An Analysis Of Tiger's Daughter And The Sorrow By Bharati Mukherjee

Abstract:

Diaspora is defined as the dispersion of any people from their traditional homeland. Diasporic literature of the 21st century is enriched by the issues of diaspora, transnationalism, hybridity and identity crisis. These are reflected in the writings of Salman Rushdie, Amitabh Ghosh, V.S.Naipaul, Bharati Mukherjee and many others. Bharati Mukherjee in her novels attempt to bridge the gulf between “home” and “exile”. Nostalgia, directness towards the culture you are absorbing, re-stiching and the divided settler evolving into a permanent alien getting transformed into a perfect immigrant are the elements of consciousness. In the present paper an attempt has been made to investigate or recognise the elements of diasporic consciousness

Her works can be divided into three distinctive phases. Her earlier works such as The Tiger’s Daughter and Day’s and Night’s in Calcutta unfold her attempts to find her identity in her Indian heritage. The second phase of her writing includes works such as Wife, Darkness, An Invisible Woman and The Sorrow and the Terror. These works explore the immigrants’ experience of racism in Canada. The third phase of her writing encompasses works such as Jasmine and The Middleman and Other stories. These works explore the immigrants’ experience rather than nostalgia. She depicts the meeting of East and West through immigrant experience. Her early writings gave a pessimistic account of rootlessness and depict the immigrant characters as “lost souls, put upon and pathetic adrift in the new world, wondering if they would ever belong” (Darkness XII-XIV), whereas her recent writings celebrate “the exuberance of immigration” (Darkness XV). Bharati Mukherjee in her novels explores the struggle of immigrants living in the United States and Canada. In her fiction she mirrors her own life as an immigrant first to Canada and later to the United States. Many of her characters are Indian women who are victims of racism and sexism.

This novel addresses Mukherjee’s personal difficulties of being caught between two worlds, home and exile. The Tiger’s Daughter can also be seen as the story of a young girl named Tara who comes back to India after seven long years of being away, and on her return finds only poverty and turmoil. It reflects Mukherjee’s own experience of coming back to India with her American husband in 1973, when she was deeply affected by the chaos and poverty of India. The novel is a starting point with Mukherjee’s treatment of the theme of the conflict between Eastern and Western Worlds, as in her other works. Tara is born in Calcutta, schooled in the States and married to an American gentleman. After spending seven years abroad, the beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind and comes back to India. But the place she finds on her return full of strikes, riots and unrest is vastly different from the place she remembers. Yet she seeks to reconcile the old world that of her father, the ‘Bengal Tiger’ with the new one of her husband