Rashmi Gaur
Polemics of Gender Construction: Bharati Mukherjee’s A Tiger’s Daughter and Desirable Daughters
The idea and practice of gender is given shape and meaning by the social structures of a society. Unlike Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists, materialist feminist critics see gender differences as “rooted in social relations which give rise to social practices that produce and reproduce gender inequalities” (Alsop 68). Patriarchal norms of treating women as a group and as subordinates, impart a particular position to women in the social order. Patriarchy enacts ideological and psychological structures within a society which encourage women to internalize their secondary role, accept feminine responsibilities and imbibe the intricacies of pre-defined traditional cultural patterns without questioning them. Bharati Mukherjee’s novels provide a sensitive portrayal of how gender identity constricts the possibilities of autonomy among women and stops them from being truly independent. Educational, financial or global differences often do not equip them with the strength to eschew eschatological traditional roles. The present paper takes up the study of two novels of Bharati Mukherjee; viz., The Tiger’s Daughter (1971), her first novel, and Desirable Daughters (2002), her second last novel; and tries to trace the commonality of approach as far as the portrayal of gender related issues is concerned.
Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction is often analyzed from the perspectives of cultural hybridity and transformation, diasporic experience, and delineation of the condition of Asian immigrants. A gendered reading of her novels has somehow been rather side-tracked so far. However in their totality her novels definitely portray, if not endorse, a world-view and a social order, which fosters traditional patterns of gender construction and their unconscious assimilation in behavioral norms. Bharati Mukherjee was told by one of her agents that she had no future as a writer if she insisted on writing about downscale immigration in New Jersey and not upper-class exotica in Calcutta. She confesses that for this reason perhaps she has clung fiercely to the notion of her un-hyphenated, mainstream place in American writing. She also feels that she is no longer Indian either in mind or spirit (Writers on America 51). She recalls in her article, “on Being an American writer,” how after the publication of her second novel, this realization had dawned on her while she was spending some time with her family in Calcutta. She records that the “weight of tradition, even the multifarious tyrannies of a family” were no longer tolerable to her.
Bharati Mukherjee’s approach to life and its problems is deeply rooted in her Indian background. She was born in 1940 into a Bengali family and had received a traditional education. She has acknowledged her debt to the great Jewish writer Bernard Malmud and has commented that like him she also writes about a minority community which has to adapt itself to the patterns of the dominant American culture. Simultaneously she is also aware of her dissimilarities with his vision. Born into a Hindu Bengali Brahmin family she had a different sense of self, of existence, and of morality than do writers like Malmud. Her belief that the souls can be reborn in another body imparts a different perspective to her about a single character’s life than that of an American writer who believes that he has only one life.
Mukherjee’s different, rather traditional, sense is evident in her portrayal of women characters in her novels. Despite her assertive stand of having eschewed Indianness in mind and spirit, her novels strongly reflect an obsession with traditional patriarchal norms of Indian society. Against such pervading back drop, she has sketched several pictures of arrogant men and submissive women, of women who at times aspire to transcend conventional constraints, but somehow fall short of it.
Her women characters in The Tiger’s Daughter and Desirable Daughters do not show a sustained independence. The social conditioning they have been exposed to, makes them accept, at moments even desire, a passive existence, devoid of the enigma of agentic participation in decision making processes. Despite their intimate familiarity with different cultural milieus and life patterns, they are unable to dissociate themselves from the conventional social myths governing feminine behavior, and treat them as significant and essential norms.
There are strong similarities between the plot handling of The Tiger’s Daughter and Desirable Daughters. In both these novels, the beginning is set in distant and out-of-the-way past. Mukherjee’s first novel begins with the narration of the grand wedding ceremony of the daughters of Harilal Banerjee, and is set in the year of 1879: an incident which can be interpreted as an authorial attempt to impart a historical framework and clan continuity to its major characters. Desirable Daughters repeats the same contrivance and begins with the bridal procession of Tara Lata, daughter of Jaikrishna Gangooly, a feudal lord. The incident is set sometime in the late nineteenth century. Tara Lata is barely five years old when on her wedding day the groom dies from snakebite. Her father decides to marry her to a tree, as otherwise she will be a person to be avoided, “a despised ghar-jalani, a woman-who-brings-misfortune-and-death-to-her-family” (DD 15). Married to a tree she will at least remain “a wife, a wearer of vermilion powder in her hair part, and not a widow” (15). Whereas the initially reported event does not have much connotation later on in The Tiger’s Daughter, it becomes a focal point of Tara Chaterjee’s quest in Desiable Daughters. Tara Chaterjee, the narrator and the protagonist of the novel, becomes curious to know more about the trauma of the tree-bride after her divorce from her Bill Gates like genius of an Indian husband Bishwapriya Chatterjee, and the “roots search” becomes a compulsion with her till she finally yields to this most American of impulses (17). The Tiger’s Daughter moves on with the independent story of Tara Banerjee, the great-grand-daughter of Harilal Banerjee and the daughter of the Bengal tiger (named so for his temperament), the owner of famous Banerjee & Thomas (Tobacco) Co. Ltd. At a tender age of fifteen she is sent to America for higher studies. Homesick and scared, she tries to adjust to the demands of a different world. Her adjustment travails are described in detail, often using the flashback technique. Gradually she falls in love with an American David Cartwright and marries him. After a gap of seven years she plans a trip to India. These intervening years though have changed her perception about her surroundings; she has not been able to override gender stereotypes and clings to past memories for sustenance. On her return to India her initial reaction is that of shock and disgust. At the airport she is received by her Bombay relatives and is introduced as “the American Auntie” to the children. They insist on calling her Tultul and feel diffident at her disappointment. Marine Drive which was once fashionable to Tara is now appalling in its shabbiness. In her hurry to reach Calcutta she insists on traveling alone by train instead of waiting for plane reservations. The scenery outside is “alien and hostile”, “For years she had dreamt of this return to India. She had belived that all hesitations, all shadowy fears of the time abroad would be erased quite magically if she could just return home to Calcutta”. (TD 25).
During the journey she meets P.K. Tuntunwala – a corporate fear, a selfish energy, a national personage, an “impassive and calculating spider” (22), who later seduces her, taking advantage of her passive femininity. During the train journey Tara feels embittered, old and angry. Her despondency diminishes only when her father, the Bengal tiger, takes command of the situation. As she is being escorted out of the squalor and the raucous laughter of the Howrah station, she feels “safe” in his presence (29). She feels that she could depend on him to protect her. This is the first explicit reference in the novel of her dependence syndrome. Her ready acquiescence is a result of the ingrained respect for the male authority which later on makes her accept Tuntunwala’s advances without any protests.
Tara’s relationship with her father is one of total dependence. With him she finds a security which David is unable to provide to her. During her first semester at Vassar she had refused to unpack and had “clung to the large leather suitcase bought for her in a hurry by the Bengal tiger at New Market” (63). Simone de Beauvoir has said that a girl accepts her father’s superiority with impotent admiration. Further she defines it as a full abdication of the subject, “consenting to become object in submission and adoration” (de Beauvoir 315). Tara also feels that her existence is magnificently justified (Beauvoir’s phrase) and fulfilled when her father shows affection towards her. Still, no strains of Electra complex are visible in the structure of the novels. The characterization displays conventional patriarchal mind-sets. Power hierarchies are controlled by men in different societal relationships while women are encouraged to live through their roles of mother/wife/daughter in a non-agentic and non-autonomous manner. Since individual personality cannot be understood independent of the structural conditions of social life, such power/control hierarchies become imperative for comprehending patterns of gender construction within a given milieu. When Connell talks about hegemonic masculinity, he suggests the dominance of a culturally dominant construction of masculinity within a social context (Connell 1987). He talks about the pressures on the male psyche and in a way refers to the social essentialism which suggests that all men/women share certain characteristics “as a consequence of adopting the same social role … being subject to the same symbolic order” (Alsop 65).
In these novels, autobiographical elements can also be discerned as powerful symbolic motif. Tara’s marriage with David is reported in a summary manner, “Within fifteen minutes of her arrival at the Greyhound bus station there, in her anxiety to find a cab, she almost knocked down a young man. She did not know then that she eventually would marry that young man”. (TD 14).
It will be relevant at this point to recall Bharati Mukherjee’s sudden marriage to Clark Blaise, which she had reported to her father in a cable saying `by the time you get this daddy I’ll already be Mrs Blaise!’ In her interview with Dave Weich after publication of Desirable Daughters Bharati Mukherjee has admitted to some autobiographical relationship with Tara :
And as someone pointed out in Iowa City two nights ago on NPR, Tara was also the name of the protagonist in my first novel, and that character was very much me, too, so it’s a kind of alter ego that I wasn’t totally aware of when I embarked on this. (net, powellbooks, emphasis mine)
Her remarks about Desirable Daughters in the same interview are also noteworthy:
Other than the three sisters … I also have two sisters, and we’ve had our estrangements even though we’ve always pretended to be so close-knit. I’m playing with author-protagonist relationships in ways that I haven’t before. I think it’s because I want to write an autobiography, but I just can’t bring myself to. You create masks.
Rita Felski in her article, “Beyond Feminist Aesthetics : Feminist Literature and Social Change” has talked about the reasons which blur the distinction between autobiography and fiction in feminist literature. She argues that the obligation to honest self-deception which constitutes part of the autobiographical contact is “mitigated by the feminist recognition that it is the representative aspect of the author’s experience rather than her unique individuality which are important, allowing for the inclusion of fictive but representative episodes distilled from the lives of other women” (quoted by Eagleton 165). The autobiographical links in women’s writing, similarly, are different from what is found in traditional writings by men. Perhaps it is for this reason that Bharati Mukherjee has talked about the need to create masks.
Another aspect of social conditioning visible in Tara’s attitude is her constant fidgety feeling about her marriage while in India. She considers it to be a transgression of social diktats and is defensive about it, “In India she felt she was not married to a person but to a foreigner and this foreignness was a burden. It was hard for her to talk about marriage responsibilities in Carmac Street …. (TD 62). David is vociferous in his letters about his feelings and issues linked with his book. His concern about Tara is also palpable. Tara, on the other hand, is evasive in her replies and contrives to hide her true sentiments, “So Tara confided secrets in her letters to her husband, but managed quite deftly not to give her own feelings away” (130). Instead of fighting with her phantoms, she tries to bury them beneath the ruse of easy banter and activity profile. Her life in Calcutta becomes a means of avoiding issues about which David is sensitive. While living with him she has learnt not to hear any word, while in Calcutta she broods only about the consolations the city can offer (132). Somehow she is unable to assertively admit her feelings or thoughts in her letter to David.
Tara’s relationships with Joynoto Roy Chowdhury and Tuntunwala also suggest her passive dependence on males and an acute sensitivity towards her own incompleteness. This aspect of feminine conditioning has been commented on by various critics. In an oft-quoted remark Germaine Greer has said that women are contoured by their conditioning to abandon autonomy and seek guidance. When Joyonto Roy Chowdhury wants to take her for “a breath of fresh air” first to the river bank (TD 80), and then for a view of the squatters (113), she is unable, even unwilling to put across a rational protest. Her training at St. Blaise had prepared her for genteel and discreet submission; it had not equipped her with decisive survival skills. Similarly, in her chance meeting with Tuntunwala in the annual charity carnival of the Calcutta Chambers of Commerce, she is unable to resist his peremptory gestures. When he asks Tara to join him for a snap, she obeys him, even though she did not like the peremptoriness of his gestures, she knows she would “obey without much questioning” (77). She coquettishly converses with him as such behavior is traditionally linked with passive feminine charms. During the weekend trip to Nayapur also she allows Mr. Tuntunwala to take her for site seeing, and then to escort her to his air-conditioned room without any protest. She is even glad of his sympathy (196). When he authoritatively sends the maid away, she is unable to protest:
The man’s tone was so authoritative, it did not occur to the maid to question the proprieties of his suggestions. Tara knew she should protest, yet she couldn’t. It would be useless to storm out now. She was tired, and sick; she was curious and impatient. She could wait for few minutes longer. If she were a more aggressive young woman, better able to protect herself like Antonia Whitehead, she knew she would have walked out of the suit with the maid. But she was neither forceful nor impulsive. At that moment the Marwari appeared to her strong, sensible and curiously akin to the Bengal Tiger and Hari Lal Banerjee. (197).
Her seduction, “tastefully executed by Mr. Tuntunwala” (199), leaves her bitter, but she never shows any reaction beyond it, and tries to over come it by immersing into the activities planned by her parents for her diversion.
The hold of tradition on the Indian psyche affects “sensibility responses to an extent not experienced in the West” (Nabar 184). In traditional Indian milieu the duties and the domains of men and women are neatly carved out, and the women’s duty is to conform and to create comfort for their menfolk. Transgression of these unsaid rules is treated as a sacrilegious act. This facet of gender conditioning is discernible in the character sketch of Arati, Tara’s mother. She is depicted as a religious and “saintly woman”, who spent a great deal of time in the prayer room (TD 47). Given to religious dreams she regularly sings bhajans and makes small prophecies. Whereas Bharati Mukherjee is careful to portray her husband with sufficient individual details, her treatment of Arati is rather sketchy. She has been given a stock description. She comes across as a traditional wife and mother who dittoes her husband’s desires and is embarrassed when Tara asks uncomfortable questions to her Aunt Jharna.
The conclusion of this novel duplicates the confusion of Tara’s character. The riotous and destructive mob outside Catelli-Continental Hotel is merciless. Jittery, shivering and encased within a car, surrounded by ruthless humanity, Tara feels the vulnerability of mortals. The novel ends with a chaotic scene and is unable to present any transcendental vision. Tara’s stasis of imagination and general inability to do any thing is also a reflection of the manner gender norms are internalized by girls.
It can be said thus that Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel The Tiger’s Daughter presents before us a milieu in which traditional gender roles are very much intact. Strangely, her approach has not changed in the rest of her fictional writing. Her second last novel Desirable Daughters (2002) can be taken up for illustrating this point. This novel has several commonalities with the previous novel in terms of plot handling and characterization. Like the earlier novel, Desirable Daughters also begins with an ancestral tale and goes on to narrate the lives of Tara Chaterjee and her two elder sisters. The sisters had spent their adolescence in much affluent bhadralok background which had guaranteed a privileged insulation to their lives. Their traditional upbringing within a patriarchal set up negates the possibility of assertive independence. The sisters are incredibly beautiful, and were featured on the annual “Miss Brains and Beauty” cover of Eve’s Weekly (DD 27). They, though, have not cultivated any independent outlook. Padma, the eldest sister was coerced by her father to turn down Satyajit Ray’s movie offers. Alarmed by Tara’s elder sister Parvati’s love marriage, Tara is married at the early age of nineteen, is sent to Atherton, California, where her husband Bish tries to carve out a semblance of Indian traditionality in all respect. The naivity of a nineteen-year-old traditional Indian girl is absolutely unpalatable and amusing to her American friends. Tara and her sisters were protected from any probable indication that the sheltered existence they had led was irresistibly moving towards destruction. Such conventional upbringing compels Tara to admit that she isn’t, perhaps never will be, “a modern woman” (DD 27). The hold of tradition is strong and can be seen in her arranged marriage, in her holding back of information about her divorce from her ailing parents and her homing desires. The cultural pull of her new country enables her to seek divorce and later on to come to terms to her son’s homosexual preferences. Such choices represent her movement towards independence, though the novel does not develop them fully. Her struggle to redefine her gender role sounds ultimately hollow, as she is ultimately unable to eschew the traditional gendered preferences of Indian women. The scene in Rivoli street provides a categorical example of it. When Tara meets Bish after nearly three years, her first reaction is that he is “desperately in need of a makeover” (259). The fact that he had not taken the “simplest corporate precaution against personal liability”(260) further endears him to her. Tara realizes her complete dependence on him. ”How can you not love such person?” (263). In the aftermath of the blast she seeks emotional sustenance from her husband and decides to revive their relationship. Her cross-cultural experiences have given her a desire towards autonomy, but the subtle pressures of conventional conditioning do not allow it to burgeon fully and the possibilities of inner restructuring are thwarted. Tara’s pursuit of individual happiness may seem to be a modern one, but her choices are still governed by medieval preferences, she is unable to free herself from the historical socio-cultural forces which have conditioned her cognition and shaped her priorities. Tara tries to reframe the history of her ancestor, not as much as a family chronicler, but perhaps to tell herself a myth to survive by. Dave Weich has quoted Bharati Mukherjee, commenting that the aesthetic strategy for this novel was “to use the width of the field of history, geography, diaspora, gender, ethnicity, language rather than the old fashioned long, clean throw”.(net)
Bish is more traditional in his outlook. Gender conditioning is a double-edged sword. He feels that roles within marriage should not be affected by societal/environmental changes. Despite being well-versed in latest technological developments, he wants to perpetuate the traditional life pattern without any change. He believes that America makes children “soft in the brains as well as the body”, and weakens their “moral fiber” (DD 154). He wants his son to duplicate his life and displays open abhorrence towards his creative talent. Personal and professional slots of his life are entirely incompatible with each other. It shows that gender conditioning does not affect only the feminine psyche; it also moulds the male thinking. As it is not discriminatory against them, it normally remains unnoticed.
A comparison of these two novels shows that Bharati Mukherjee’s novels exhibit clearly the constricting influence of gender stereotypes on the individual sensitivity of girls as well as on their social behavior. The referential climate of imparting unquestioned superiority to the masculine and coaxing the feminine into passive acquiescence snatches initiative and decisiveness from girls. In both these novels Bharati Mukherjee has delineated a social order in which girls not only do not possess the agentic vibrancy, but are also happy with it. Engrossed in their struggles of adjusting to new cultural challenges/shifts, her women characters leave aside their vibrant individuality, bartering it for the convenient option of easy pace of life. Inner transformation is not on their agenda. Bharati Mukherjee has been unable to look beyond the limitations of a gender existence and provide any ameliorating vision.
Works Cited
Alsop, Rachel, et al. Theorizing Gender. UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Connell, R.W., Gender and Powe. Cambridge: Polity, 1987.
de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Eagleton, Mary ed., Feminist Literary Theory, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Mukherjee, Bharati. The Tiger’s Daughter, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.
…………………… Desirable Daughters, New Delhi: Rupa & Co.,2003.
Weich, Dave, http://www.powerbooks.com/authors/mukherjee.html