Monika Gupta

Nostalgic Experiences in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride

The Tree Bride (2004) is about the nostalgic reminiscences of an American based Indian woman desperate to unearth the mystery of her ancestors. Familiar with the feeling of alienation on a foreign land Bharati Mukherjee has successfully incorporated the same feeling in her protagonist, Tara Chatterjee. “The Tree Bride is supposed to be the second in a trilogy; it is going to take Mukherjee a lot of work to bring the storyline back to the promising track that Desirable Daughters displayed” (Apte 1). Tara’s life takes a U turn when her house is bombed by unknown suspects in San Francisco leaving her computer wizard X- husband, Bish, crippled who presently is leading a vegetable like existence, dependent on Tara and confined to a wheel chair. Believing the theory of her husband that there are no co-incidences, only convergences, she succeeds in finding the mysterious link between death of her great-great aunt, Tara Lata Gangooly, in Mishtigunj and attack on her family in America.

Tara was always nostalgic about her childhood spent with her grandparents who told her many mythical stories including the story of Tree Bride alias Tara Lata Gangooly. Tara was fascinated by the story to the extent that she wished to write a book on Tree Bride. Tara Lata Gangooly was a spirited activist who was widowed at the age of five on her wedding day and therefore forced to marry a tree in the jungle of Mishtigunj. Thereafter referred as Tree Bride she devoted her life to the Indian freedom struggle and fought wholeheartedly till her last breath. Her heroic life unexpectedly comes to an end when after her arrest she dubiously dies of heart attack in the jail. The circumstances of her death are not clearly stated by the British government thereby suggesting a cold blooded murder of a freedom fighter. Tara’s life is unknowingly weaved into the story of Tree Bride and this marks her urges to visit India. Bharati Mukherjee has amalgated and fused history and mysticism in an amazing manner. The Tree Bride is a sequel to her earlier novel Desirable Daughters:

To understand Tara’s rich experience of revelations, Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride are meant to be read in succession. Together they prove that Mukherjee is a master at creating magical, mysterious stories that resound with spiritual healing for both the dead and living (Houlihan 1-2).

There is intrigue and treachery and all engulfing love unearthing secrets of past. Tara Lata’s death unravels the hatred and racial discrimination of some British rulers who were contemptuous about Indians and tried to cover up their atrocities on them by showing that they were civilizing them. Tara Lata has laid bare the cruelty of the British and the double faced policy towards the Indians. It circumlocutes throughout the story and there hangs an air of suspense that carries on for generations. Bharati Mukherjee’s novel is alive and vibrant and unfolds the historical events of freedom fighting.

According to a critic, “A key theme in The Tree Bride is Tara’s attempt to reconcile the part of her tied to her Indian heritage with her life as an assimilated American” (Skerrett 1). Tara is well settled in America but is nostalgic about her ancestral home in Calcutta. She remembers her crisp convent upbringing in a typical Brahmin household. But she knows the effect western culture had on the orthodox families like hers. Her ancestral family was, “… a hybrid family of orthodox Hindu, Bengali- speaking, cricket-loving, Shakespeare- acting, Gilbert and Sullivan- singing, adaptable- anywhere Brahmins”(Mukherjee 45). Her father who, “... drank scotch and read English mysteries and positively, idolized Doris Day…” (48) ended up his life in prayer in Rishikesh. Tara, unlike the Victorians who lay dreaming of future, dreamt of the past. Out of her curiosity to know about her ancestral home and Tara Lata, The Tree Bride, she visits India three times and directs her search in Mishtigunj. When she goes there for the second time she dresses herself in a sari. But the American ways had seeped into her system and though she tried to look as Indian as she could, her gait was, “… far too American” (58). She ends up in shaking hand with Hajji Gul Mohammed Choudhary, shocking him. Since she had no sign of vermillion on her forehead and had no wedding ring, he called her, “mysteriously unmarried lady from Calcutta” (58). Mukherjee has contrasted the two system of culture that shaped the personality of a person. Changing outward appearance from Western to Indian could not help Tara and she looked stranger in her own ancestral village. Living in America for a period of time had distorted her traditional outlook.

But Tara at heart is Indian to the very core and she is obsessed with the idea of knowing her roots. Her nostalgic reminiscences of her house, school, childhood friends and the myth of Tree Bride that she heard only in stories colored her imagination even in a foreign atmosphere.

The history of Tree Bride is intricate web woven along with the Indian freedom struggle, Hindu Muslim unity, racial discrimination and social evils such as child marriage etc. On Tara’s visit to Mishtigunj she learns that Tara Lata, “had been dead for fifty five years” (59) and she left no written record of her life except a little pamphlet containing parables and moral stories. Tara is disappointed yet there are, “… three or four memories of her early childhood” (68). Tara Lata had recorded the day when she became a widow and her marriage with a tree at the tender age of five. In the years following her marriage, Tara Lata Gangooly took on the tree like characteristics herself. She was rooted to her father’s house. She was silent like a tree and the grave little girl became a somber young lady. The second incident is when she was six year old and British troops and their Indian conscripts arrested the chowkidar and then broke through the gate of her house. There was a feast to honor Rafeek Hai and his family attended by John Mist and Tara’s great grandfather Jai Krishan Gangooly. It was Ramzaan and in 1880, Tara was surprised to know that the Brahmins were not racial at all. The troops arrested Mist and Rafeek Hai and later they were hanged in the ‘Town Square’. Tara Lata witnessed the incident sitting on her father’s shoulders. There is also the mention of Tara’s childhood friend Sameena who inherits the Mist Mahal after the death of Tree Bride.

Tara Lata left her father’s house on three occasions only. The first time was to go to the forest on a cold winter night in 1879, to marry a tree. Second time it was to witness the hanging of john Mist and Rafeek Hai. The third time she left her house in 1943 when the British prodded her with rifles. It was reported that she died of heart attack in the jail but her body was never found nor cremated properly. The document that Tara found revealed the pathetic condition of females under the British rule. She had lucid records of the burning of a nineteen year old housewife called Habeeba Shah and her three infant daughters who had been scorched alive in their hut because Habeeba’s husband joined the Indian National Army. Then there was the story of Kananbala Devi who had been raped and tortured in front of her parents because her brother who was a fugitive had bombed a police station. Tara purchases another document of importance from Hajji called Mist Nama. John Mist the founder of Mishtigunj tried to create a ‘Utopian’ village by involving people from Calcutta and Dhaka. He was an orphan named Jack Snow who was drifted to the sea of Bengal and settled there and earned fortune by jute business. Mist ordered the Christians to be barred from Mishtigunj. Mist himself wore dhoti like Gandhi and led a life of a simple villager in a village comprising of both Hindu and Muslims. He had his own views on the religion and he appointed two doctors, one Hindu and one Muslim, two kinds of teachers, two kinds of journalists and built two kinds of schools in Mishtigunj. Apart from being the founder of the place called Mishtigunj, he also influenced the family of the Gangooly. Tara Lata along with her father lived in Mist Mahal along with a Muslim family that served them. After the death of Mist the possession of the house causes many mysterious murders in the house including the attacks on Tara in America, first attack leaving her husband injured and in the second attacks her doctor Victoria Treadwell dead. Victoria Treadwell is also connected the story of Tree Bride. She is Tara’s doctor and treating her in her second pregnancy. Apart from this she is the from the blood of Vertie Treadwell, the ICS British officer who hated India and signed the official Death report of Tree Bride in the jail. He too left written records of his life in India in Bengal that Victoria handed to Tara before her death.

In Vertie autobiography Tara discovered many facts about the Tree Bride. Vertie penned down in his autobiography, “I had a proper English childhood and do not regret any element of it” (189). Vertie was born on the same year 1874, Nov 30 as Winston Churchill and he, “was given to oracular pronouncements”(200). He told Churchill that he knew, “… a woman married to a tree”(205). Vertrie spoke of the woman who was a heartened case in many ways:I have never met an Indian woman more obdurate than Miss Gangooly. We knew she had been financing Gandhi and then she broke with him and started supporting Subash Bose. She seemed to have abandoned the rational and, I might say, containable, course of non-violence for some sort of alliance with the devil himself. (206-207) He further describes that Tara lata’s house was a veritable printing press and munitions factory for sedition elements. Her house was known as Mist Mahal. She was most gracious Like Brahmins of good families. At fifty three, she wore her hair short in a bob that was cut for practical purposes. She had grey hair but she was quite masculine and attractive in her own ways. She had read the works of George Orwell when in 1931 many well read men had not heard the author’s name. Treadwell believed that she was organizing an infamous attack on him.

She was well connected to the people of higher rank than Treadwell. When the warrant for Tara Lata was issued she had the following pieces of literature- a magazine called ‘A Hanging’ and a novel called ‘Burmese Days’. People revered her as God and she was referred as ‘Tara–ma’ by the people of Mishtigunj. Treadwell told Churchill, “She’d managed to take the curse of virginity- the worst thing a woman can be in that country- and elevate it into something worthy of a Catholic saint” (211). Vertie refused to believe that she was a virgin as she was always surrounded by a virtual army of men. Tara Lata was sharp and in her youth she trained all her servants to read and write. Then she sends them out into the villages to teach five other people thereby spreading literacy.

After gaining all the details of Tara Lata and the Mist Mahal, Tara comes to few conclusions. One of them was that Tara Lata had few enemies, someone who fed her name to the British authorities in Calcutta. Sameena and her father must have been indignant by the way they were treated by the new Jai Krishan Gangooly whose quest for spiritual purity had summarily fired Abdulhaq for a condition he could not rectify. He was installed as a gatekeeper which might have been interpreted by Abdulhaq, “as demeaning” (276). One of the British official Coughlin also concluded that, “Sameena and her husband, Tara Lata’s personal physician, plotted to take possession of Mist Mahal, sooner or later”(277).

When Tara Lata died in 1943, in the police custody her house passes to Begum Sameena Chowdhry, widow of late (Dr) Hajji Shafeeq Mohammmad Chowdhary who was the mother of Gul Mohammmad Chowdhry, the old Hajji whom Tara met in Mishtigunj on her second visit. She had also met Hajji’s son, on leave from New York restaurant while he pillaged her father’s holdings on her third visit. She also recalls her meeting with Sameena’s great grandson Abbas Sattar Hai in San Francisco.

Before Coughlin died in 1971 he had written in a Dhaka newspaper that Mist mahal was still legally owned and occupied by a ninety seven years old widow Sameena Chowdhary and her family of her son that included a grandson and wives as well, along with relative. Since there was no will or sale, it was presumed that the Gangooly’s had the right to inherit the house. This Coughlin saw as a part of the “inevitable ‘Muslimisation’ of East Bengal”(278). Tara realized that Victoria’s murder, her ‘would be’ assassin, the crippler of her husband an indiscriminate killer in India and America was born and bred in her Family’s house, “The house itself, …might have killed John Mist, Rafeek Hai, and, eventually the Tree Bride”(278). The story turned to show a new face of greed hiding under the veil of Hindu Muslim disputes.

Tara is so mesmerized by the experiences of the Tree Bride that she decides to visit back India. At Bengal Street Tara feels the presence of tree Bride and she also hears her urgent whispers, “I am trapped in your world of mortals, she pledges. Perform the rites. Set me free Tara” (279). The Tree Bride sneers and tells Tara, “Ah, distracted from duty to me by patiseva. … The selfless Hindu wife dedicates herself to her husband’s welfare. Even divorced one. Even in America”(279-280).

Tara switches on the lights of her house as she remembers the stories her grandmother used to tell her about ghost appearing at twilight. “..twilight was the time when evil spirits were most potent and unhappy ghost most eager to take over living bodies. Most ghosts were unhappy, she said caught between worlds. Some were dangerous”(208). Tara Lata’s presence could be felt over the house and mysteriously she reveals the truth of her death to Tara. She tells that she was hanged by Mackenzie in a jail cell and that to avoid a rebellion by the natives; Treadwell had ordered her body to be cremated by the police. She told Tara that her body had been tossed over the prison wall and it had been ripped off by vultures and her bones had been chewed up by the dogs. Tara also learned that Tara Lata does not want vengeance nor justice but her soul’s release. Bish does not mock at Tara for listening to ghosts and tells her that they must go to Kashi when they are fit enough. He proposes that Tara Lata must be given proper cremation so that she can attain the status of ‘pitr’, ancestor. In Kashi the soul would return to the “Abode of Ancestors” (281) in realms invisible to the mortal. Using the element of mysticism Mukherjee has connected the past and the present. Tara inquisitiveness for the Tree Bride and her association even with her ghost seems to proclaim the strength of roots that binds generation after generations. Tara who is always crazy for her Bengali tradition since marriage could not overcome the obsession of her own country where she spent her childhood. Tara, like many Bengalis had crossed the black Waters and felt she had lost her cast as the myth went and had mingled with the casteless, eaten red and white meat. She had divorced, had lovers and even tasted wine. She conceded with Bish to go to Kashi who agreed to go as a married man. This was her new beginning as she remarried to the same man again and a week later gave birth to her daughter named Victoria. The family returns to Kashi and the Tree bride is cremated and the soul is set free.

One of Tara’s most nostalgic experiences is sitting on a relative of her great grand uncle. “He was a sundari-shoondari-tree” (251) and the only piece of furniture Bish and she had taken from her original dowry from her parents’ house. Tara reminisced about Tara Lata and aptly said, “When we dream or perhaps I should limit such a broad declaration only to myself, I dream of the past” (252). Through her nostalgic experiences and reminiscences, Bharati Mukherjee portrays her protagonist Tara Lata and her experience. Rich in Bengali tradition and cultural, the novel also portrays different shades of human relations.

 

Works Cited

Apte,Poornima.Review DesiJounal accessed Nov.18, 2006

Houlihan, Mary. “The Enchantment of Bharati Mukherjee”(review).Aug.8,2004.

Mukherjee, Bharati. The Tree Bride. New York:Hyperion Books,2004.

Skerrett, Joanne.(review) “The Tree Bride Mixes Past, Present in Eloquent Tale”.Sep. 16,2004.