Associate Professor & Head, Department of English, Dayanand Arya Kanya, RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India
Online published on 8 January, 2014.
Bharati Mukherjee is a doyenne in the field of English Literature. Her fictional work has won rare acclaim from the world of critics. Bharati Mukherjee's novels reflect as to what and who she is, her personality, her thought process, her strength and weakness as well. It will be prudent to delve further into her writing to bring to the surface precisely what she wants to project. It is by and large apparent that she is deeply involved in issues like immigration, assimilation, expatriates, alienation, diaspora, host country, country of origin, etc. Her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter, published in 1971, is narrated through the eyes of the protagonist Tara. This novel is almost an autobiographical story reflecting the protagonist's shattered innocence when she stays in Calcutta after coming back from the USA. Her stories exemplify the problems faced by Indian women in a cross- cultural encounter and their ultimate search for identity. In Darkness, her first collection of short stories, she deals with aspirations for success and stability of South Asians; but they get frustrated in their attempts to get to their goals. The Sorrow and the Terror:the haunting legacy of the Air India Tragedy. This is a joint work of Bharati Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise. Amongst Mukherjee's immigrant tales, a significant change in focus is found in the collection called The Middleman and Other Stories.
Alienation, Assimilation, Cultural, Crisis, Identity Immigrants, Values, Woman
