Sense of Displacement in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughte

Abstract

The last few decades have witnessed a remarkable change in the perspective of women in Indian English fiction. One of the reasons for this altered point of view has been the mass exodus of Indians to the West which posed before them narratives of broken identities and discarded languages amidst the basic difference between the culture of the West and the East. The expatriate writers or their writings have been able to transform the stereotypical sufferings of a woman to an aggressive or independent person trying to seek an identity of her own through her various relationships within the family and society. As a natural consequence their writings, reflect what we consider an expatriate sensibility generated due to cultural disparity and emotional disintegration. In this process it is the woman who suffers the most because of her multiple dislocations. She gets involved in an act of sustained selfremoval from her native culture, balanced by a conscious resistance to total inclusion in the new host society. She carries the burden of cultural values of her native land with her to her new country, thus making it more difficult and problematic for her to adjust. She is caught between cultures and this feeling of in-betweenness or being juxtaposed poses before her the problem of trying to maintain a balance between her dual affiliations. Nevertheless, along with the trauma of displacement she is fired by the will to bound herself to a new community, to a new narrative of identity. As Chowdhury asserts, “For a critical evaluation of Bharati Mukherjee’s female characters, one must understand that all her women characters are people on the periphery of all society in which they have chosen to spend their lives; they are all immigrants and new ones at that” (93). In this context we may review the novels of Bharati Mukherjee, whose writings are largely honed by her personal experience as a woman caught in-between, which itself has been described as a text in a kind of perennial immigration. As