Chapter IV

Rootless Expatriates in The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife

Bharati Mukherjee went to America as a student, and then lived in Canada for a few

years, with her Canadian husband Clark Blaise. In 1980, she moved back to America, where

she currently lives. She is one writer, who would rather be considered as being from her

adopted homeland, rather than as an Indian English expatriate writer. In fact, in an interview

with Alison B. Carb in 1987, she said that she viewed herself as an American author in the

tradition of other American authors whose ancestors arrived in Ellis Island.

Mukherjee‟s fiction portrays expatriate characters and their experiences. Mukherjee

makes a clear distinction between expatriates and immigrants:

Expatriates, she claims, have a „cultural retentiveness‟ which ensures that

they remain a visible minority. Whereas immigrants must necessarily

transform themselves by taking risks and letting go of the past, in order to

become assimilated in a new social and cultural role in their adopted

homelands. (Bharucha and Nabar 269)

The first phase of expatriation in the career of Bharati Mukherjee comprises of her two early

novels The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife which were written during her stay in Canada. As

Jasbir Jain points out, “Mukherjee‟s novels are representative of the expatriate sensibility.”

(12) Bharati Mukherjee‟s The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife deal with two different problems of

expatriates. Both the novels show how the immigrants in America try to adapt to the

American culture and in consequence, are portrayed as rootless. Mukherjee depicts the

predicament of the expatriates who are confused and desperate by breaking their ties with

their native culture.

The Tiger’s Daughter is about Tara, a convent educated Calcutta girl, who goes to

America for higher education, and is married to an American, David Cartwright. She returns

to Calcutta after seven years of stay in America. This is similar to Mukherjee‟s own trip back

to India with her Canadian husband, Clark Blaise. Tara feels more alienated on her return, as

she encounters the clash of cultures and values in Calcutta. Hence, the westernized Tara feels

like an alien in her own country. Therefore in the end, she decides to return to her husband

David in America. Aparajita Ray rightly comments: “The protagonist Tara Banerjee

Cartwright makes a trip home to India to soothe her ruffled feathers but becomes painfully

aware that her memories of a genteel Brahmin lifestyle are usurped by her westernization”

(84). Instead of being comforted by middle-class Bengali Brahmin traditions, Tara is now

struck by great impressions of poverty, hunger, disease, and political turmoil.

Tara‟s father „The Bengal Tiger‟ sends Tara to New York for higher studies at the age

of fifteen. As a student, Tata faces discrimination on the alien soil. She feels home sickness:

“For Tara, Vassar had been an almost unsalvageable mistake… she would have rushed home

to India at the end of first week.” (The Tiger’s Daughter 10) Though she confronts

discrimination in the foreign land, she faces it boldly and even reacts aggressively to defend

her family and her native country when her friends try to ridicule it. Whenever she feels

broken, she prays to goddess Kali for strength. She hangs silk scarves around her apartment

to make it more Indian at times of her loneliness. “Like any expatriate in a country like

America, Tara creates a „little India‟ physically and emotionally without any communication

whatsoever with the host culture. As Tara‟s relationship with India too is fragile, she feels

homeless” (Stephen 21). During her stay in America, Tara, at first, finds it difficult to adjust

to the alien culture, hence, her sense of loneliness. But with the exposure to American culture

and its strangeness, Tara learns to develop qualities of courage, determination and strength.

Tara‟s stay in America for seven years has totally changed her attitude. She thinks on

her own and gives importance to her desires. When she comes across cultural conflicts in

America, she tries to resolve it by herself. In the meantime, she meets David Cartwright an

American, falls in love with him and takes a bold decision to marry him overlooking her

family customs and traditions. Tara who had defended her Indian heritage breaks it with

courage by marrying an American who is considered an outcaste by her family. She believes

that her marriage with an American will give her new meaning to her American life. Tara‟s

American attitude to life is easily sensed by her relatives in India. They find her “stubborn”:

“the relatives attributed Tara‟s improprieties, to her seven years in America” (The Tiger’s

Daughter 19). It is America‟s influence on her that has changed her perspective about India.

Tara‟s rootless self makes the scenery, outside, “merely alien and hostile.” (25) The dullness,

emptiness and desperation are evoked by her American life:

New York, she thought now, had been exotic. . . . there were policemen with

dogs prowling the underground tunnels. Because girls like her…were being

knifed in elevators in their own apartment buildings…. The only pollution she

had been warned against in Calcutta had been caste pollution. New York was

certainly extraordinary and it had driven her to despair. (33-34)

Tara is torn between mutually contradictory emotions on seeing Aunt Jharna since she

cannot sympathize with her aunt‟s religious attempts to heal the child, and also, she does not

hate them all. Her innocent remark, whether Aunt Jharna has tried plaster casts and special

shoes for her clubfooted child is seriously mistaken by Aunt Jharna as she rebukes Tara:

“You think you are too educated for this, don‟t you? . . . . You have come back to make fun

of us, haven‟t you? What gives you the right? Your American money? Your mleccha

husband?” (36-37). In India Tara finds nothing to her liking. For Tara, Calcutta appears to be

a city with riots, political upheaval, buses burning, and workers surrounding the warehouses.

Seven years ago, Tara had admired “the houses on Marine Drive” (18) but her stay at Vassar

has changed her outlook on Indian life. The very houses she admired then, “now their

shabbiness appalled her” (18). Aparajita Ray remarks: “She discovers she is more an outsider

than a native, having an objective concern with the complex and confusing web of politics,

privilege and the hierarchies of power and class in India” (84). To her dismay Tara

understands that Calcutta, the city that she loved so much, is slowly becoming a nightmare.

The streets were crowded with people shouting slogans, looting shops, breaking

windowpanes, and assaulting of upper class people.

Tara and David lead a contended life in the United States, yet Tara is apprehensive of

the fact that he is a Westerner. When David asks Tara minute details about her family

background, and India tradition, she fails to communicate its finer aspects. Nagendra Kumar

comments: “Her failure to do so is rooted in their cultural differences. In India marriage is not

simply a union of two individuals, it is coming together of two families as well. But in

Western countries like America, a marriage is simply a contract between two individuals”

(30). Tara‟s apprehension about her husband‟s inability to understand her country through her

leads to doubt, fear, and misunderstanding in their personal relationship. The cultural

differences between Tara and David cause the feeling of insecurity in Tara. To overcome this

feeling, she decides to visit India after a gap of seven years. Tara arrives to India with little

awareness that her attitude has changed after her seven years stay in America. In turn, her

hope of getting comfort on her native soil gets shattered. She feels lonely and insecure even

when she is in the company of her friends and relatives. Stanley Stephen rightly states: “Her

problems of alienation, loneliness, despair, loss of identity and total anonymity in America

springs forth from her rootless condition. Her impulsive decision is to go back to India and

belong there.” (21) But now after her return from America: “She feared their tone, their

omissions, their aristocratic oneness.” (The Tiger’s Daughter 43) After seeing Tara‟s

negative reaction to the deterioration of Calcutta city, her friend Reena tells that she has

become “self-centered and European”. (105)

Tara feels that the Indians who show much interest for foreign things, dresses, etc. do

not approve marriage with foreign people. “She had expected admiration from these friends.

She had wanted them to consider her marriage an emancipated gesture. But emancipation was

suspicious – it presupposed bondage.”(86) Tara feels quite detached from her friends and

relatives due to her marriage with David Cartwright, an American. Aparajita Ray remarks: “.

. . her [Tara‟s] marriage aggravates her discomfort and unease and hangs on her heart like a

burden . . . . she was aghast at their conservative attitude.” (87) Through the relationship of

Tara and David, Mukherjee shows the problems of cross - cultural bonds. Mukherjee links

together the events like Tara‟s visit to the funeral pyre, her meeting with a small beggar girl

affected with leprosy, the vision of children eating on the streets, the superficial routine life

of her friends, the violence and riots in Calcutta, and her victimization by the lecherous

politician. Tara feels that Americans would never understand poverty, since America is a land

of abundance and opportunity.

Tara experiences alienation at all points of her life. Her relatives call her

“Americawali” (42), and her husband “mleccha” (36), an outcaste. Such label distinctions

intensify the agony of her mind. Above all, her mother‟s changed attitude toward her puts her

in dismay: “Perhaps her mother sitting serenely before God on a tiny rug, no longer loved her

either. After all Tara had willfully abandoned her caste by marrying a foreigner. Perhaps, her

mother was offended that she, no longer a real Brahmin, was constantly in and out of this

sacred room, dipping like a crow” (56). Tara expects her friends to approve of her marriage to

a foreigner. They want to listen to stories about America, foreign things, dresses and other

items, but they make her feel that she is a sinner because of her marriage to a foreigner.

Mukherjee subtly brings out the conservative attitude of Indians in the novel: “They were

racial purists, thought Tara desperately. They liked foreigners in movie magazines – Natwood

and Bobwagner….. But they did not approve of foreign marriage partners.” (86)

Tara forgets the next step of the rituals while preparing for worship with her mother

and at once realizes: “It was not a simple loss, Tara feared, this forgetting of prescribed

actions; it was a little death, a hardening of the heart, a cracking of axis and center” (51).

Religion plays a vital role in any culture. When Tara forgets the rituals, it upsets her because

she realizes that her westernization had made her oblivious of her religious traditions. Now

she has become „foreign‟ to her native values also and it fills her with a sense of rootlessness.

She starts questioning the validity of her identity. She is totally confused. Tara cannot share

her feelings with her friends and relatives, and she fails to express her feelings for her foreign

husband. For David she is a foreigner and for her Indian friends and relatives she is a sinner

who has polluted herself by marrying a “mleccha” (outcaste). As M.Sivaramkrishna

comments:

Tara in The Tiger’s Daughter finds it difficult to relate herself to the family,

city, culture in general since her marriage to an American, her western

education are enough signs to brand her as an „alienated‟ westernized woman.

The implicit logic is that since she is exposed to the West and has absorbed its

values she must be necessarily alienated. Therefore even when she tries to

„voice‟ her continuing attachment for identity with India, the voice does not

carry conviction . . . of indifference and arrogance − one generally associates

with the „westernized‟ (exiled) Indian. (74)

Tara‟s western education and American husband cause the feeling of rootlessness and sense

of not belonging to either India or America.

Tara realizes that America has transformed her completely. Her westernization has

helped her view the wide gulf between the two worlds that cannot be bridged together. In

India she sees despair, disease, riot, poverty, and children eating yogurt off side walk. She has

now started looking at the negative aspects of India. There is always an ongoing conflict

between her old sense of perception and outlook on Calcutta and her changed outlook in her

mind. As Jasbir Jain in her article, “Foreignness of Spirit: The World of Bharati Mukherjee‟s

Novels” rightly states: “Tara‟s consciousness of the present is rooted in her life in the States

and when she looks at India anew it is not through her childhood associations or her past

memories but through the eyes of her foreign husband David. Her reactions are those of a

tourist, of a foreigner.” (13) Tara begins to look at India as a land of poor people living in

hostile, unhygienic conditions and suffering from starvation, disease and decay. Tara visits

Kananbala Mata Devi ashram at the request of her pious mother. She feels her soul uplifted

by the “darshan” (The Tiger’s Daughter 172) of Mata, forgetting all the hatred and

wickedness for the time being. She experiences a sort of trance in the temple which is a

typical religious experience: “Warm and persistent tears rose in Tara‟s heart. She forgot her

instinctive suspicions, her fears of misunderstandings and scenes, she forgot her guardedness

and atrophy in that religious moment. „Ma, Ma, Mata!‟ she shouted with the rest” (173).Tara

thus finds comfort and strength in her conscious returning to the rites and traditions of her

religious faith.

Tara meets the politician Tuntunwala, the same ugly Marwari fellow with whom she

had travelled in the train from Bombay to Calcutta. Tara has come across Mr.Tuntunwala

several times. She has always felt a kind of strange attraction towards Tuntunwala and so

when he proposes to show Nayapur, she does not decline his proposal. Finally this meeting

ends with her claustrophobic rape by this wretched politician. Tara has not faced any such

disgraceful incident in America, whereas she is raped on her own native soil. According to

Aparajita Ray, “Tara‟s psyche is always tragic as a result of the tension created in the mind

between two socio-cultural environments, between the feeling of rootlessness and nostalgia.”

(85) Tara senses the deterioration of Indian culture when she falls a prey to the lust of the

lecherous politician. Tara is ignorant of the changes that have taken place in Calcutta as the

author says:

In another Calcutta such a scene would not have happened. Tara would not have

walked into the suite of a gentleman for medicine, and a gentleman would not

have dared to make such improper suggestions to her. But except for Camac

Street, Calcutta had changed greatly; and even Camac Street had felt the first

stirrings of death. With new dreams like Nayapur Tara‟s Calcutta was

disappearing. (199)

Tara is unaware of the changes in Calcutta and becomes a victim of the degrading culture in

India. She does not even tell her friends about this incident for the fear of disgrace. At last she

decides to leave for America to find security in her husband‟s affinity.

The last pages of the novel are full of rapid and forceful incidents. The whole of

Calcutta city is burning with violent protests and riots, and in the riot even Tara‟s friend

Pronob is unfortunately killed by the mob. Mukherjee ends the novel with: “Tara, still locked

in a car across the street from the Catelli – Continental, wondered whether she would ever get

out of Calcutta, and if she did not, whether David would ever know that she loved him

fiercely.” (210)

It is not known whether Tara meets her husband or not as the novel ends with Tara caught in

the midst of a riotous Calcutta. Nagendra Kumar in his book The Fiction of Bharati

Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective, remarks: “In a sense the turmoil outside is but an external

manifestation of Tara‟s inner state of mind and by leaving her amidst that turmoil, perhaps,

Mukherjee hints at the irreconcilability of such conflicts”. (42) It may be said that Tara‟s

sense of not belonging to either India or America is due to „hybridity‟. As Homi Bhabha the

post-colonial critic suggests, “Hybridity can lead to sense of dislocation and a lack of

belonging that comes out of diaspora of colonization. This hybrid form of identity can

…result in conflicting loyalties and identity crises and can lead to alienation and the situation

in which the hybridized subject is always outside of belonging.”(qtd. in Edwards 140)

Mukherjee has clearly presented the cultural conflict of the East and the West in The

Tiger’s Daughter. Tara‟s attempt at assimilation in America ends in failure due to her

„otherness‟. She breaks her family tradition by marrying an American to find security in an

alien land. But her marriage also proves a failure since she always remains nervous and

apprehensive that her husband is a foreigner, and how well he would understand her and her

Indian tradition. While in India, she feels alienated due to her changed outlook on Indian life

after her seven years stay in America. From the beginning to the end of the novel, Tara has

been shown as shuttling between the world of alienation and the world of belonging- the

Western world and the Indian world. She realizes that she is now neither Indian nor truly

American. She is totally confused and lost. “Throughout the novel she is shown as torn apart

by the feeling of nostalgia and rootlessness. She has to pass through the intense cataclysmic

feelings of alienation and yearning for belongingness” (Siroha 113).Tara is caught between

two contrasting cultures, and realizing that the gulf between the two worlds cannot be joined

together, she decides to go back to her husband in America, her adopted homeland.

Bharati Mukherjee‟s novels deal with the attempts of the Indian and other Third

World immigrants to tackle the problem of loss of culture and their endeavour to assume a

new identity in the United States. The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife consist of many similarities.

In both the novels, Mukherjee uses general terms or kinship terms like the daughter of Bengal

Tiger or wife of Amit Basu to refer to the protagonists, which show the dependent nature of

both the protagonists. The narrative technique used in both these novels is omniscient

narration. However, there are dissimilarities between the two protagonists as well. Tara and

Dimple move in opposite directions. As Jasbir Jain states, “Dimple‟s journey-unlike Tara‟s is

undertaken in search of fulfillment and self-expression. Wife does not begin where The

Tiger’s Daughter ends, but it progresses in the opposite direction.” (15) Tara returns to

Calcutta, her homeland after her seven years stay in the United States to reclaim her roots and

to overcome her doubts and fears she experienced in the alien land. On the contrary, Dimple

migrates to the United States in search of her future.

The second novel Wife belongs to the period of transition from the expatriate phase to

the immigrant phase in Mukherjee‟s own life. According to D. Lakshmana Rao, “The

experience and fate of the immigrant wife Dimple Dasgupta in Mukherjee‟s second novel

Wife is disturbing since it shows the protagonist uprooted and exiled from her culture and

transplanted into an entirely alien culture” (117). Dimple fails to attain her identity in the

process of uprooting and replanting from one culture to another. She does not accept America

as her permanent destination and prefers to return to India, particularly to Calcutta, expecting

“him to find a job so that after a decent number of years, he could take his savings and retire

with her to a three-story house in Ballygunje Park”. (Wife 89) The novel is a clear depiction

of the life of an Indian woman whose lifestyle is wholly untraditional, and whose mind is

disturbed due to neuroses. Through the inclusion of letters, songs, advertisements and other

mundane information, Mukherjee succeeds in portraying an unsteady, modern woman‟s life

in an alien land. Dimple who migrates to America with her husband Amit suffers also due to

her psychic problem. The novel is a vivid depiction of the plight of an Indian expatriate

woman. Mukherjee‟s own expatriate experience in Canada and the United States has given

greater authenticity to the narrative of the novel.

Dimple is misled by the evil impact of American culture to murder her husband as she

is used to watching T.V. shows depicting murder and violence. According to Justin D.

Edwards, “All of these forms of violence have arisen out of the movement, migration and

displacement of people through imperialism.” (73) Dimple turns neurotic and fails to

differentiate between what she sees on T.V. and what she experiences in reality. It is America

which intensifies her confusion and turns the violence inside out and she ends up murdering

her husband. She is unable to adapt to the alien culture and lifestyle, and as a result, feels

alienated and resentful. Her efforts in assimilating cultural identities remain confined with

socializing with a few Indians, watching television, listening to the happenings like mugging,

kidnapping, flirts, rape, murder and so on. The violence in America adds to the already

existing inherent psychic traits of Dimple. Dimple‟s character is endowed with some

symbolic dimensions. The name Dimple is a deliberate choice of the author where she quotes

the Oxford English Dictionary meaning of “Dimple” as “any slight surface depression” (1) at

the beginning of the novel. The word “depression” present in the meaning of her name never

allows Dimple to get rid of the various stages of frustrations caused by the excessive cross-

cultural crisis. It has been argued that the plight of Dimple in the United States is an outcome

of her psychological abnormality rather than the cross-cultural aspects. This is partly true,

since Dimple suffers from mental distress even in Calcutta as Jasbir Jain aptly remarks : “It is

difficult to treat the novel as a study of cultural shock for even while in Calcutta, Dimple is

an escapist and lost in her private world of fantasy…” (16)

From the very beginning of the novel, Dimple seems to be different from normal girls.

Dimple has nothing to do except think about marriage because she thinks that marriage is a

blessing in disguise, which will bring her freedom, fortune and happiness: “Marriage would

bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, fund-raising dinners for noble

charities. Marriage would bring her love.” (Wife 3) Dimple is an imaginative girl, and dreams

of living in foreign countries. Nothing pleases her more than the imagination about marrying

a fellow who provides her all material comforts. Mr. Dasgupta, Dimple‟s father finds a

suitable match for Dimple, Amit Basu a consultant Engineer who has already applied for

immigration to Canada and the United States. When Dimple comes to Amit‟s residence after

the marriage, she finds it small and unattractive, and feels uncomfortable. She does not like

Amit‟s mother and sister also. She is infuriated when her mother-in-law wants to call her

“Nandini”, but does not protest outwardly.

Dimple always lives in a world of fantasy, a world which is created by herself. But,

when she confronts the harsh realities of life, all her imagination is shattered. When all her

dreams are crumbled, she becomes upset, and starts hating everything around her: “She hated

the gray cotton with red roses inside yellow circles that her mother-in-law had hung on

sagging tapes against the metal bars of the windows”. (Wife 20) Dimple thinks that marriage

has robbed her of all romantic yearnings that she tastefully cherished. Amit was not the man

Dimple had imagined to be her husband, and she does not love him. Had she done that, she

would not have created the ideal man of her dream: “She borrowed a forehead from an

aspirin ad, the lips, eyes and chin from a bodybuilder and shoulders ad, the stomach and legs

from a trousers ad and she put the ideal man.” (23)

For Indian women, pregnancy is a boon because they are supposed to maintain the

continuity of the family. But Dimple reacts contrary to this view as “She thought of ways to

get rid of . . . whatever it was that blocked her tubes and pipes” (31). Her aversion with her

own pregnancy is developed due to her hatred for Amit who fails to fulfill her fantasies.

Dimple is about to migrate so she “does not want to carry any relics from her old life” (42).

She thinks that old things will remind her of frustrations and irritations. She feels that

motherhood will rob her of the pleasures of leading a comfortable life in a foreign country.

Hence she violently aborts the baby by skipping ropes. The description of her self-abortion is

very poignant and touching:

“She had skipped rope until her legs grew numb and her stomach burned; then she had

poured water from the heavy bucket over her head, shoulders, over the tight curve of her

stomach. She had poured until the last of the blood washed off her legs; then she collapsed.”‟

(42) Dimple does not regret for the cruel deed that she has committed by killing a prospect

human life. In this regard, Rosanne Klass comments: “For an Indian wife, childlessness is a

disaster, pregnancy the achievement that steals her status. To overturn such inherent values

would involve a major emotional upheaval; yet Dimple acts on the vaguest and most

undefined impulses, and thinks no more about it.” (88) It has to be remembered that Dimple‟s

strange behaviour should not be related to the values of Indian culture, since Mukherjee has

pointed out the psychic defect of Dimple at the beginning of the novel itself. Maya Manju

Sharma has stated that Dimple‟s act of abortion “is a sacrament of liberation from the

traditional roles and constraints of womanhood”. (15)

Dimple arrives with her husband to the Land of Promise with her dreams and

aspirations, deprived of Indian values. Dimple and Amit are received in New York by Jyoti

Sen, Amit‟s former classmate at the I.I.T. Kharagpur. Dimple feels excited and a little scared

as well in her migration to America. The magnificence of New York terrifies her, and she is

baffled by the exposure to American culture. Nagendra Kumar comments on her condition

thus: “How a boorish, an innocent Indian wife can keep her nerves in a country where murder

was like flapping the bugs?” (49). The following lines describe Dimple‟s state of mind: “She

was caught in the crossfire of an American Communalism, she could not understand. She felt

she‟d come very close to getting killed on her third morning in America”. (Wife 60) The very

first exposure to America leaves a traumatic effect on Dimple‟s mind. Her bewilderment with

America is due to her sheltered childhood, as she had hardly ever been out of Calcutta. She

does not know what might offend anybody there to cost her precious life itself.

Dimple is gripped by a sense of nostalgia. It is just beyond her understanding “how

could she live in a country...where every other woman was a stranger, where she felt

different, ignorant, exposed to ridicule in the elevator?” (11). Her whole world is limited to

the four walls of the apartment, assisting Meena Sen, watching T.V. or reading newspapers

and magazines. Through the media, she is exposed to violence in America. Pradpsinh B.

Rathod in hthe article, “The Psycho/Cross-cultural Patterns in the Protagonist of Bharati

Mukherjee‟s Wife” comments: “In Calcutta Dimple used to work out on a few constructive

and homely activities like sewing, cooking and reading, rather than a passive addict to the

T.V. set as in New York. Those seemingly trivial activities lose meanings in the American

society where materialism, individualism, intolerance and lack of communication persist in.”

(35) She also hears more about murder, suicides, muggings, rapes and racial prejudices to

which she succumbs very quickly. Therefore, she constantly lives in fear of the unknown.

Dimple‟s disgust with American English and American system gets intensified even by small

things. She is afraid of operating the self-service elevators. Linda Sandler explains this in

terms of her traditional upbringing: “Dimple emigrates to the electronic age with her

traditional values almost intact, only partly modified by the pop culture of modern Calcutta,

she is unable to make the transition from Before to After and chooses violence as a „problem

– solving‟ device.” (75)

Amit and Dimple experience frustrations at many levels. Amit is frustrated as he finds

himself jobless initially during his stay in New York. Dimple realizes that she is deceived in

her marriage and a husband like Amit cannot fulfill her dreams. Her hatred for Amit

continues with much intensity. “She wanted Amit to be infallible, intractable, godlike, but

with a boyish charm.” (Wife 89) She thinks that her marriage to Amit is a failure of her

dreams: “She was bitter that marriage had betrayed her, had not provided all the glittery

things she had imagined, had not brought her cocktails under canopied skies and three A.M.

drives to dingy restaurants where they sold divine kababs rolled in roti” (102). Her confusion

with the names of places like Nebraska and Nevada, Ohio and Iowa is only an external

manifestation of the confusion growing within her mind. Her frustrations and violent

reactions against Amit not only show her inability to adjust herself to the new world but the

constant violent attitude of New York life also.

Amit and Dimple fail to communicate with each after both of them get exposed to the

alien culture. This has a marked effect upon their relationship. M. L. Pandit aptly points out:

Dimple, the obedient and faithful Indian wife, gradually loses faith in the

ambitious dreams of success that Amit nurtures to the last. She is the first to

realize that he is too spineless a person to succeed in the competitive economic

jungle of New York. At the same time, she finds it not so easy for a young woman

like her, born and bred in a totally different environment, to adjust to the

American ways.” (39)

Dimple suffers from inferiority complex and thinks that she is unable to win her husband‟s

love and affection. Amit spends more time in his work and thinks that providing material

comforts is enough to make Dimple happy, but fails to understand her emotional needs. Both

fail to communicate their true feelings for each other. Though their living conditions

improve, they feel lonely. The lack of communication between Amit and Dimple develop a

breach between them which widens day by day and ultimately ruins their relationship.

Dimple tries to assimilate into the American culture, but fails due to a lack of „shared

faith‟. She finds it difficult to adjust “with the people who didn‟t understand about Durga

Pujah” (Wife 114). According to Nagendra Kumar,

An expatriate is tenaciously conscious of preserving his identity in most trying

moments of life. In America, she realizes how easy it was to live, to

communicate, to share with people in Calcutta. She never felt frightened at the

sight of the policemen whose faces were so friendly, but the scene has

changed completely in the new environment. (53)

Dimple is so distressed by the American life that she becomes frustrated, and thinks that the

prevalent violence in the American society has made her timid and nervous. She does not tell

Amit about her imaginary beginnings and keeps everything secret from him.

Dimple seems to have expected some trouble in the American set up, but she had

never imagined it „to be strained like this beyond endurance‟. As Mukherjee says, “She had

expected pain when she had come to America, had told herself that pain was part of any new

beginning, and in the sweet structures of that new life had allotted pain a special place.” (Wife

115) Shyam M. Asnani attributes Dimple‟s mental state to the „dilemma of cultures‟:

“Dimple is entrapped in a dilemma of tensions between American culture and society and the

traditional constraints surrounding an Indian wife, between a feminist desire to be assertive

and independent and the Indian need to be submissive and self-effacing.” (42) Dimple feels

very lonely, isolated and distressed, when Milt Glasser and Ina Mullick‟s visits become rare.

The loveless relationship with her husband adds to her miseries. Dimple suffers from

insomnia. She experiences “waking nightmares” (Wife 97) and starts thinking about seven

ways of committing suicide. In the apartment on Bleecker Street, she feels like “a star

collapsing inwardly” (109). She does not want to be an Americanized woman like Ina

Mullick, nor does she want to be like Meena Sen living an expatriate life. She is trapped

between the expatriates and the immigrants, hence, she feels estranged from the community.

Amit‟s callous attitude, fear of violence as well as persistent thoughts of suicide aggravates

Dimple‟s neurotic problem and finally leads to the cruel murder of her husband.

At times of loneliness, Dimple contemplates over seven ways of committing suicide.

When her loneliness becomes unbearable, she turns to media and the T.V. becomes her sole

companion. She gets so involved with the media that she gets obsessed with words like dark,

evil, sinister, gruesome, murder, suicide, mugging etc., and she trusts nobody but the media.

Even “her body seemed curiously alien to her, filled with hate, malice, and insane desire to

hurt, yet weightless, almost air borne.” (117) From her suicidal thoughts develop the idea of

murdering her husband. Linda Sandler comments on her „emptiness‟: “She is uprooted from

her family and her familiar world, and projected into a social vacuum where the media

becomes her surrogate community, her global village. New York intensifies her frustrations

and unhooks her further from reality.” (75) Dimple‟s mind becomes rebellious due to over

exposure to the alien culture. She tries to look like an American by wearing Marsha‟s clothes,

going out with Milt and Ina Mullick, and enjoys the prohibited freedom. She puts on

Marsha‟s tinted glasses, which are characteristics of American culture. For Dimple they are

like masquerade, borrowed from the West, just like Marsha‟s clothes and the apartment in

which they are living. She seduces Milt and keeps it a secret from Amit. Dimple‟s behavior is

an outcome of her attempt to assimilate into the American culture. Finally she turns neurotic

and complains against her life:

Life should have treated her better, should have added and subtracted in

different proportions so that she was not left with a chimera. Amit was no more

than that. He did not feed her reveries; he was unreal. She was furious,

desperate, she felt sick. It was as if some force was impelling her towards

disaster, some monster had overtaken her body, . . . (Wife 156)

Amit could notice only the external changes in Dimple‟s behaviour and he refers it to

culture shock. He even promises to take her to Calcutta, but that does not help either. The

influence of the media brings out the violence in Dimple as she starts contemplating the

murder of her husband. The violence outside her turns inside her. She now fails to

differentiate between what she sees on T.V. and what she imagines. The idea of murdering

her husband fascinates her. She thinks, “She would kill Amit and hide his body in the freezer.

The extravagance of the scheme delighted her, made her feel very American, somehow,

almost like a character in a T.V. series”. (195) This idea makes her reconcile herself to the

culture shock that Amit thinks of happening to Indian wives all the time. The problem with

Amit is that he fails to understand the emotional breakdown of Dimple. “He never thought of

such things, never thought of how hard it was for her to keep quiet and smile though she was

falling apart like a very old toy…” (212)

According to S.Indira, “Dimple experiences total estrangement from herself and her

surroundings as well. Torn by the conflict between her fantasy world and the reality of her

situation, she allows her mind to be totally conditioned by the commercials on T.V. and

magazines so much so she loses the ability to distinguish them from the world of reality.”

(141-142) She thinks of seven different ways of committing suicide due to her frustrations.

She longs to live like the glamorous T.V. characters. She loses her sleep and in an agonized

intensity, she ultimately kills Amit without even thinking about its consequences:

She sneaked up on him and chose a spot, her favourite spot just under the

hairline, where the mole was getting larger and browner, … she touched the

mole very lightly and let her fingers draw a delectable spot, then she brought her

right hand up and with the knife stabbed the magical circle, once, twice, seven

times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty

pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser,

and then she saw the head fall off...Women on television got away with murder.

(Wife 212-213)

The above description shows that it is a case of cruel murder. The vast difference between the

uprooting of Dimple from one culture and putting in of another culture has created a sense of

instability and insecurity in her, which instigated her to commit such a gruesome act.

Some critics are of the view that Dimple‟s gruesome murder of her husband has

nothing to do with cultural shock. “She is not a victim of „expatriation‟ but a „victim of her

own neurotic sensibility fed on popular advertisement fantasies‟.” (qtd. in Kumar 58) It is

probable that if Dimple had stayed back in India she would have had her family‟s support

during times of her emoyional breakdown not ended up as a murderer. The violence that is

passively seen in her mind gets intensified on coming to America where “talking about

murder is like talking about the weather” (Wife 161). Dimple has never been able to relate

herself to her tradition, or to understand it. Jasbir Jain remarks: “All her actions are geared

toward the future and this bespeaks of the main problem, the utter rootlessness of her life.”

(17) Dimple‟s alienation is rooted not in loneliness, in isolation or cultural differences but in

her estrangement from her own past and her own inner being. Other critics praised the novel

for its representation of the plight of Indian expatriates in America.

Bharathi Mukherjee‟s first novel The Tiger’s Daughter was written during a difficult

phase of life when Mukherjee was struggling to determine her own identity against the Indian

heritage. With this novel Mukherjee examines the recognition of the Indian expatriate Tara

who returns home after seven years of stay in America. Tara is always reminded of her

rootlessness in America, but now seven years later, she feels that India is no better. Tara

becomes „foreign‟ to her native values and is once again filled with the sense of alienation in

her native country. In Wife Mukherjee explores how the violence in America actually

intensifies the confusion and violence within the protagonist Dimple turning her into a

neurotic and murderer of her husband. Both Tara and Dimple are portrayed as expatriates in

India and America in a cross-cultural set up and their predicament due to their rootlessness in

life. Jasbir Jain remarks that in The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife,

The main concern is, no matter how we approach these novels, the relationship

of the protagonists towards India. The attempt to understand India is clouded

by the desire to interpret for foreigners, to judge India by their standards and

value system and this results in a kind of vacuum surrounding the

protagonists. They belong nowhere. (18-19)

In both The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife expatriation is not only a major theme, but it

becomes a metaphor for deeper levels of alienation like „existential alienation‟ and „self-

estrangement‟. This is revealed in some significant images in the two novels. As Christine

Gomez points out:

In The Tiger’s Daughter, Hotel Catelli-Continental, described as the “navel of the

universe,” (3) becomes an important symbol of a rootless existence, a symbol of

Tara‟s expatriate sensibility. In Wife, the cage is an important symbol. It stands for

a comfortable but restricted existence, for isolation and a denial of freedom. It is

significant that Dimple kills her husband after watching a T.V. programme in

which a birdcage figured prominently. (74)

Thus Mukherjee‟s two novels The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife reflect a world which

refuses to hold together both at the individual level and at the cultural level. Though there are

innumerable characters in both the novels, the protagonists do not relate to the others and are

involved in discovering the nature of their identities. As M. Sivaramkrishna comments about

Tara and Dimple:

Mrs. Mukherjee‟s protagonists … victims of life which is visionless because

they are voiceless. Therefore, these protagonists are neither typically Indian or

exotically westernized: they are essentially human, basically feminine in their

sensibility struggling to find modes of authentic communication. And their

problem correspondingly is that since both are exposed to the West, through

absorption, mainly of its language and mores, they find it difficult to dissociate

the language from culture, their primary emotions from language. In other

words, the retention of their identity as Indians is in constant tension with the

need for its renunciation if they have to a new identity as immigrants. (73-74)

Thus Tara‟s return to her native country has made her realize that she can no longer belong to

her homeland due to her changed perception. Dimple, on the other hand, is disillusioned with

her immigrant experience in the alien land, because the adopted homeland has not fulfilled

her longing for liberation, rather it intensifies her neurotic problem. Both Tara and Dimple do

not want to belong to the traditional role of womanhood or to be more liberated like the

women of the West. They are neither rooted to their own tradition nor assimilated to the

culture of the adopted homeland. Hence both of them are portrayed as rootless expatriates.