and evolving but at the same time does not lose the identities she had once possessed. Instead of transplanting Indian culture or disposing it off altogether she tries to assimilate her Indianness through reinventing her identity as experiences forever keep on moulding it into something new. The characters in Mukherjee’s novel develop multiple consciousness, resulting in a self that is neither unified nor hybrid, but rather fragmented. As the protagonists perceive both their race and sexuality through new and different lenses throughout the course of the text, they come to realize that the notion of a singular identity is a fallacy and the reality of the
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diasporic experience is the indeterminacy of multiplicity. This multiplicity at times becomes a significant plight for the characters, for as their different consciousnesses contradict each other the characters are left uncertain as to the nature of their identities, not knowing where they fit in the American society. Finally they become capable of living in a world where individuals exist not as a unified One, but as many, bound by no borders and infinite in the possibility of inventing identities. Through her Desirable Daughters and Unaccustomed Earth, Mukherjee and Lahiri depict the desires and expectations of immigrant women who want to live with their native culture in abroad. These stories are concerned with the diasporic situation of the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans whose hyphenated Indian identity has let them to be trapped between the Indian- American customs. It illustrates the scene of cultural transformation in the development of possessing and re-possessing the past and the present both sequential and spatial in an important way. It also depicts an attitude of diasporic as well as gendered struggle towards existing patriarchal hierarchies in the post-colonial through the effort of thoughts. The world that these two writers portray is set in movement against the cultural anxieties, apprehension and consequential dialogues that take place when two very different sections of the world are present. Their works proliferate with female characters struggle to survive in the unknown environment they are intertwined in. These two women writers show the diasporic struggle to keep hold of culture as characters create new lives in foreign cultures. In fact relationships, language, rituals and religion all help these characters to maintain their culture in new surroundings even as they build a hybrid realization as Asian Americans. Women characters are defined by isolation of some form or other. These women immigrants are isolated from their families, culture, homes, and parents and from the communities in which they live. The lives of these women in these stories end with a sense of loss. In their isolation they feel that they are missing something vital to their identities. It is this missing something that defines them.
REFERENCES 1.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. London: Harper Collins, 1999.
2.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New Delhi: Random House, 2008.
3.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Desirable Daughters. New Delhi: Rupa Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2003. Print.