Transformation of Female Immigrant Identity in the Select Novels of Bharati Mukherjee

Abstract

Mukherjee lays claim to an America that is both constantly transforming, and transformed by, the new immigrant. However, it is clear that Mukherjee's representation of a fluid American (trans)national identity influenced by diversity is ultimately predicated on the foregrounding of differences. Despite Mukherjee's call for America to go beyond multiculturalism in its treatment of new immigrants, her own postcolonial immigrant subjectivity-inevitably shaped by her elite British and American educational background-remains aligned with white hegemony, which continues to hierarchize its immigrants on the bases of ethnicity, class and gender. So this paper attempts to show the sense of assimilation andassertion of female protagonist Tara in Bharathi Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter (1971), the main causes of the suffering of her women characters are therefore the hostile situations and the unfavourable social conditions which obstruct the path of their lives for a meaningful existence. Feelings of loneliness and homelessness contribute to their existential predicament where as Bharati Mukherjee’s women experience these feelings abroad. Being an expatriate herself, Mukherjee often deals with the plight and conditions of the immigrants and expatriates. In her novels the problems of displacement and cultural crises are the main causes of the suffering of women. This article intends to study the problems of existentialism and its subsequent effects on the women protagonists in the selected novels of both the writers.