Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS)
Volume 20, Issue 1, Ver. II (Jan. 2015), PP 54-57
e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845.
www.iosrjournals.org
DOI: 10.9790/0837-20125457 www.iosrjournals.org 54 | Page
Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati
Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters
Dr. Rajib Bhaumik
Asst Professor Dept of English Alipurduar CollegeWest Bengal
Abstract: Mukherjee’s protagonists are all sensitive and are differently trained in the new ethnic imagination.
They are tossed in an environment of ambivalence regarding their identity, racism, sexism and other social
oppression. They negotiate displacement and face the multicultural reality in the process of cultural
differentiation and assimilation. Bharati Mukherjee has explored many facets of diasporic consciousness and
immigrant experience of dislocations, ruptures and relocation of the migrant women in her fictions. She has
dealt with the ambivalence of their psychic and spatial identity and the trauma of dislocations at multiple levels.
The impact of patriarchy on the Indian society varies from the one in the West and therefore Mukherjee has
tried to evolve her own strand of feminism grounded in the truth of compulsory displacement that they
recurrently undergo. Indian expatriate writers do not write from all exclusive foreignness of their identity but
their writing reflects the perspective of someone caught between two cultures. Migrancy and dislocation, either
consensual or conflictual, is a global and trans-cultural necessity. In her earlier novels, diasporic
transmigration meant new opening and emancipation from the clutches of convention bound society. In these
novels, attachment to one’s own native culture and homeland, living abroad was presented as something to be
spurned and total assimilation into the host culture was hailed. It is to create a location of the presence that
reduces the diasporic individual to delink the past and deconstruct the future. In Desirable Daughters
Mukherjee considers different pattern of belonging in the Global perspectives from in-between temporality to
assimilative permanence and further, hyphenated and unmixed nationness.
Key Words: ethnicity, ambivalence, identity, racism, sexism, social oppression, displacement, multicultural
reality, dislocations.
I. Introduction
Bharati Mukherjee has explored many facets of diasporic consciousness and immigrant experience of
dislocations, ruptures and relocation of the migrant women in her fictions. She has dealt with the ambivalence of
their psychic and spatial identity and the trauma of dislocations at multiple levels. The impact of patriarchy on
the Indian society varies from the one in the West and therefore Mukherjee has tried to evolve her own strand of
feminism grounded in the truth of compulsory displacement that they recurrently undergo. Indian expatriate
writers do not write from all exclusive foreignness of their identity but their writing reflects the perspective of
someone caught between two cultures. Bharati Mukherjee has been especially attentive to the changes taking
place in the control mechanism of south Asian women in the New World, their otherness and alienation in „the
larger flow of a transnational history.‟Mukherjee consciously avoids glorification of the native country, she also
doesn‟t allow herself to demean or lower the adopted country or the center of the new location although there
are criticism on her bicultural perception. Mukherjee has emerged with a postmodern counter narrative of
assimilative and celebratory American citizenship. This new perspective preserves essential Indianness to be
exotic but merge gleefully into American materialism. From this category of experience Mukherjee wishes to
carve her own exclusiveness within the broader genre of American Literature.
Migrancy and dislocation, either consensual or conflictual, is a global and trans-cultural necessity.
Mukherjee‟s protagonists are all sensitive and are differently trained in the new ethnic imagination. They are
tossed in an environment of ambivalence regarding their identity, racism, sexism and other social oppression.
They negotiate displacement and face the multicultural reality in the process of cultural differentiation and
assimilation. The multiculturalism ethos with which they are confronted leads to the struggle for a new life and a
near break with the past. They are shown at an emotional transit point and from their dual and bicultural
perception they attempt to measure the disjuncture and persecutory paranoia. In the USA Mukherjee explores
the immigrant sensibility, recognizing its duality and fluid identity and acknowledges its realities. According to
Malashri Lal:
Undoubtedly, Mukherjee focuses upon the immigrants in America, that energetic, volatile community
to which this gifted writer lends her voice and consequently appropriates „another‟ America. But the
immigrants, like her, have a pre-history. Their cultural imperatives, interacting with the unknown focus of the
new world, create a drama of co-options and collaborations which the story teller records.

Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters
Bharati Mukherjee is her own theorist and exemplar since her novels illustrate the credo of immigrant
writing as a „Maximalist‟ act. She emphatically asserts her American citizenship. She has her characteristic way
of defining her Indian heritage and affiliations through several assertions. Mukherjee has expressed the reality of
being located in a particular culture, geographically and ideologically separate from her chosen home and
citizenship and has thus problematised her own identity. This aspect of her own cultural exclusivity is very
strongly expressed while criticizing the Americans. Mukherjee says in Desirable Daughters (2002): „They have
no idea of the wealth I came from.‟ Again, Mukherjee‟s powerful assertion that she is an American writer in the
tradition of other American authors „whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island‟ doesn‟t in any way, demean her
original home just for celebrating her American citizenship.
With all such cultural problematic and diasporic ambivalence, Mukherjee has long used fiction to
explore issues of identity and culture, often through displaced characters – Indian coming to the West or
Westerns heading to Asia. The tremendous difference between two ways to life leads a person to a feeling of
depression, frustration and delirium where „Psyche and Society mirror each other.‟ In the modalities of
translational selection and differentiation women have to assimilate the alien culture and accept the changed
identity.
She is an outsider in a no man‟s land. She recreates herself into a new personality and forms emotional
ties with the place where she lives and „behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.‟ Mukherjee‟s novels
and short stories express the same dislocations and the neurosis in their wandering impulse and their deliberate
search for materially better life. They migrate to the West and consequently face tension of adaptation and
assimilation. She depicts the cross-cultural conflicts and shows how her heroines turn febrile and phantasmic to
take control over their destinies.
Mukherjee‟s sixth novel Desirable Daughters (2002) marks a new trend in her writings. In an interview
with Dave Weich, Mukherjee says: „The authentic Strategy for this book was also using the width of the field of
history, geography, Diaspora gender, ethnicity, language – rather than the old fashioned, long clean throw.‟ In
her earlier novels, diasporic transmigration meant new opening and emancipation from the clutches of
convention bound society. In these novels, attachment to one‟s own native culture and homeland, living abroad
was presented as something to be spurned and total assimilation into the host culture was hailed. It is to create a
location of the presence that reduces the diasporic individual to delink the past and deconstruct the future. In
Desirable Daughters Mukherjee considers different pattern of belonging in the Global perspectives from in-
between temporality to assimilative permanence and further, hyphenated and unmixed nationness.
The general tendency of the people in the diasporic space is to be centric to primary identities –
religious, ethnic, territorial and national. Most of Mukherjee‟s novels deal with the question of such primary
identities and the crisis of such identities along with transmission of ethnic traits. She takes in account the
borderline condition of cultural translation in the postcolonial location of past present and future. In
Mukherjee‟s fictions the two geographical entities, the home and location thus support, and to an extent reflect
each other.
In her narratives she takes in account of the spatial and locational subjectivity related to their
homeland. Her characters experience the cultural inanity and the social displacement which are expressed in
mixed identity codes. Such concept of diasporic space as theoretical construct, evolving out of the practical
journey from alienation to acceptance seeks to project and map out the space of different culture and
postcolonial heterogeneity. This space of diasporic experience is potent to become the pulsating contemporary
parameter, offering various other new scopes of negotiations on the programmed location of culture.
Desirable Daughters is a tale of immigrants and the attitude of three sisters and their ways of
negotiating the multiple dislocations in three different perspectives. The three sisters, who are the daughters of
Motilal Bhattacharjee and the great-grand daughters of Jaikrishna Gangooly, belong to a traditional Bengali
Brahmin family. They part ways taking their own course of voyage towards their destiny. They are a blend of
traditional and modern outlook. Padma and Parvati have their own trajectories of choices; the former an
immigrant of ethnic origin, New Jersey, and the latter married to her own choice and settled in the posh locality
of Bombay with an entourage of servants to cater her.
Tara, the narrator of the novel, takes the readers deep into the intricacies of the New World and seems
to float rootless with time. The fluidity of her identity testifies not only her own but also the fluidity of the
immigrants. She values her traditional upbringing but takes pride in moving forward in life. Her image of her
family values forms a wall of security around her that camouflage the fragile vulnerable self.
Tara as a young wife stays for ten years with Bish Chatterjee, but his almost sinister preoccupation
with his profession leaves her yearning for companionship and care, the couple eventually separate. Next, she
finds solace in Andy‟s arms, her live-in partner, but again, when Andy leaves her she feels threatened and comes
back to Bish. Her rhapsodized soul takes dip as she is confronted with the realities of terrorism. New revelations
unfurl as her son declares that he is a gay, tearing apart her cocoon and, the final blow is her house being
bombed and Bish Chatterjee is crippled and dependent on her. Finally, Tara Bhattacharjee returns home to find

solace at her father‟s house. She further probes into her family tree to unveil the life of „Tree Bride‟ her
ancestor. The retrospective journey is in fact a return to the roots seeking Eastern solution to the weeds
developed in the Western World.
The novel begins with the history of Tara Lata describing the dull disquiet of the time. The conflict
between the inscrutable traditional corridor and simple quest for location and space constitute the description of
the interpersonal world:
Tuberculosis is everywhere. The air, the water, the soil are septic. Thirty-five years is a long life. Smog
obscures the moon and dims the man-made light to faintness deeper than the stars‟. In such darkness perspective
disappears. It is a two-dimensional world impossible to penetrate.
In The Tree Bride (2004) her namesake the child bride, Tara Lata is thus, headed towards her destiny.
Before she gets married the groom dies on his way due to snake bite. The groom‟s father is greedy and wants
Jaikrishna Gangooly to give the dowry. Jaikrishna Gangooly instead of bulking down to the demands of the
groom‟s father, puts his foot down and refuses to hand over his daughter to her in-laws, dooming her to a life of
servility. A Sanskrit scholar and a Brahmin, he decides to solemnize his daughter to a tree as bride so that she
can overcome the curse of widowhood. It is presumed that she is united with God, and now she is eternally
doomed to be a married woman leading a life of purity, sainthood and lifelong virginity. Tara Lata, the Tree-
Bride becomes a family legend:
After the night of her marriage, Tara Lata returned to Mishtigunj and, at least by legend, never left her
father‟s house. Unburdened by a time-consuming, emotion-draining marriage and children, never having to
please a soul, she grew up and grew old in a single house in an impoverished village in the poorest place of
earth, and in that house, the world came to her. She lived there seventy years and gradually changed her world.
Tara Lata of The Tree Bride shall never become a human bridegroom to continue an ancestral line. In
marrying her to proxy husband, a tree, he permits her to occupy the respected position of married woman, within
the family home. Married to a tree she will at least remain a spouse, „and not a widow.‟ What appears to be a
strange practice is in fact a highly efficient adaptive strategy.
The author describes Tara Lata, just five years old and is being carried on a palanquin, all decorated in
the ceremonial dress to be given away in marriage. The older sisters, seven and nine are already married. In
Hindu culture it was authenticated that a father should give away his daughter in marriage before she reaches
puberty and if the father is not able to do so he is considered useless and undeserving:
In a palanquin borne by four servants sit a rich man‟s three daughters, the youngest dressed in her
bridal sari, her little hands painted with red lac dye, her hair oiled and set. Her arms are heavy with dowry gold;
bangles ring tiny arms from wrist to shoulder. Childish voices chant a song, hands tap, golden bracelets tinkle. I
cannot imagine the loneliness of this child. A Bengali girl‟s happiest night is about to become her life time
imprisonment.
Her return to tradition is also a revolt against modernity. Tara Lata becomes famous for acts of
rebellion and she becomes freedom fighter and martyr. Paradoxically, therefore, in pursuing a vapid Indian
tradition and confining his daughter to a life without the distractions of husband, children and mother-in-law, the
father transforms her into a symbol of essential womanhood under the patronage of traditional male symbolic
order.
Precisely, the novel Desirable Daughters concentrates on complex ideologies revolving round the life
of three sisters and their multiple alienations – Padma, Parvati and Tara. All of them maintain distinctive
individuality in their attitude and approach to life. The novel begins with the description of bridal procession of
Tara Lata, an ancestor whose life history becomes a focal point of Tara Chatterjee‟s, family chronicle. Tara
Chatterjee, the narrator had always treated the story with a sense of awe and it is after divorce from her husband
Bishwapriya Chatterjee she became curious to know about the trauma of the „Tree bride.‟ Seemingly, a thematic
parallel with Spivak‟s phenomenal article, Three women‟s texts and a critique of imperialism Mukherjee has
written three different texts in the novel that unfold and also entangle the politics of diasporic consciousness of
three women. Though the three sisters had different opportunities to assimilate America with their Indianness,
each sister‟s reactions to the confrontation are distinct. While Tara undertakes this root searching mission as an
attempt to come to terms with her fragmented and at times confused notion of self, Padma takes the world at her
stride according to her own cultural poetics.
Tara‟s positioning is different from Padma in the sense, Padma is a hyphenated immigrant. From her
obsession on assimilation as a critical content of a survival strategy in an alien soil, Mukherjee vociferously
talks against the status of a hyphenated immigrant because the hyphen marginalizes the Asians as minorities.
Parvati the middle sister, with an American education and an America trained Indian husband, lives the life of a
privileged rich wife in India. She symbolizes the traditional life of an Indian woman with Western orientation.
Each one traverses her own path of immigrant life quite happily.
Tara, through the life of her other two sisters, Parvati and Padma her husband Bish her illegitimate
nephew Mr. Christopher Dey, introspects on her own crisis of identity as an immigrant and she continually

expresses her desire to seek a consolation in her native traditions. In Tara‟s realization the novel reveals the
spaces of tradition, personal memories, places, and life styles, tradition and modernity. She indulges in the
nostalgic romanticism of the past, the inverted story of mobility, existential suffering, hybrid-subjectivity and
plurality in her physical and psychic dividedness. In Mukherjee‟s poetics of Diaspora, rejection to the nativity
and incapacity to deal with the new situation make the theme of identity more powerful and poignant in the
mainstream American life.
Tara at the age of nineteen was married to a software engineer from an outstanding Bengali family.
After her marriage, Tara was shifted to American society, in Atherton California where her husband Bish tried
to carve out a semblance of Indian traditionalism. Mukherjee describes the reason for such selection of Tara‟s
husband.
He had that eagerness, and a confident smile that promised substantial earnings. It lured my father in to
marriage negotiations, and it earned my not unenthusiastic acceptance of him as husband. A very predictable,
very successful marriage negotiation.
Her marriage to Bish did not have any immediate traumatic effect as earlier experienced by Tara-Lata
the „Tree-Bride.‟ While Tara Lata became a widow by the foul mechanization of fate, Tara leaves her husband
by choice in a self redemptive and assertive role of a woman of the global era. She falls a prey to her own
experiencing of America where the „Cream-colored houses seem to have tumbled down the hill sides like
children‟s blocks, or-on bright days under a cloudless sky-like cottages in an Etruscan landscape.‟ Here she feels
„totally at home, unwilling to leave.‟ But her American summer suffers a jolt with a series of dislocations.
Swerving away from the tradition she ends up becoming a fun loving woman who is „ethnically
ambiguous‟ and finds comforting charm in the arms of a Buddhist retrofitter. To her love is no longer a matter
„indistinguishable from duty and obedience.‟ But such Western excesses of untrammeled fun and glitziness of
the exotic perturbs her inner self, and she contemplates an alternative way to survive. A transition is on the
cards, from imaginary homeland to imagining the homeland:
I wasn‟t, perhaps I‟ll never be, a modern woman. These are the objections of modern American woman
who know me now, all of whom have passed through at least one unarranged marriage and who are raising at
least one child with or without the bottom line of child support. They have no idea of the wealth I came from.
The nostalgia of Tara for her past, her protective existence in India, her helplessness to assimilate in the
glamorous life of the USA has become a voice of all these immigrants who lead a life of „subaltern‟ in the
highly mechanical, progressive and prosperous society of America. In his review of Desirable Daughters, Jopi
Nyman Comments: „Bharati Mukherjee‟s fictions rewrite the traditional immigrant story, imagining new spaces
and favour of identity as a result of travel and dislocations.‟
References
[1]. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.p. xx.
[2]. Malashri Lal. “Bharati Mukherjee: The „Maximalist‟ Credo.” Contemporary Indian English Fiction: An Anthology of Essays.Ed.
K.N. Awasthi, New Delhi: ABS Publications, 1993.p.2.
[3]. Bharati Mukherjee. Desirable Daughters. New Delhi: Rupa &Co.2006.p.27.
[4]. Alison B. Carb. „An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,‟ op.cit. p.654.
[5]. The Location of Culture. op.cit. p. 62.
[6]. F.Fanon.„Concerningviolence‟,TheWretchedof the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), qtd in Bhabha. The Location of Culture,
p.62.
[7]. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. op.cit.p. 62.
[8]. Dave Weich. “Bharati Mukherjee Runs the West Coast Offense” Powells.com 29 Jan. 2004<
http://www.powells.com/authors/mukherjee.html>)
[9]. Bharati Mukherjee. Desirable Daughters. New Delhi: Rupa &Co.2006.p.3.
[10]. Ibid., p.17.
[11]. Ibid., p.15.
[12]. Ibid.,pp.3-4.
[13]. G.C. Spivak. (1985) “Three women‟s texts and a critique of imperialism”. Critical Inquiry, no.12, 1(Autumn).
[14]. Bharati Mukherjee. Desirable Daughters. op.cit., p.7.
[15]. Ibid., p.24.
[16]. Ibid., p.25.
[17]. Ibid.
[18]. Ibid., p.27.
[19]. Ibid.
[20]. Nayman Jopi. “Transitional Travel in Bharati Mukherjee‟s Desirable Daughters”. The Atlantic Literary Review, vol-3 no. 4 Oct-
Dec., 2004.(53-56)

Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

More from iosrjce

Recently uploaded

Dislocation, Relocation and Root Search: a Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters