An Analysis of the Relationship Between Aziz and Fielding in "A Passage to India"

In the memoir, “By Any Other Name,” Santha Rama Rau explores the British attempt to replace Indian culture with the “superior” British culture and her resistance to this change. The speaker depicts this man vs. society conflict by sharing the story of a culture clash she experienced at a British run day school. The conflict is first seen when the headmistress decides to change the girls’ names, as indicated when she states, “Suppose we give you pretty English names” (Rama Rau 35). By calling English names pretty, the headmistress is implying their Indian names are not pretty, and thus inferior to British names. She said it was because Indians cheat…So I don’t think we should go back to that school. Another instance where the conflict is evident

might take offense if I accidentally referred to him as an Indian, though I could not really imagine Mr. Pirzada being offended by much of anything. “Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but he is a Muslim,” my father informed me. “Therefore he lives in East Pakistan, not India.” His finger trailed across the Atlantic, through Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and finally to the sprawling orange diamond that my mother once told me resembled a woman wearing a sari with her left arm extended. Various cities had been circled with lines drawn between them to indicate my parents’ travels, and the place of

this not motivate her to get back at him by having an affair of her

Immigrants’ refusal to appreciate a fused culture promotes division. Mukherjee questions the idea of immigrants losing their culture for American ideals: “Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture,” to that Mukherjee asks, “Is it so terrible that our children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?” (Mukherjee, 1997, para. 28). Many immigrants experience anger when their children no longer hold the ideals of their home country. This tension produced within the household hinders the unity within a resident country’s culture and encourages division within families. Using herself as an example, Mukherjee provides another instance of anger directed at her from her own subculture: “They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a U.S.

The best gift you can give anyone is hope, because without it, you don’t have a future to look forward to. The book “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie is about a teenage boy go looking for hope in a new environment. He left everything he know to pursue the unknown because he is looking for hope. The biggest step Junior have to take is transferring to Reardan, because this is where he can find hope. In the process Junior lost his best friend;he gains hope, and he is making new friends.

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

Indians gave corn; English didn’t try converting very hard; intermarriage wasn’t common, even w/ few Brit women; few Brits learn Indian language

One of the surface takeaways of the first few passages is the straightforward recognition of the audience i.e. other Muslims, who will be depending on this book for their first exposure to Indian subcontinent. It is important to note that the author does not use the word ‘Indian’ to address the natives of Indian subcontinent; rather addresses them as “Hindus” throughout the piece. He also categorizes the barriers he explained as those “separating Muslims and Hindus ” and not Indians from foreigners. This excludes people living in the Indian subcontinent practicing any religion other than Hinduism (like Buddhism) from Al Biruni’s analysis, and creates religiously powered in-group and

The novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie, is a tale about a hopeful 14-year-old boy named Arnold Spirit, also known as Junior, and the challenges that he faces being a poverty-stricken Spokane Native American Indian in a "white" man's world. Throughout the novel, Junior endures numerous obstacles and hardships; despite all of his adversities, he was determined to make a better life for himself and decided to go to a predominately white school away from his Indian reservation, where he had lived all of his life. Unfortunately, Junior did experience several problems relating to his cultural identity, some he faced while he was at his new school, others were on his Indian reservation, even though these obstacles temporally held him back he was able to overcome them.

Bharati married an American-Canadian fellow that would live in every part of North America with her over a span of thirty-three years. She became “opting to fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T-shirts, and renouncing three thousand years of caste-observant, ‘pure culture’ marriage in the Mukherjee family.” Despite their differences, the sisters knew they were the only blood relatives they had on the continent, so they had regular Sunday morning calls where they were carelessly affectionate. During these conversations the sisters would have small talk rather than speak what was truly on their mind, yet they pity one another: Mira “for the lack of structure in [Bharati’s] life, the erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying daily core.” Bharati “for the narrowness of [Mira’s] perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of the American society.” It is clear that the two differ, however, in the ways in which they hope to interact with the country

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters

He continued, “Participating in a social events or visiting a home requires conservative dress codes. Do not shake hands with ladies. Always pick things up and eat with your right hand. Take only as much as you can eat, do not leave anything uneaten over the dish. Do not point your finger at any person. It is taken as a sign of annoyance. Be careful of cultural and social sensitivities of the regions. Never buy food from roadside stalls or mobile canteens. Your system may not be accustomed to such delicacies and you might end up spending more time in the loo than normal. Indian English has its own delights, especially to foreigners of English nativity” (kwintessential ).He went on and on, and by the time we reached our hotel my head was spinning.

In the essay, “American Dreamer” by Bharati Mukherjee, Mukherjee writes about the problems of immigrants nowadays. Because of her families religious tradition, Mukherjee is confined by her permanent identity in her own culture, “a Hindu Indian’s last name announced his or her forefathers’ caste and place of origin…a Mukherjee could only be Brahmin from Bengal…my identity was viscerally connected with ancestral soil and genealogy” (Mukherjee 1). From her attitude towards her identity, Mukherjee does not want to confine by the Hindu tradition. She is rebellious against her own culture even though she understands Hindu tradition forbids any assimilation with any other culture. After her marriage with an American of Canadian origin, she

Bharathi Mukherjee’s later novels Jasmine(1989), The Holder of the World(1993) and Leave It to Me(1997) comprised her last creative phase conveniently termed here as the phase of immigration. By now she has travelled a long distance in terms of thematic perception and character portrayal. Beginning with an expatriate’s uprooted identity in the early 70’s, her creative faculty explored the transitional dilemma of characters in early 80’s, whose acculturation bids were occasionally thwarted by the complexity of cultural plurality in the adopted land. However, after the publication of The Middleman(1998), the process of cultural acclimatization appears to be complete and the characters betray the confidence of an immigrant, almost a naturalized citizen, in facing the challenges of human life.

Very early on in the novel, the reader is shown the sheer effort the British have put into keeping themselves separated from the natives of the land over which they rule. On the rise above the city of Chandrapore they build an entire community for themselves that is shielded from the native land, and physically above the native population. This lends much credence to the idea that the British felt they were better than, or above, the native peoples (Forster 4). There are homes, gardens, and even a community club where it would be almost impossible for a person to tell that they were in India. Everything is modeled around making it seem like they are still in their homeland of England. This separation from the native