Exploring the Implications, the Outcry and the Outcome of Marriage in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

Even so, Mukherjee was “opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and Tshirts, and renouncing 3,000 years of cate-observant, ‘pure culture’ marriage in the Mukherjee family” (273). She embraces the American culture because she acquires conformity from it. Mukherjee’s love for America makes her more susceptible to adjust into America to the point where she does not even follow her own Indian tradition. This changes her identity negatively because the more she embraces the American lifestyle, the more she surrenders her Indian heritage. If she did allow herself to gain citizenship while maintaining her Indian culture, perhaps her identity would not be jeopardized, however it is. Mukherjee loses her identity as a traditional Indian since chose the American lifestyle over her own, and hence this reveals the trauma of self-transformation that results from sacrificing one’s identity.

'Mrs. Sen’ is the sixth story of this collection in which Lahiri has portrayed proficiently and successfully the problems of immigrants such as displacement, restlessness, discrimination and marginalization in the migrated country, even after having found a place to settle in. This story exhibits the troubles faced by an Indian wife in a foreign culture. Mrs.Sen is one of two main characters in this story. She is a friendless woman who hopelessly misses her native place Calcutta, her home. Her husband took a job as a professor in a New England town. Life is very different for her there. She refuses to learn to drive because it’s not her interest, but the rejection also limits her experiences in her new country. She becomes a babysitter for

Indian fiction in English has matured itself over the years. It has become more expressive and experimental, both thematically and stylistically, than ever, and has come to establish itself as an indigenous branch of world literature. With the passage of time novel in English became recognized as an effective vehicle of human relationships in Indian society. Novelists since the formative years of this genre have been exploring through it, human relationships in the complex Indian society. R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Shashi Despande, Arundhti Roy, Kiran Desai, Jumpha Lahiri, Geeta Mehta, and Githa Hariharan etc., have produced social novels which deal with the theory of human relationships in the traditional and

The new worlds emerging from such phenomena go beyond the personal, for the country they left behind is changed as well as the one to which they go. The Indian diaspora contains a high number of professionals, making for a global expatriate community with a strong measure of influence and clout. Chaudhuri’s novel is a gently told, convincing glimpse into the life of one ordinary non-resident Indian, stated in deceptively simple, elegantly rendered.

Shashi Deshpande is one of the famous contemporary Indian novelists in English. She writes about the conflict between tradition and modernity in relation to women in middle class society. Shashi Deshpande’s novel deals with the theme of the quest for a female identity. The complexities of man-woman relationship especially in the context of marriage, the trauma of a disturbed adolescence. The Indian woman has for years been a silent sufferer. While she has played different roles-as a wife, mother, sister and daughter, she has never been able to claim her own individuality. Shashi Deshpande has emerged as a writer possessing deep insight into the female psyche. Focusing on the marital relation she seeks to expose the tradition

In the book, Arranged Marriage, by Chitra Divakaruni there are multiple stories that demonstrate arranged marriages from within the Indian culture. In some cases, arranged marriages work out better than others. However, in the short stories in her book, most don’t work out positively. In the short stories, “The Bats” and “The Disappearance”, the arranged marriages don’t work out. Chitra Divakaruni’s viewpoint on arranged marriages is clearly negative, due to violence, and the effect on children.

and Mrs. Das that is completely different from the life of Indian husband and wife. In India, we see that husband and wife don’t express their emotions for each other but in it doesn’t mean they don’t have the emotions or feelings. Though they don’t express themselves apparently, but they keep a strong intimacy, attachment for each other which is beyond the limitation. But in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Das, we see that they are quite frank, behave with their children like an elder brother and sister, not like parents. On the apparent level they have great intimacy but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that they lack the emotional attachment especially from the side of Mrs. Das as she is suffering from a guilt consciousness with which Mr. Das is completely unaware of. She even finds Mr. Kapasi as a suitable person to talk about her past instead of her husband. Interestingly enough, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Das was not an arrange marriage, rather Mrs. Das had fallen in love with Mr. Das at a young age and later they got married with the permission of their respective families but it can’t be called a typical arranged marriage. Even Mrs. Das frankly talks to Mr. Kapasi about her sexual relation with Mr. Das. This was quite unusual for a person like Mr. Kapasi, who has never seen his wife naked. Even he does not approve the infidelity which Mrs. Das has committed though his own marriage was not a happy

In Provoked and “The Disappearance” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, they describe how the Indian women leave their native country and immigrate to Western countries due to the arranged marriage that they have no rights to choose. Although the Indian women try to learn and integrate into Western culture, their husbands expect them to be a traditional Indian woman who should stay home and take care of the children, certainly isolated from mainstream society. If the Indian women try to rebel or challenge their husband’s authority, they are subject to their husband’s abuse in the fact of their machismo culture. This is because men try to retain their authority in the household as well as their status in the house. Men sometimes needed to take a step back and make a concession toward women by learning to respect women’s choice. This is because everyone has a different cultural background that shapes how one behaves and acts in the society based on his or her social group. If men offer freedom to their women, they will be able to retain their authority in the household.

Choosing between the Sexual Woman and the Relational Women becomes much more complicated for young religious women. They cannot decide whether to follow their religious guidelines on sex or to rebel against them and follow the ideals of non-religious sexual freedom. For example, Jayanthi, a twenty-nine-year-old Indian woman, is exposed to this conflict as she grew up in a traditional but moderately religious Hindu family. As a teenager, she “felt sheltered by her parents, who would not allow her to date” (34). Her parents expected her to be a good Indian girl who would marry another suitable Indian boy and follow Indian traditions and cultures. Many young women from families with traditional ideas and teachings about sex are sheltered and restricted. They are untrained in the methods of dating and having sexual relationships, which causes “uncertainty and anxiety” during their twenties (29). These women “split their social and psychological options[,] … lead[ing them] to assume that they cannot be strong and autonomous when they are interdependent with others, vulnerable, and intimate” (29). Jayanthi follows the persona of the Sexual Woman in order to avoid emotional commitment and to assert herself as a strong and independent woman. She rebels by “hooking up” with various male partners in order to disobey her culture and to create an identity for herself (33). However, she fails to feel independent due to the

Arranged marriages continue to be normative in many Asian cultures, such as Japan, India, Korea, and so on (Applbaum, 1995). Specifically, among Hindus in India, they continue to be the most popular form of organizing a marital relationship (Mullatti, 1995). Despite globalization, modernization, and urbanization, the number of arranged marriages continues to outnumber 'love ' or 'self-arranged ' marriages. In fact, an estimated 95% of all Hindu marriages in India are still arranged marriages (Chawla, 2004). My parents are Indian, my mother was born in the Islands of Fiji and my father was born in India, they both migrated to the US in Los Angeles, where they met though arranged marriage.

In India, marriage is a mean that relies on the parents' decisions. For example, Marriages in India are arranged marriages, they are forcing two people to get married. Marriages in this country is not a relationship of love for two people, but a connection between two families. Moreover, in this type of arranged marriage, the husband and wife have never met each other, and they have to live as a lifetime term with a partner that they don’t even know before. Indian family said that “Their kids will love and understand each other when they spend time to live together. Even though the arrangement of marriage in some countries

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian born American writer. Her writings explored the internal culture clashes of immigrant. She was born on 1940, July 22 she belong to an upper middle class Hind Brahmin family in Calcutta. She is second daughter of three for the parent of Sudhir Lal, a Chemis and Bina Banerjee. Until all age of eight she lived with big family with 40-50 relatives. Mukherjee and her sister had opportunity to receive rich excellent schooling. In 1947, her father move to England for his job and he brought his family too. Until 1951 they lived in England. Her life in England gave opportunity to develop and perfect her in English language skills.

It holds a mirror to the society and the issues focused upon are something every Indian woman is familiar with irrespective of her nativity. The author has talked about a myriad of issues ranging from patriarchy, child marriage to widow remarriage and marital rape. The novel also talks about the conservative and misogynistic ways in which our society works. A pre-pubescent girl is refused education for the fear of being left alone as all her friends had started menstruating and did not attend school anymore. A divorced woman who dared to voice her disagreement with the groom chosen for her by her family is almost driven to suicide by her own mother, fearing shame and disrespect in the society. A girl is married off to a man decades older to her just because her father lost a game of cards to that man. To keep family’s relations and honour intact, a teenage girl is married off to her cousin and is raped by him, all the while having to respect her father-in-law who also leaves no chance to harass her sexually. The novel gives us a true and honest account of Muslim women of Tamil

The concept of space is very relevant in the study of diasporic communities. Cultural otherness, generational and cultural alienation from their ethnic community leaves the Indian diasporic women trapped in a space between the culture of homeland and that of the host country. They lack security and emotional support from their family and the isolation leads diasporic women emotionally and economically dependent on their husbands to the problems like depression, loss and nostalgia. Lahiri’s The Namesake, is a cross cultural multi generational story which examines the cultural conflicts, pangs, aspirations and dilemmas of the Indian immigrants who find themselves in between the native and host cultures. Namesake is the story of Ashima Bhaduri, a student in degree class who becomes Ashima Ganguli after her betrothal to Ashoke Ganguli of Alipre. After marriage they shift to Boston. The book opens with Ashima Ganguly who is upset, homesick, spatially and emotionally alienated from her ancestral home, trying to recreate the taste of her favorite Indian snack, thereby trying to reconstruct her past. She thinks of her past with nostalgia of her home and spends her leisure in reading Bengali poems, stories and

Bharati Mukherjee’s female protagonists are immigrants and suffer cultural shock but they are anxious to establish their identity by undertaking their heroic journeys that is why Bharati Mukherjee received considerable critical attention from almost all the quarters of the globe in a relatively short period of just twenty five years. Even though she has been acknowledged as a voice of expatriate immigrants, sensibility, and a close observation of her novels reveals that she has written all the novels with predominantly feminist views. Mukherjee’s depiction of women and their different relationships portray the dominance of practical practices in traditional society, as well as the forms of liberation and empowerment which are available to women in their Diaspora’s situation.