Sunteți pe pagina 1din 8

International Journal of English

and Literature (IJEL)


ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028
Vol. 4, Issue 6, Dec 2014, 33-40
TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

THE PLACE OF NOSTALIGIA IN DIASPORA WRITING: HOME AND


BELONGING IN THE FICTION OF BHARATI MUKHERJEE
C. NEELIMA
Associate Professor, Department of English and Communication, RISE Gandhi Group of Institutes,
Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, India

ABSTRACT
The present paper The Place of Nostalgia in Diaspora Writing: Home and Belonging in the Short Fiction of
Bharati Mukherjee explores the main theoretical approaches surrounding diaspora and the concepts of home, belonging
and nostalgia. It is to extrapolate from the theoretical framework and apply their relevance and limitations to the study of
the diasporic condition. Primary focus will be on the Indian diaspora within the United States and its portrayal in Bharati
Mukherjees short fiction. Specifically, I wish to look at how nostalgia is both employed as a method and represented as a
theme in creating and shaping the sense of belonging and home within her fictional narrative. Finally, I will place her work
within the larger context of diaspora literature and analyse the overall diasporic literary response to established and often
problematic understandings of nostalgia, home and belonging.

KEYWORDS: Postcolonial Culture, Short Fiction, Nostalgia


INTRODUCTION
Nostalgia, home and belonging are interconnected concepts that are difficult to fully capture in any conventional
definition. Though a number of critical theories have emerged around the notions of home and belonging as viewed within
the diasporic framework, virtually little focus has centred on the way these identities are constituted and contested,
particularly within the fictional context. In this paper, I wish to discuss the place of nostalgia in diaspora writing and its
significance in creating a sense of home and belonging for the diasporic protagonist. I would like to examine these
concepts in relation to the work of Bharati Mukherjees collection of short storiesThe Middleman and Other Stories (1988).
I will highlight the problems inherent in homogenous, simplistic definitions of home, belonging and nostalgia that fail to
recognize socio-economic variables such as gender, age, and economic class structures. Diasporic identity is dynamic,
multi-dimensional and evolving and belonging itself is a continual ongoing process, more usefully viewed as journey
rather than as a leap between absolute fixed points of departure and arrival. I also contend that the term home extends
beyond a geographical, physical space and can encompass other variables such as memories, relationships and cultural
signifiers such as food and rituals.
This paper asserts that nostalgic feelings may not just revolve around going back to ones home in a tangible,
physical sense of the term. I argue that nostalgia can be a subtle psychological manifestation of a longing to recapture an
emotional or spiritual connectionand can also be a mourning of sorts for sentiments that have been dissipated or
misunderstood or even disappointed with onesown failed potential.

www.tjprc.org

editor@tjprc.org

34

C. Neelima

Bharati Mukherjee
I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in bullet-proof vest, was
to be a coward. (Jasmine, 17)
Mukherjee defines herself as an American writer whose fiction portrays characters occupying the hurly-burly of
the unsettled magma between two worlds. (1999) Characters who are determined to construct new identities and a new
sense of belonging for themselves. She asserts that in this age of diaspora ones biological identity may not be ones only
identity. Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration. (American Dreamer, 1997: 4) In my view, she chooses
to portray nostalgia as a form of selective memory that, rather than idealizing the past, reveals its flaws, namely her
characters previous sexual and economic powerlessness.
Mukherjee is quite different in her approach to interpreting nostalgia, home and belonging. In Letters of Transit:
Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (1997: 70), she writes that, It is the reality of transplantation and
psychological metamorphosis that is my material, not the world I left behind. From this we may infer that Mukherjee
rejects the fundamental notion of nostalgia as a wistful longing for something left behind. My argument, however, is that
an awareness of the past plays a significant role in that her characters strive to escape from it whilst attempting to become
something else. Nostalgia does not define Mukherjees characters, and the overriding impression the reader gets is of the
characters determination to check the resurgence of any sentimentality or regret.
Mukherjees The Middleman and Other Stories, (1990) emphasize the reality of transplantation and
psychological metamorphosis (Aciman, 1999:70) that occurs when immigrants from various socio-ethnic and economic
backgrounds interact with mainstream America in all its permutations and learn to negotiate their way between two modes
of knowledge, (Mukherjee, 1990: 189) much in the tradition of early American pioneers and settlers.
The impulse to invent a new identity complicates the concept of nostalgia and home in terms of its conventional
meaning. Nostalgia serves a dual role in these stories, as a critique of the past and also as an utopian yearning for an
idealized, westernized way of life that may have been desired and aspired to in their previous impoverished existence.
Nostalgia in Mukherjees fiction reminds how backward and traditional the home left behind is. Any thought or
reminiscing about a home are considered a hindrance in the context of constructing a new sense of belonging in America.
Mukherjees fiction portrays migration as a process of self-invention and transformation, rather than
unquestioning clinging to the past. According to FakrulAlam, the immigrants portrayed in her narratives are seen to be
emerging from shadowy or marginal lives and putting out feelers to root themselves in a brave new world. (1996:15)
Cindi, the Italo-American girl, in Orbiting, wants her new Afghan to forget his culture of pain. She wants to teach him
how to walk like an American [] how to fill up a room [] instead of melting and blending. Maya Sanyal, the female
protagonist of The Tenant, restlessly moves from city to city, discarding her Indian values as she searches for a new kind
of meaning to her life. What seems to be interesting about these characters is that they seem to be united in their desire to
escape a past that has either exploited them or persecuted them.
Mukherjees fiction thus rejects nostalgia in terms of its narrow definition of writing wistfully about the homeland
or a yearning for the relationships and support structures left behind. Nostalgia in terms of romanticized sentimentality
about the past is viewed as an indulgence that impedes an experience of the present, an experience that is necessary in
order to succeed as a migrant. She just subverts the definition of nostalgia, she also revisits and redefines the meaning of
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0

35

The Place of Nostaligia in Diaspora Writing: Home and Belonging in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee

the term home with its connotations of security and comfort. Mukherjees migrants assume and discard addresses and
identities. They appear to have no attachments to hold on to, no tangible symbols of home, material possessions, food or
neighbourhoods.
Mukherjees approach to both parameters of home and nostalgia as reflected in her female characters in
particular, appears to have been shaped by a feminist post-colonial set of principles. They view home in terms of the
confining boundaries it sets up that defines and limits their sense of self. In fact, they are relieved to escape home with its
connotations of patriarchal and gender inequalities. Re-routing thus plays a significant role in Mukherjees stories,
where new beginnings are valued over endings. This urgency to construct a new identity echoes in Mukherjees own
trajectory that saw her travelling from India to Canada to the United States, transforming herself from an expatriate to a
naturalized American citizen, negotiating the no-mans land from the country of my past to the continent of my present.
(Grewal, 2005:68)
Aversion to referring to or sentimentalizing the past is a theme that recurs in several of the stories in the
collection, notably, The Tenant, Jasmine and A Wifes Story. Mukherjees heroines are constantly fleeing,
whether from parental authority, unhappy marriages or economic impoverishment. In Jasmine the heroine enters America
as an illegal immigrant and exploits her exotic appearance to get a series of American lovers and illegal jobs.
Mukherjees female protagonists are aware of inhabiting this in-between space, their identities in transit,
while they attempt to shed their inherited set of values and replace them with new American ones. They seem to between
roles, caught between tradition and modernity and compelled to improvise as they go along. Despite their education,
economic independence and increasing self-belief, Mukherjees female protagonists thus labour under a deeply-rooted
sense of guilt, as they rebel against their cultural values and ultimately view themselves as transgressors.
The awareness of the past and the dilemma it poses for a diasporic who wants to let go has significant bearings on
Mukherjees portrayal of nostalgia, particularly if one interprets the meaning of nostalgia as a yearning for kinship.
According to Ippolito and Halbwachs, [w]e remember not only things that have happened to us personally, but also, and
perhaps more importantly, we remember events, language, attitudes, actions and values that are aspects of our membership
in a group. (Ippolito, 1998: 191-203) This diasporic longing to belong to a familiar socio-cultural group is evident in
some of Mukherjees stories. Mukherjees characters reach for comforting symbols and connections to their past and
ethnicity when standing at an emotional crossroad. According to me this could be interpreted as a nostalgic yearning to
access a sense of home and belonging in moments of crisis moments that are recurrent in the life of a migrant. Mukherjee
appears to be critiquing the concept of nostalgia, and despite her insistence on being viewed as an American writer in the
traditionof other immigrant writers, there are aspects of her work that are derived mainly from her cultural roots in India,
particularly in narratives where the principal character is a woman. Her return to these cultural signifiers can be termed
nostalgic, thereby revealing the often unconscious elements at work at the evocation of longing over objects associated
with an idealized vision of home.
Mukherjees narratives are, above all, stories of transformation, of immigrants finding renewal and reaffirmation
in the melting pot that is America and the impulse behind this is a nostalgic yearning for America and what it represents.
Home in this instance is not a specific place of residence but an idealized abstraction which is the American Dream.
Her female protagonists, such as Jasmine, Maya and Panna, negotiate their identities, hovering in an in-between
contradictory space until they can achieve oneness with the American dream. Home and belonging when defined as a
www.tjprc.org

editor@tjprc.org

36

C. Neelima

return to old ways of being, become boundaries that constrict rather than liberate her subjects search for identity.
Her characters strive for freedom from convention and home in both the emotional and temporal sense. Mukherjees stories
sometimes suggest that migration and eventual belonging is an arduous and long-term painful process and not an
instantaneous privilege. Her protagonists may change accents, clothing or name and adopt superficial trappings of
becoming American, but they still remain marginal diasporics, outsiders who are constantly made aware of their diasporic
status and thwarted in their desire to put down roots and belong.
Mukherjees fiction implies that assertion that belonging to the American dream comes at a price. The price is the
rejection of ones personal history, starting at the bottom of the ladder, painfully working up each rung. The female
diasporic protagonists are trapped between two opposing systems and values, whether of marriage or a single life pitted
against familial obligations. There is withdrawal from the old world, but it has violent emotional repercussions in terms of
rape, abuse and loneliness. We are never quite sure what compels her to make such a difficult choice. Perhaps Mukherjee is
suggesting that such violence and uncertainty is a prerequisite for rebirth and a new identity in America.
The overriding theme in Mukherjees short stories is of transformation. Mukherjee is also keen to present
Americans as being equally changed through their contact with the immigrants. In an essay on Being an American Writer
(22 May, 2008).
While reshaping the diasporic identity to fit an American model, Mukherjees narratives also challenge and seek
to redefine what constitutes the archetypal American identity, thus echoing Clifford and Halls view of diasporasas
dynamic communities that shape and reshape their own ancestral culture, as well as cultures they come in to contact with.
Her novels portray an ironic and perceptive portrayal of Americans who are just as wounded and lost as the immigrants
with whom they interact, and who are as much victims as perpetrators, united in chasing a idealized American Dream.
Most of Mukherjees stories centre on a dialogue between either Americans or diasporics or between diasporics of
different ethnicities, like Maya Sanyals with Charity Chin in The Tenant. Mukherjee does not allow her characters to
pause on a fond memory or a moment of emotional attachment as they hurtle their way into a desirable future. She avoids
sentimentality even when these characters are reflecting over intensely emotional experiences, such as a broken
relationship. Panna and Maya Sanyal leave comfortable, secure marriages in pursuit of freedom, yet Mukherjees prose
does not always reflect their trauma or emotional scarring from exiting a relationship.
Mukherjees characters nostalgia is built around an image of an unaltered, stagnant India that lacks subtlety or
depth. Her protagonists, in a hurry to embrace the new, oversimplify the transition from the old to the new and underplay
the significance of losing away of being. They adopt a judgmental and detached spectator point of view when
scrutinizing their past and their previous relationships. In referring to her longer fiction, but in an opinion that may also be
applied to her short stories, Jasbir Jain notes that, despite Mukherjees assertions about being an American writer,
her main concern is the relationship of the protagonists towards India. Jaspal Kaur Singh contends that authors like
Mukherjee draw upon an essentialized notion of Indianness in a stereotypical and reductive manner, that stems from a
westernized consciousness and an awareness of westernized audience. (2008:61)
Mukherjees characters are nostalgic for a future and a present they have not yet encountered but which they
dream of namely acceptance into the American mainstream and all that it signifies in terms of material comforts and
socio-emotional connection. The central preoccupation of Mukherjees fiction is the manner by which these hybrid
identities negotiate new ways of belonging and how nostalgia can act as either an impediment in this process.
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0

The Place of Nostaligia in Diaspora Writing: Home and Belonging in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee

37

Mukherjees fiction focuses not only on survival in an emotional and geographical vacuum where economic
security is a priority, but also on capturing the dilemmas pertaining to a fluid identity, where inter-generational hierarchies
and gender-defined roles and expectations become critical variables in determining individual happiness and the attempt to
reconstruct identity and a sense of belonging in new locations.
Diasporic fiction exemplified by Mukherjee goes beyond a nostalgic wistfulness. Its scope is ambitious and
attempts to redefine and question the meaning of home and belonging for characters that possess a dual perspective and
have portable roots. Helen Grice in her book Negotiating Identities, states that contemporary Asian-American narrative has
shifted from psychologies of exile to narratives of migration that rethink the idea of home. (Grice, 2002:201-02)
The ambiguity behind notions of home and belonging is largely due to the fact that Mukherjee is writing against a
backdrop of national identity, ethnicity and location.
Home as evidenced in Mukherjees fiction, is ultimately tied up with a sense of self and a sense of identity, and
it can also allude to a sense of belonging in terms of emotional relationships and cultural moorings. Svetlana Boym, in her
discussion of nostalgia argues that:
To feel at home is to know that things are in their place and so are you. It is a state of mindthat does not depend
upon actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but a sense of intimacy with the
world. (Boym, 2001:251)
Mukherjees stories reveal more varieties of interaction between different ethnicities who are all jostling for a
slice of the American dream. Her American protagonists range from academics as in Jasmine, to down and out social
drop outs as in Loose Ends. This panoramic view of contemporary American society can be considered both a strength in
terms of capturing the flavor of American society can be considered both a strength in terms of capturing the flavor of
America and a weakness in terms of a propensity to remain on the surface of such characterizations and not probe deeper.
Mukherjee recognizes and emphasizes different facets of the diasporic needs to belong and to preserve or create
an identity. Like other postcolonial writers who live in The Third Space, as defined by Bhabha, she is interested in
tracing the trajectory of their shared Bengal roots and its replanting within an alien environment. The challenge that her
characters face is to find or question the necessity to find a core, stable point of reference, a sense of home in a world that
is in constant flux. Mukherjee understands the nostalgic pull felt by the diaspora, but in her narrative, nostalgia is an
impediment to belonging to a new world.
Mukherjee is interested in the trajectory that takes a diasporic from alienation to integration and finally
assimilation in the host state. She considers a backward looking nostalgia to be an impediment in so far as it acts as a
deterrent to this process. Clifford (1994:319) asserts that diasporic subjects are carriers of consciousness which provides
an awareness of difference. Mukherjee perceptively combines her social privilege with empathy for the diasporic
condition. Her concern is not so much the geographical, but the emotional landscape of their fictional protagonists. India s
representation in her narratives is more iconic than literal, more allegorical than chroniclers of factual reality. Nostalgia
plays an important part in this, as it functions as the link between past, present and future. Their artistic voice reflects not
only the generational shift in diasporic priorities and concerns, but also the changing nature of American society.
(Kalra, Daur, Hytnyk, 2005:37)

www.tjprc.org

editor@tjprc.org

38

C. Neelima

Mukherjee in the contemporary world of transnational cultural exchanges, a movement of peoples between
countries implies that identities and cultures get delocalized, but rarely detached from memories of past places.
(AparnaRayaprol, 1997) The process of cultural negotiation is an intrinsic part of the immigrant narrative. The paradox
here is that the diaspora experience nostalgia not only for what has been left behind in the past, but also for what has been
left behind in the past, but also for what is inaccessible in the present.
In diasporic writings nostalgia becomes a self-conscious way to offer selective bits of information on the
homeland or to evoke stereotypical images of life back home. Jaspal Kaur Singh, warns against the tendency to
reconstruct an identity and a home, which is based on an outright rejection of Indian culture and/or womanhood. Singh
argues against an essentialist and reductive representation of India or its portrayal through a middle-class educated lens.
This may simply perpetuate the postcolonial binaries between tradition and modernity. (2008)

CONCLUSIONS
According to Brouillette, Mukherjee may be catering to the commercial needs of the Anglo-American publishing
industry. This has the effect of a certain ghettoization, as a largely white industry forces the diasporic writer to write about
multicultural issues for a largely white, middle-class audience that is familiar with global issues. She is using a global
language, English, to expose the diasporic experience to a wider audience, making it less exotic or peripheral. Mukherjee
presents in an ironic, satirical and sometimes humorous manner, the predicament of being a diasporic in contemporary
times and draw attention to social and political ills, such as war, divorce, violence or racism. She challenges the notions of
patriarchal hierarchy and gender stereotyping, not always through polemical hectoring but through imaginative portrayal of
individual choices. The struggle to assert an identity is made accessible to an audience that may not necessarily understand
or appreciate the stakes involved in inhabiting parallel worlds simultaneously.

REFERENCES
1.

Aciman, Andre, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. New York: New York,
1999.

2.

Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee, New York: Twayne, 1996.

3.

Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Blanc Cristina Szanton, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects,
Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-states. Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1993.

4.

Bhaba, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

5.

Blunt, Alison, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home, Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

6.

Connell, Michael, Jessie Greason and Tom Grimes. An interview with Bharati Mukherjee.

7.

Mukherjee. Iowa Review, 20.3 (1990). Conquering America with Bharati Mukherjee: World of Ideas interview
with Bill Moyers, Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1990.

8.

Grewal, Inderpal, and CarenKapln. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and TransnationalFeminist Practices.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994.

Impact Factor (JCC): 4.0867

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0

39

The Place of Nostaligia in Diaspora Writing: Home and Belonging in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee

9.

Hall, Stewart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Jonathan Rutherford
(ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

10. Ippolito, Emilia. History, Oral Memory and Identity in Toni Morrisons Beloved. The Poeticsof Memory.
Thomas Wagenbaur (ed.). Tubingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 1998.
11. Jain, Jasbir. Foreignness of Spirit: The World of Bharati Mukherjees Novels. Journal ofIndian Writing in
English. Volume 13.2 July 1985: 12-19.
12. Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora Criticism.
13. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ., 2006.
14. Mukherjee Bharati. A Four-Hundred-Year-Old-Woman. The Writer on Her Work: New Essays in New Territory
(Vol.2). Ed. Janet Sternburg, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991, 33-38.
15. ____ American Dreamer. Mother Jones. January/February 1997/01.
16. ____ Being an American Writer. Writers on America. U.S. Department of State publication. 22 May 2008.
17. ____ Jasmine. London: Virago Press Limited, 1991.
18. ____ The Middleman and Other Stories. London: Virago Press Limited, 1990.
19. ____ Wife, London: Penguin Books Limited. 1987.
20. Nelson, Emmanuel S., and Bharati Mukherjee, Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives; New York: Garland
Publications, 1993.
21. Nora, Pierre and Lawrence D. Kritzman. Realmsof Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: Conflicts and
Divisions. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1996.
22. Ponzanesi, Sandra, Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and
Afro-Italian Diaspora, Albany: State University of New York, 2004.
23. Rayaprol, Aparna. Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997.
24. Safran, William. Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora, 1991 1(1): 83-99.
25. Said, Edward William. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin, 1991.
26. Sing, Jaspal Kaur. Representation and Resistance: Indian and African Womens Texts at Home and in the
Diaspora, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008.
27. Vertovec, Steven. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge, 2000.

www.tjprc.org

editor@tjprc.org

S-ar putea să vă placă și