Purnima Gupta
Diasporic Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters
Bharati Mukherjee, an India born Canadian/ American novelist, has made a deep impression on the literary canvass. She is an investigative pioneer--of innovative terrains, practices, and literatures—co-existent with her wide-ranging mission to discover new worlds. Her novels, honestly, depict the issues of her own cultural location in West Bengal in India, her displacement (alienation) from her land of origin to Canada where she was “simultaneously invisible” as a writer and “overexposed” as a racial minority and her final re-location (assimilation) to USA as a naturalized citizen. Acculturation is the depressing upshot of post-modern scenario, which Mukherjee had comprehended much early in her life .That is why, as a postmodern writer, her foremost concern has been the life of South-Asian expatriates and the dilemma of ‘acculturation’ and ‘assimilation’. Through her female characters who are autobiographical projections of her experience as an expatriate she represents in her novels the contemporary woman’s struggle to define herself and attain an autonomous selfhood, especially in cross- cultural crisis, a subject which has assumed a great significance in the present world of globalization. She endeavors to dive deep into the distorted psyche of those immigrant women who have been surviving in the conflict of traditional Indian values; inherent in their personality and their fascination for western mode of living. Her five novels and short stories delineate her evolution from alienation to adoption and assimilation.
The Tiger’s Daughter (1972) and Wife (1975) relate the dilemma of belongingness as a matter of flux and agony and explore the problems of nationality, location, identity while Jasmine and Desirable Daughters (2002) reflect the “cultural diaspora-isation” what Stuart Mall calls marks the beginning of the desire for the survival in the community of adoption. She rejects the nostalgia of her early books and the myth of the nomad 'adrift', in favour of an affirmation of belonging and the theme of the successful 'conquest' of the New World.
Desirable Daughters is a brilliantly woven thoughtful novel about three India born upper class sisters-Padma, Parvati and Tara- who live as Indian immigrants in USA. The novel basically explores the diasporic experiences of Tara, the protagonist, who is more removed from her native Indian culture than her two sisters. It registers her sense of alienation, lack of belongingness, memory and fragmented identity; nevertheless it does not describe her nostalgia, urge to return to her homeland. Unlike earlier novels such as The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife, it celebrates immigration as the process of gain rather than a case of loss and dissolution of native culture. The protagonist undertakes the journey from expatriation to immigration; from strangeness to familiarity and from alienation to adoption and assimilation. It is a wonderful synthesis of feminist and diasporic ideologies.
Tara belongs to a conservative Bengali Brahmin family of Calcutta which constricts her future prospects in life and career. Marriage with millionaire Bishwapriya Chatterjee transplants her in U.S.A. where she absorbs energy and vitality of western life to fulfil all her desires and encroach every code of conduct and restriction laid for ladies in Indian society. American society provides her those opportunities which were denied to her till then, but Bish’ traditional outlook estranges her from her husband and she is divorced. To embrace Americanism in totality she accepts divorce .Divorce leads to solitariness and solitariness causes wantonness. In an attempt to satisfy her feminist urges-unlimited liberty, sexual adventure with a Hungarian lover and career building-she loses her family, that is, husband and son. She does not realize her loss until a mysterious fellow Chris Dey enters her life and links her with her past. By introducing Chris Bharati Mukherjee explores the psyche of Tara and her diasporic feelings. Chris compels her to search her cultural identity, to make self assessment and to reexamine her past life.
Tara is a modern educated lady. When she migrates to San Francisco, she accepts the challenges of host country; she does not look backward. In stead of being afflicted with nostalgia she looks ahead for adjustment and survival. The conservative and strangulating Indian background works as a strong stimulus to let her enjoy a free and liberal atmosphere of America. She wears jeans and t-shirt in place of sari, drives car, establishes live in relation ship with Andy, accepts divorce, an ominous word in Indian dictionary and also grants her son Ravi gay sexuality. She indulges in the process of adaptation and assimilation like Bharati Mukherjee herself. Being an autobiographical presentation of the novelist herself, Tara journeys from aloofness of expatriation to the exuberance of immigration. She becomes ready to be changed like Jyoti of Mukherjee’s other novel Jasmine. She would echo Jasmine’s words: “I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bullet proof vest, was to be a coward.”(Jasmine 185)
Tara is more akin to Jyoti of Jasmine than Dimple of Wife. Like Jasmine Tara welcomes American life style and prepares to make a new identity. She differs from Dimple who fails to adjust with alien atmosphere ;becomes neurotic due to experiences of diaspora ; kills her husband and commits suicide, because she has hope and confidence to assimilate the host culture and adjust to the changed socio-cultural and geographical conditions.
Despite her positive response to displacement, Tara always feels herself a stranger .She can not change her inferior black race, nor can she control American outlook towards Indians. Like other Indian diasporas she suffers from the pangs of alienation, lack of belongingness and crisis of identity. She says: “I am sick of feeling an alien.”(Desirable Daughters, 87) “I am not the only Indian on the block. All the same, I stand out, I’m convinced. I don’t belong here.”(Desirable Daughters,79) She is a victim of racial discrimination, a common behaviour of humiliation practiced with every Indian in western countries. Tara says: “I didn’t have a single close friend in San Francisco…The Atherton wives treated me as a pariah I didn’t belong in India or in the Silicon Valley….” (Desirable Daughters, 109)
It is however noticeable that Tara never wishes to return to her homeland because Calcutta evokes memories of constriction and conservative ideologies. Her desire to visit her native land is temporary to satisfy some queries related to her family prestige.
While undergoing the process of assimilation the identity of Tara is transformed. Mukherjee elucidates her concept of fluid and changing identity through Tara. She agrees with the lines of Stuart Hall:
“The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.” (401-402)
Although Tara tries to get rid of her native identity, yet she can not completely desert it, for it flows in her blood. Her oscillation between Indian ethos and American value system thrusts her into a dilemma. She realizes that she is neither an Indian, nor an American. Her outer self is American, but her inner self is Indian. A character named Sidhu says to her: “You seem so American, but you have got an obsession with India.” (Desirable Daughters, 145). Despite her openness, she is not ready to digest the matter of her didi’s illegal son because she still believes virginity essential before marriage. She is divorced and lives freely with Andy, nevertheless she aspires for her family (husband Bish and son Ravi).She feels that her identity is fragmented, composed of multiple selves, accepting or rejecting certain aspects of both Indian and American culture. She comes to terms with the idea that she will never have a single identity, but rather be dispersed between being Indian and American. She does not fight with her multiplicity, rather accepts them as part of her progressive capacity. In this way, Tara keeps on changing and evolving, but at the same time, she does not completely lose her former identity. This is Taralata’s segmented assimilation in the novel. While Tara’s elder sisters Padma and Parvati try to transplant Indian culture in America and try to preserve it, she moulds and reshapes it to adjust to the world of adoption through her assimilative capacity.
Tara proves that survivor is one who accepts change and transforms oneself according to situation. Bharati Mukherjee’s heroines break the myth of single identity and try to balance the ‘world of origin’ and the ‘world of adoption’ through the process of assimilation. Unlike other Indian writers such as Kamala Markandaya and Anita Desai who treated the Indian immigrant situation as one of conflict and adjustment, Bharati Mukherjee gives it a new and challenging perspective enabling the immigrants to emerge out of their cocoons of defence into the openness of assertion.
Works Cited
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Chrisman. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Mukherjee, Bharati, Desirable Daughters, Rupa. Co. New Delhi, 2004.
Mukherjee, Bharati, Jasmine. New York: Grove Press, 1989.