Portrayal of Women Protagonists in the Selected Novels of Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee is a famous Indian born American non-fiction writer, short story writer and journalist. She is one of the well-known novelists of Indian Diaspora. Within a really short creative time, she has achieved enviable position in the field of English literature. In her works, she has very well depicted the Indian immigrant experience of her women characters both in her novels and short stories. In her works, she talks about the lives of Indian women immigrants in the U.S.A and their journey of transformation and adjustment of their lives and personalities. She tries to explore the themes of immigration as well as transformation. She portrays the various phases of her characters such as the phase of expatriation, the phase of transition and phase of immigration. She very well depicts how the cultural clash or cultural conflict between the west and the east leads to the psychological crisis in the minds of her women characters. In her novels, she has given importance to the feministic perspective of her women characters. Her women characters are the protagonist and hero of the novels. She has tried to portray how her female characters sacrifice their dreams, hopes, desires, wishes, what the various problems, fear, torture they face, and how they finally do their best to overcome from all the hurdles. She has drawn her female characters in various situations and circumstances.

Existentialist Perspective: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction The Holder of the World

The present study explores and analyses the existential perspective in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Holder of the World; she tries to represent the fluid nature of immigrants due to frequent dislocations and relocations, which facilitate the characters to transform and assimilate into a new environment. The protagonist, Hannah Easton, discards nostalgic feelings and celebrates the latest opportunities in a liberal environment. Being a fearless, brave, and bold, spirited woman, she chooses her ways of life freely and accepts the consequences frankly. Bharati Mukherjee, one of the path breaking Indian American novelists and short story writers, has constantly made efforts to voice the immigrant experience of women. Hannah initially suffers from cultural shock, but being resourceful establishes her authentic existence by understanding the new environment utilising her full potential via free choices.

Reconceptualization of National Spaces: A Close Reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s selected novels with Gloria Anzaldúa´s Nueva Conciencia Mestiza

In 1997, Bharati Mukherjee, a renowned diaspora woman writer, stated in an interview, “I am an American, not an Asian American.” Since then, she has been virulently attacked for defining herself as an American by the writers of her original homeland and her diaspora compatriots. However, with this statement, Mukherjee challenged the diaspora writing and took a solid move to redefine the diaspora through her life and novels. Her novels also considered her autobiographical notes, demonstrate a new diaspora identity that is fluid and transforming. Her latest diaspora writing has challenged the quintessential diaspora identity, gender structure, definition of home, and host land. The paper will do a close reading of her four novels, The Tiger’s Daughters (1971), wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), and Desirable Daughters (2002), to see the transition from being a Bengali Indian expatriate in Canada, Asian American to American Immigrant. In the paper, her four novels are divided into two phases- expatriate and immigrant, which show different writing styles, different psychology behind the narration, and transition in her definition of the nation. This discussion will employ the theory of Nueva Conciencia Mestiza given by Gloria Anzaldúa to comprehend the reconceptualization of national spaces from the perspective of diaspora women.

Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, and Bharati Mukherjee: A Comparative Study

Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai and Bharati Mukherjee are contemporary Indian English Writers. They have represented the case of Indian women who are the subject of negligence, suffering, suppression and exploitation. The problems of identity figures more prominently in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee and Anita Desai. Shashi Deshpande’s main concern also has been to trace out the root cause of denial of women’s self and their struggle for self-identity. Thus all these factors give rise to emergent trends and tendencies like hybrid cultural forms among the migrants. These three female authors who have been under the influence of trans-nationalism, immigration, migration as well as re-housement, began to take deep interest in study of the women’s problems in India and giving them insight and outlook that have some relevance with the Western culture and social back-grounds.

Multicultural Identity Crisis in Bharati Mukherjee’s Novel Jasmine

This paper intends to explore the transformations with disintegration literary pieces of Bharati Mukherjee has gained a milestone as she brings out the segregation experienced by the immigrants of South Asian Countries. Through her novels, she voices her personal life experiences to show the reconstructing shape of American Society. She centrally locates her emphasis on the women characters their struggle for identity, their harsh experiences and their final emergence as the self- assertive, self opinioned individuals free from fear imposed on them. The list of Diasporic writer is too long and the root of Diaspora is so deep. Through the novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee focuses the multicultural identity of a woman. This paper is an effort to portray the bitter experiences of homelessness, displacement, oppression and exploitation of protagonist Jasmine.

Rewriting Immigrant Masculinities in Selected Works of Bharati Mukherjee

The precedence of women over men in Bharati Mukherjee’s works reflects an attempt on her part to construct a feminine narrative as a means of countering the marginalized position that women usually occupy in mainstream traditional literature. This paper probes how with such displacement of female perspectives into an authoritative position, routinely prescribed for men, Mukherjee revises the suspiciously stable place occupied by male immigrant subjects in fictional writings. Employing the critical voices of several masculinity theorists, this paper explores how immigrant men’s conceptions of masculinity are reformulated and challenged by their migration processes. Seen in the light of gender oppression, the male characters, seem to occupy an ineffective and feminine narrative space even in powerful male stories of immigrant economic success written by Mukherjee. Finally, the paper probes how Mukherjee’s act of rewriting masculinity from inventive perspectives in her fictions introduces new, more egalitarian, and alternate models of manhood.

Gender Role as Relative Phenomenon in Bharati Mukherjee’s Novel Desirable Daughters

Gender is a relative, fluid and dynamic phenomenon. In a traditional society woman has always been treated as “other” which needs to be changed. Human beings unconsciously remain engaged to absorb notions of gender-based manhood and womanhood. Gender construction is not static but changes with circumstances. Women who live in different environment face different problems and whole pattern of their lives changes when they change their living conditions and social set up. Gender is basically an aggregate of cultural and sociological traits which are associated with a particular being and leads to marginalization of one gender namely women. A particular behaviour is expected from that gender and vice versa. This concept is visible in the novel ‘Desirable Daughters’ by Bharati Mukherjee which is primary text for current research. The characters in this novel violate traditional limitations and gender role becomes a fluid and relative concept. So, this work focuses on highlighting that gender role is a relative term primarily a product of environment. The theoretical framework used here is third wave of feminism and the methodology employed to conduct this research is textual analysis.