Bharati Mukherjee : The American Dreamer

First - the reason why so many immigrant writers write about their immigration or the country they left behind or their assimilation or lack thereof into their new countries is not because of a paucity of imagination. It is rather because the genre of literary fiction demands an increased amount of personal investment in their work and immigration, especially in the days before people were jetting back and forth once a year, was a wrenching experience.

Second - There are a number of authors who write about the less `exotic` migration as you call it. However, exoticism seeps through when the author is faced with an alien experience. A woman from Ohio transplanted into NYC will find it exotic and write it as such. Readers impart a limited sense of exoticism to the books they read. Authors convey most of it. Whether they write from Bhatinda or Boston. Your home can be exotic if viewed correctly.

HN - as a matter of fact, I was thinking of this other anthology edited by Rushdie called the Best of Indian Writing, I think. It was a delightful read and of course controversial because it left out vernaculars (Rushdie being a snob about it) but it did illustrate the shift from coloniial to postcolonial in Indian writing and therefore a lot of immigrant lit was included. As for Letters, you`re preaching to the converted.
And there is one name that few people include but I have to drag in here willy nilly - GV Desani. Here is a novel that takes the South Asian immigrant experience and does something different.

Saminasha #27/#43,

You seriously believe that you are making concrete contributions here ?

By the way, share your ``reading is good`` wisdom with wide-eyed undergrads, and
spare me the sanctimony. My remarks are different from Amrita`s and Subroto`s
because they are discussing the author and her work, whereas I am not. You
brought in the issue of desi men and their reaction to Mukherjee and made it fair
game to call you on it.

In the meantime, you are yet to respond to my questions, and I repeat them here:

1) Had Mukherjee been a man and held forth the same views on India/America/
immigrant experience and married a gori, would it elicit a different reaction from
Amit or nikki ?

2) If n number of desi women berate her for the same reasons that Amit or nikki
does, are you willing to retract your statement that this is just about insecure
desi men ?

Since you have put forward a hypothesis/claim, let`s see how well it holds up.

``...Naipaul himself, whom these interactors laud...``

Please show me which interactor has lauded Naipaul here (other than Urbashi
for his technical brilliance, and quite rightly so). Or is this another straw-man
that needs demolishing ?

Amit #23,

Mukherjee and Nirad Chaudhuri are quite different in their worldview. Conflating the
two would be incorrect, even if you disagree with both.

I meant ``Amrita admires Naipaul`s craft`` when I wrote Urbashi....apologies.

Urbashi,

My point about Naipaul is that if people are going to accuse Mukherjee of ``race hate``, Naipaul himself, whom these interactors laud, is as guilty, if not more....

Blasphemer,

I am really remembering an Indo-Carribean narrator...its been a while for me as well, but certain details stick out for me...and am far away from my books...

Certainly Chitra Banerji Divakaruni`s novels are easy reading, but I feel much more superficial than Bharati Mukherjee`s.
And I don`t think Naipaul is a fair comparison to either, nor, for quite different reasons, Nirad Chaudhuri.

Saminashah

Have you read Jasmine by Bharati Mukhejee yourself? That novel is about a displaced Hindu Punjabi lady who escaped the violence in 1980`s Punjab. I dont remember any Guyanese woman in that. Unless she is from a sub plot which I have forgotten. I read it ten years ago.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

urbashi,

well identity itself is never fixed...hyphen or no hyphen, she is both desi and American...hyphens signify a newer wave of political identity. Mukherjee is in the same group that poet Kimiko Hahn is. Hahn is biracial-Japanese and Anglo parentage. But she calls herself American in the same way Amiri Baraka does-to force Americans to see all people of color as not other....

Has Amit ever cared to read Bharati Mukherjee? Doesn`t seem so.
Personally I don`t care for her later writing, Jasmine and after, but found her earlier work very interesting. And truthful. Nor do I agree that she can call herself simply an American writer on the lines of Saul Bellow and others - hers is very much a South Asian voice in the US. She`s said she finds Anita Desai`s English too ``Indian`` (in a derogatory sense.) No-one can agree with all her ideas and attitudes. But I can understand why she wants to be thought of as a non-hyphenated American - who would like any hyphens in their identities?

nikki,

what of mukherjee`s have you read? Please demonstrate your actual knowledge of the text being discussed.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

HN,

Indeed. Look at some of the Asian authors in Eat A Bowl Of Tea....there are so many different approaches-from sociological to complete post modernism...

Amit, ok, I apologise I missed that context.
But while you interpret her ``‘someone so totally outside the Brahmanic pale of civilization’ `` statement as ``it is a blue eyed gora guy, so fall at his feet and marry him as soon as possible before he changes his mind and at the same time score a point against one`s own civilization.``, I`d focus on what came next ``and he was also a nice guy``. The other point is that she is not condemning Brahmins, merely stating that she met someone outside her family`s social circle and married him. I see that in a lot of marriages that I have seen. It doesn`t have to be a brahmin and gora it could be any other combination.
Anyway love and marriage are complex issues - I`d leave it to one`s personal choice.

This is another article that is being caught in the winds of uninformed opinion, and some freely tossed prejudices. Much l;ike Veeresh`s.

That said, I would think Amit might benefit from a more informed study of the development of immigrant literature. There is a body of poetry about the early immigrants from India in English, that actually is the most important English poetry work post-independence.

Atr least Indians on this board would remember Nissim Ezekiel, and G parthasarthy etc. The Oxford Anthology of Ten Indian Poets.

If one starts from there, this experience passes through Raja Rao, and Mulk Raj Anand Niraj Chowdhury et all. By that time, a lot of themes were tackled...which seems to be made more accessible by the new lot....Mukherhjee, Lahiri et all.

Rushdie wrote the breakthrough one...I love to privately imagine that Rushdie was the peaking of Mulk Raj Anand`s Indianisation of English...and Raj Rao`s meditation of identity on the east-west crossroads...as in The serpent and the rope. Anand was rather stodgily Indian...while Rao was esoterically Indian....and Rushdie peaaked in merging both in his fiction...and then clarifying in his non-fiction.

I think it is the same process from the woman`s point of view. What Chitra Divakuruni writes, and Mukherjee writes is not less profound...just less easily accessible. Lahiri made it accessible, and I might say at some cost to the complexities of the issue. It is rather a worthless cottage industry to psycho-analise their personalities or to dilineate their generation`s charcteristics on the basis of such insignificant pieces of biography as a impulsive marriage. Just as, the longevity of the marriage is no argument against Amit`s version of the marriage being a sham.

Romair,

Methinks you are loading too many of your own understanding of the world onto authors. There is a rather interesting essay called The Hedgehog and the fox. Might interest you in understanding this entire phenomenon of why some authors belabour as you woudl see it, one issue, while others move from one theme to another.

Amrita/Saminasha,

I think Naipaul too is a soft target for thoerising because of a difficult mal-adjusted personality he possesses. That said, if any of you have any doubts about the man`s integrity, I suggest you read a book he has written in, but claims will never read. ``Letters from father abnd son.`` It is a rather compelling portrait od a man who ``wrote for a living, and has pursued no other interests.``...or something similar.