Cultural Conflict, Assimilation and Self-Transformation in Bharati Mukherjee’s Selected Novels

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee's place in contemporary diaspora and American literature has the feature of the fact that the themes of migration, cultural clash, assimilation, identity, gender, displacement, and self-transformation are raised. Her protagonists are on the move searching for something that would help them realize their potential as individuals. Migration is presented as a process when people negotiate their values and beliefs since returning to the motherland or migrating to another region involves cultural, ideological, psychological, and geographical duality. The purpose of this paper is to examine cultural clash, assimilation and self-transformation in a number of Bharati Mukherjee's novels: The Tiger's Daughter (1971), Wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), and Desirable Daughters (2002). It is suggested that the immigrant identity in Bharati Mukherjee's novels changes in different phases of her story. The impact of cultural clash produces alienation, breakdown, and inability to adjust in the new cultural setting in her earlier novels. Later stories show that the notion of cultural displacement serves as a mechanism for self-creation and transformation. In The Tiger's Daughter, Tara Banerjee Cartwright discovers how little India has changed and the idealized India in which she had lived for twenty years is gone. Dimple, the protagonist of Wife, is faced with devastating cultural and patriarchal dislocation. Jasmine undergoes a set of transformations as she moves across the United States, living in different social circles. In Desirable Daughters, Tara has to negotiate her Indian traditional and American modern cultural values, her family history and the idea of multicultural identity. Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity and 'the Third Space' and his understanding of the process of diaspora and identity is a framework for this study. This study argues that Bharati Mukherjee problematizes the idea of fixed cultural identity and presents it as contingent and negotiated.