Hindus By Mukherjee

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

A person has always been able to choose to what extent their cultural experiences affect their perspective. Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds,” Bharati Mukherjee’s, “Two Ways to Belong in America,” and Robert Lake’s, “An Indian Father’s Plea,” all show how the main characters have chosen to let their experiences have an effect on their cultural identity. A person’s cultural experiences shape perception based on their own identifications and they may chose to assimilate to different cultures.

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.

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.

Forming a new identity in a foreign country is not an easy task. Immigrants usually face challenges to identify themselves. Identity formation is the development of one’s distinctive personality due to particular reasons such as new environment, new culture and conflicts. During the process, some characters from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake either create or deny the bond with their own culture; some undergo conflicts among generations. Those processes reflect significantly in Ashima and Gogol throughout the book. The degree of assimilations determines to what extent the characters have formed the new identity in the new culture.

Jasmine is a novel of emigration and assimilation, both on physical and psychological levels. In this novel, Bharati Mukherjee novelizes the process of Americanization by tracing a young Indian woman’s experiences of trauma and achievement in her attempt to forge a new identity for herself. The story is told from the first-person point of view by the female protagonist, who undergoes multiple identity transformations in her quest for self-empowerment and happiness. Mukherjee uses the movielike techniques of flashback and cross-cutting to fuse Jasmine’s past and present. The novel is immersed in violence.

Before analysing Mukherjee’s novels citically, it is important to survey and review the critical works on Bharati Mukherjee and her fictional work. The present chapter provides a general review and assessment of critics on Mukherjee's fiction. In Bharati Mukherjee: A Perspective, Sushma Tondon examines her three novels entitled Tiger’s Daughter, Wife and Jasmine. She also analyses her collections of short stories entitles Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories. She concludes that in her novels Mukherjee has made a concerted effort to conceptualise the image of the immigrants. She portrays the immigrants who assert their claim to an American identity by struggling heroically to reinstate themselves successfully in a new cultural space. Some of Mukherjee's characters strive to find a niche and get for them a second chance to build their lives on the alien land. As an artist in immigrant tradition, Mukherjee tries to redefine the process of migration in a novel way. As shown in her later novels, immigration for some of the post-modern and post-colonial characters is an opportunity to redefine their own identities. After analysing all her fictional work,

The work of fiction that challenged and encouraged my perceptions on ‘identity’ and ‘discrimination’ is a piece of short fiction called ‘Rudali’, written in Bengali by Mahasweta Devi and translated to English by Anjum Katyal. This text serves as an epitome of class, caste and gender subalternity in the historic context of brahmanical patriarchy. The protagonist individualises the discrimination exerted on low caste communities via the triple oppression faced by them under these structures of society (i.e caste,class and gender) and tries to subvert these hegemonic structures from within. The title of the book, “Rudali”

Her characters are either first generation or second generation Indian Immigrants to America. The Indian immigrant characters went to America for getting more affluence and better social realities. But there they face another kind of problems-the problems of racial discrimination, constant tension, bitter alienation and pungent hardships in their activity compact day-to-day life. They revert back to their native lands. They are seized in what Avtar Brah says “the homing desire of the migrants” (Brah. 180). They are also caught between two diametrically opposite cultural values-the values of the native country and that of the host country. Because they cannot fully shed off the cultural values of their native land under which they or their former generations had been so long born and brought up and cannot totally adapt to the cultural values of the alien country. Consequently they suffer from utmost loneliness, complete uprootedness, and mental agonies.. They are divided multicultural

It becomes difficult for them to balance between the provoking economy of America and the ethical weight of Indian in their immigrant sensibility. In an ethical imagination they believe that self-exile for money is a sin and acculturation is expiation for it. In a dilemma they worship Mammon and Manu for a double gain but lose one for other on hybridity.

The AKA people of India, a minority group who lead a simple lifestyle in a small Indian village, speaks an eccentric language . However, the AKA language is in a verge of disappearance according to a sub-article called “AKA.” D’Souza, an AKA non-native who works as a school teacher in the village, have learnt speaking the AKA language, and is driven to preserve it by promoting the use of this language among his students. Similar to the AKA people, in a bordering country of India, is the situation of another minority group who are also facing a verge of disappearance. In the case of this minority group, the Rohingyas, are victims to disappearance of an entire ethnic group. This Muslim minority population, living mainly in the

Many a writers of Indian Diaspora have expressed their true emotions and fear through their writing in multifaceted ways. For the non resident Indian writers the struggle is everywhere, whereas the Indians trapped in the cultural conflict in their country itself endure a constant struggle which ends nowhere leads nowhere. The Man Booker prize winning Indian works Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, The Inheritance of Loss, and The White Tiger are written with an intention to discuss the inner struggles faced by various elements of the society in India and outside India. The cultural confusion naturally suffered in the displaced society is experience by the characters of the novels in some or the way. They are not able to get rid

Bharati Mukherjee an established, diasporic women writer has made her corpus in immigrant sensibility and cross-cultural crisis not only in American or Canadian context but also in India. All her previous novels or stories deal with the women protagonists in assimilation of alien cultures in alien lands. But Miss New India is purely set within India but the western cultural effects have played a vital role in developing the themes. It creates a new orientation of woman identity dealing with the conservative thoughts of patriarchal system and modern western life style cultural effects in growing India. It deals with various issues such as rape, international terrorism, false charges of murder, police brutality, arranged marriage system, teenage runaway, divorce life, gay life in India, prostitution, art of theft, suicide, role of outsourcing of Indian economy, the art of photography, homelessness, telecom centers (call center life), immigrating in India and assimilation in Indian culture.

Bharati Mukherjee, currently working as a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, presents a deep insight into the Indian culture and immigrant experience through her works. The Indian-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee is one of the prominent novelists of Indian Diaspora. She has created a fair place for herself in the literary circle abroad, by her contribution to Indian English writing. Her commendable work places her in the class of great diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri. The ailment of the human psyche is Bharati’s forte. She emphatically displays the damaging effects of the severance of the natural roots and the dislocation of geography, climate, race, custom which leads to ‘ declining

Ruth Jhabvala’s first novel reveals world order in which a stubborn identification with one’s inherited culture is both realistic and desirable. This identification has its genesis in the ancient code of laws laid down in the Dharma Shastras. An adherence sustained over the centuries to the social order created thereof, with its ramifications of caste and class and separations attendant upon them, still shapes and colours the Indian outlook as Ruth Jhabvala sees it. The characters of her novel identify with a well defined area, predetermined by birth and heritage and share a common conviction that only disruption and unhappiness can result from a violation.