Mamta Bisht

The Ordeal of Anjali in going Local to Global: A Study of Bharti Mukherjee’s Miss New India

Mamta Bisht

Abstract:

The paper aims to bring forth the different facets of globalization as depicted by Bharti Mukherjee in her latest novel Miss New India. Bharti Mukherjee was a writer of Indian Diaspora and it is interesting to perceive the global India through her point of view. This work, having a female protagonist, has been skillfully weaved into a story that represents the society and culture of the high tech city of India post liberalization. The progress in India‘s economy and social standards has changed a lot many things in India. The everyday experiences, demands of time, personal hopes, ambitions and the challenges in this New India have changed too. In Miss New India, Mukherjee penetrates into the complexities of the lives of the young girls, who come from small towns to these urban areas to live free and independent lives. In the background of struggle for new subjectivity, Bharti Mukherjee explores the impact of globalization on cities as well as small towns expressed in terms of hopes for a better life in the urban cities, complexity of high tech society and disillusionment caused by the dark realities.

Keywords: Urban-Rural, Disillusionment, Globalization, Liberalization, Local-Global

Ever since the Indian government opted for economic liberalization in 1991, there has been a landmark shift in the social, economical and political condition of India. The liberal policies and foreign capital coming to India have created the job market for the Indian youth. Most of the countries have come on liberal terms for the betterment of their economies; consequently the faded territories have constructed a global world and are further creating global citizens. The world has gone under a kind of metamorphosis and India is no exception. The exchange of world views and ideas has resulted in a major changeover of the lifestyle and living standards of people. This had far reaching impacts on all spheres of life globally. India has also made a leap towards modernization. With the emergence of globalization, our deep rooted orthodox traditions and customs have also loosened up their clasps. India has a rich cultural background which is popular throughout the world. Globalization has not only helped in the westernization of India, but conversely Indian culture has also extended its

impact worldwide. Globalization has become the new identity for India and its people in the new millennium. The fast developing cities and overall urbanization across India are the outcome of globalization. The day-today experiences, demands of time, personal hopes, ambitions and even the challenges in this Post liberalized India have changed. As the life of Indians have changed so did the representation of this new life in literature. The contemporary Indian novels are distinctively different in themes from the novels of the pre –liberalization era. The new Indian novels mark a vivid change of trend from the earlier ones in the ways as it does not simply render the stories of family saga and the flamboyant cultural India. These new novels depict India in the contemporary terms of globalization. Like the themes of their novels many of these authors also possess global identities. Even after having transnational identities, many diasporic Indian authors still hold on to their roots in India, although they claim themselves expats, but at least their novels fabricate around Indian characters and themes. Bharti Mukherjee was one such writer and this research paper focuses on her latest novel. Her novels range widely across time and space dealing especially with the consequences emerging out of cultural conflict of the East with West in the alien land. Her last novel Miss New India is entirely set within India yet the western cultural effects have played a vital role in developing the themes as the major part of the story is in the backdrop of the metropolis city Bangalore. The narrative creates a new orientation of identity, dealing with the life in the fast pacing city of growing India. In the prologue of the novel, Mukherjee talks about transnational concept , it is not always about immigrant Indians rather India has also become home for many emigrants i.e. some of rich westerns like the Aussies, the Canadians, the Germans, the Finns or like the American expat, Anjali‘s teacher-cum-friend. The prologue illustrates the transnational identities centered in India. Apparently, this has become the scenario of Global India.

The novel is centered on Anjali Bose who is not just representing a single girl from a small town but is a prototype of all growing and aspiring girls from small towns of India. She is valorised for her boldness to explore her life and decide for herself which is still not considered a women‘s privilege in rural India. Anjali Bose; a B.Com student having overtly features of Bengali beauty, with her talent of good grades and American English accent lives in Gauripur, a small town of India, a different face of a globalizing nation. The conceptualized global status of India is essentially the image of the urban part of India. The major part of India is still slithering with same old customary living and orthodox beliefs. It

becomes challenging for the youth of the under-developed parts of India to catch up with their blinding desires to live a better life in this crucial time of globalization. The nondeveloped part still does not notice the variety of opportunities provided by the global India. These youngsters are living in the crux of globalization and their traditional upbringing which makes it more complicated for them to decide the right direction for their future. The youngsters under the light of their western education find these big cities a big escape from their stagnant lives. In her narrative Bharti Mukherjee has exhibited the same kind of escape in the runaway of Anjali from her small town life to a big city. As the narrative speaks her heart, ―She wanted something exciting, life-changing, to save her from the tedium of Gauripur‖ (11). The happening life of the big cities is always a dream for them as the small town lives are slow paced and restraining. The opulence of big cities appears liberating from the shackles of old traditions and customs with which the young generation do not confirm. Though, Anjali‘s migration to Bangalore is eventual and marked with extreme circumstances of her life but she had also wished to escape from her small-town life. Her American accent, pleasing personality and her teacher cum friend Mr. Champion‘s trust (also the cash) are the pillars on which she is going to build her new exciting life in the big city Bangalore.

The novel chiefly focuses on the lives of the youth in the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore. The very beginning of Anjali‘s life in Bangalore starts early in the morning and she reaches for her first experience in Barista filled with English-speaking young people from transnational workplaces. She gets elated with the idea of being a part of a metropolitan city life, ―It was exciting to just be part of such a flow, even for one morning, and to be carried along like a twig in the flood. She had been accepted, no questions asked, even if she didn‘t understand most of what she‘d been hearing‖ (92). Anjali finds herself motivated for a better life among those dynamic people of the city.

English has become the pass for the entry into the global world. Without English one becomes unworthy of this modern time from the career point of view, Mukherjee also enunciates the requirement of a neutralized or de-indianized English in the global job market. She even highlights the importance of this language in the life of young girls in marriage market, as Anjali in the novel also gets the permission to attend the English classes from her American teacher just to add a quality in her marriage bio-data to attract good alliances for marriage. Mukherjee also critiques the call-center‘s rule that workers use a neutralized

English (an enhanced one if not exactly American), in which most linguistic traces of their Indian origins are scrubbed away, including the common Indian way of blurring between the / w / and / v / sounds in speech like the way Parvati, the owner of the training institute instructs her students for the correct way of producing these sounds. Apart from enhancing the accent, such popular training institutes keep tailor- made solutions for Mother –tongue influence problems. Linguist Claire Cowie has discussed how call-centers teach their workers ―accent neutralization‖; before employees begin working, they take pronunciation classes and are given phonetics handbooks that ―refer to the ‗elimination of regional influence‘ and encourage trainees to become more comprehensible to native speakers of English by ‗improving pronunciation‘‖ (321). Although Cowie finds that defining a ‗neutral accent‘ is difficult, as companies hold different views on what precisely constitutes a neutral sound, the ideal is usually that it not sound entirely American, despite containing strong characteristics of the American accent (Cowie 324). However, it should not sound British either, and definitely not Indian (323). In Miss New India, Parvati also emphasizes on enhanced neutralized English, she says, ―That doesn‘t mean you have to imitate American Television accent- it just means they expect you to communicate without any complication‖ (229). So, English speaking skills become mandatory in the modern India for achieving higher goals in life. Those who back off from this skill they back off from the race of growth like the other students who dropout the enhancement course at CCI (the training institute) owing to their uneasiness to this enhanced English.

One of the purposes as well as the results of globalization appears to be the cultural homogenization. The global youth are so much convinced with the western culture that they feel more comfortable and confident in the western avatar be it clothes, language and even the names. This version of the youth is also found in Anjali, the protagonist of the novel when she turns into Angie. She feels a new kind of driving force in her western name, an identity which pushes her to take on the world and forget her cultural restrictions. Her first interaction with the people from call center background reveals that it is not only her but a whole class of youth who have westernized names. It does not matter to her that it is by choice or a forced identity. In fact she finds this name change concept quite magical, in her words, ―My God, how a simple name change changes everything‖ (92). In the call- center everyone is given an American identity to work with. Let alone speaking in American English with an American identity, they are required to have a good hand at American culture

that is why the students at CCI are trained to learn about American culture. As a part of the training they are made to learn about the different brand names, watch American T.V. shows and learn about the locality and maps of that distant country. As Raka Shome has noted of real-life call-center workers, not only does the worker assume an American-sounding name, but he or she must also assume the guise of an authentic American and perform this identity with callers (115). The call-center‘s power to rename its Indian recruits is the kind of authority they have gained over the Indian young generation in lieu of globalization. This concept of identity change has lessened the value of a name among the youth but Anjali had her most dreadful experience when her identity was taken up by Husseina Siraj.

Globalization has varied effects on the lives of the Indians, with growing urban mindset a grossly compromising attitude is seen to be seeping in the human behaviour. One dimension of this development process which is totally ignored in the recent years is that of wearing down of ethics in our society. As a result of excessive emphasis on acquisition of maximum materialistic benefits, many cherished values of life are getting fast eroded. Contentment, cooperation, self-restraint all such values are getting eroded in the highly materialistic paradigm of development. These structural changes that are taking place around us with immense speed and complexity is making this valueless life very acceptable as if it is also an indispensible part of globalization. The people of urban area have become quite ambivalent to these compromises with values as the part of modernization unlike the people of rural area who still seem holding on the roots of moral values. Many characters of Miss New India set the example of the same. The protagonist herself stole expensive toiletries of her Bhagot housemates, and even admits that she would not have done such thing in Gauripur. This states the consumerist attitude that has come into her after coming in the big city. Anjali receives all the costly items of Hussiena Siraj in exchange of her dirty jeans and t-shirts, her discontented self wished to have all the expensive things by her side. Tooky another housemate keeps many boyfriends at a time; she manipulates them for her benefits. Relationship in such a time of globalization seems more for the requirement of body than for the soul. The biggest missing value which has been lost by our global generation is trust. At a point Mr. Peter Champion also complains about this very problem in this modern time and states, ―And for me this is the most worrisome aspect of India-the disappearance of trust. I look at modern Bangalore, and at Delhi and Mumbai, and wonder, what are we creating?‖(159). It was Anjali‘s trust in Hussiena Siraj that leads her to the darkest reality of

her life where she starts wishing for her own death. Anjali was shattered to pieces and went into depression after the shock of her prison adventure. She regretted for all her ambitions and found herself distanced from her innocent hopes that she had, when she lived in Gauripur.

The call centre boom in India has made people rate the quality of others by their English. All other talents look useless if ones English skills are not up to the mark. In the taken story Anjali‘s teacher sees the same talent in his favourite student as her chance for a good career and directs her to the big city life. The dream he sowed in her for a better life in the big city was to be achieved through a call centre job. The story does mention other talents of Anjali; her top grades, being good in sports, her good features but the teacher could only confirm with her American accent and ushered her to the call centre world. But later on, her training by the most professional people of this call centre support producing system did not find her appropriate for the job. With the advancement of liberalization in Indian policies, call-centre industry flourished in India rapidly. This industry created lakhs of jobs for the youngsters with good spoken English. Even the college dropouts received huge paychecks at a very early age, which attracted other youngsters from small towns. Anyone with good English perceives himself fit for the BPO sector. There started a blind following of such trend but Mukherjee in her narrative emphasizes that everyone is not cut out for this outsourcing job. The protagonist Anjali fails her test for taking calls and is declined the entry in that sector, but her trainer Parvati finds some other talent in her. When Anjali tries to protest her rejection by saying that she can change, Parvati rejects that idea, in her words, ―Don‘t even try. I have an investment in you. Just not this one‖ (240). It is true that it is hard to find proper guidance in this rushing time. People should introspect on their talents and pursue their career accordingly or else they would end up in a stressed life. The blind race for getting good salaried jobs in call-center, is suppressing other talents in the Indian youth. The investment largely came from multinational companies and the country‘s progress largely due to them. Similarly the recession in such parent countries would dearly affect the job market of our country. Mukherjee through her character Peter Champion blurts out her weariness on the countries dependent prosperity as he states, ―We‘re tied to American prosperity. If America goes under, we‘ll drown‖ (161). Through these words, Mukherjee is trying to alarm that it is high time for Indians to have their own grounds to hold on so India doesn‘t go down in the storms of other nations. Shehzem Nadeem in her seminal work puts forth her provocative argument that ―just as the

status of the colonial mimic men was dependent upon the structures of British colonialism, today the social position of [outsourcing] workers [in India] is contingent upon the continued patronage of Western corporations‖ (58). The dependence for capital on these western countries is leading to the same old structure of slavery in a sophisticated manner.

Conclusion

Thus the fictional work of Bharti Mukherjee‘s Miss New India reflects the changing urban as well as rural realities in globalizing India. Even though Bharti Mukherjee lives far away from India still she is well versed with the changing status of India. She subtly portrays the fast growing cities and urban zones along with all the global factors, experience, dreams, and attitudes of today's youth. Bharti Mukherjee very comfortably depicts women empowerment through characters like Anjali Bose, Parvati, Indrani and Tooky as one of the positive effects of globalization, at the same time the effects of this blindly followed modernization that has consumerism, alienating families and vanishing values among the urban Indians as some of the negative offshoots could not escape her piercing observation. She also wants the youngsters to be aware of their talents and to just not run after the charm of utopian transnational workplaces which many a times lead to disillusionment among the youth. She very well targets at the challenges faced by the Indian youth on the two contrary faces of India in this era of post-liberalization.

References:

 Cowie, Claire. ―The accents of outsourcing: the meanings of ‗neutral‘ in the Indian callcentre industry.‖ World Englishes 26.3 (2007): 316-30. Print.  Mukherjee, Bharati. Miss New India. New Delhi: Rupa Publication India, 2012. Print.  Nadeem, Shehzad. Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing The Way Indians

Understand Themselves. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.

 Shome, Raka. ―Thinking through the Diaspora: Call centers, India, and a new politics of hybridity.‖ International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.1 (2006): 105-12. Print.