Bharati Mukherjee's maximalist philosophy: a study of her feminism in the light of her novels

Migrancy and dislocation, either consensual or conflictual, is a global and trans-cultural necessity. Mukherjee's protagonists are all sensitive and are differently trained in the new ethnic imagination. They are tossed in an environment of ambivalence regarding their identity, racism, sexism and other social oppression. They negotiate displacement and face the multicultural reality in the process of cultural differentiation and assimilation. The multiculturalism ethos with which they are confronted leads to the struggle for a new life and a near break with the past. Out of her own several transitions as a diasporic narrator, Bharati Mukherjee has evolved a credo for the new immigrant voices, which she calls Maximalism. This is in contrast to the stagnant ‘Minimalist fiction’ of mainstream. Her attack is leveled at writers as Updike and Cheever. According to Mukherjee, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner gained some kind of international readership. The later writers pretended to speak for America but used only limited categories of subjects like Vietnam, dead-end jobs and midlife crises.

Bharati Mukherjee is her own theorist and exemplar since her novels illustrate the credo of immigrant writing as a ‘Maximalist’ act. She emphatically asserts her American citizenship. She has her characteristic way of defining her Indian heritage and affiliations through several assertions.