Mahatma Gandhi Divakarni Analysis

Divakaruni’s job as a Professor of Creative Writing at University of Houston vouches her ability as an acclaimed writer. Although she has been residing in America since 1976, she generously imbibes various Indian culture, traditions and beliefs in her stories perhaps due to her own close involvement with Indian culture when she lived in India till she was 20 years old. She also portrays life in America and the difficulties faced by immigrants due to differences in culture and beliefs of east and west. Living in a foreign country makes one yearn for one’s own homeland as Bharati Mukherjee winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 pointed, “Even in Manhattan we’d smile at another Indian if they walked by us,” she further added, “You felt an affinity to other Indians that you might not have felt in India.”(Passage from India) After her death on 28th January 2017, “I have an old copy of The Middleman (1988) with many phrases underlined,” remembered novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, saying Mukherjee

Due to her affinity for women, in almost all her work she has endowed major chunk of her novels to female characters. Divakaruni’s forte in writing enables her to present both past and present life of the characters perfectly. This immigrant experience was crucial for her in becoming a writer, she observed. “I did not think I had a story to tell,” she wrote on her blog. “Moving to a very different culture and learning to live on my own made me see the world much more clearly… I thought about India more than I had ever before. I realized what I appreciated about it; the warmth, the closeness of extended family, the way spirituality pervades the culture. But I also recognized problems [with regard to] how women are often