The Theme of “Alienation” and “Assimilation” in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee :

A Socio-Literary Perspective
Chetana Pokhriyal

Abstract:

The words like “Expatriate” and “Diaspora” need no introduction in postcolonial

literary scenario. Indian diaspora, today, has emerged with the “multiplicity of histories,
variety of culture, tradition, and a deep instinct for survival.” Indian Diaspora, though
counting more than 20 million members world–wide, survives in between “home of origin”
and “world of adoption.” The process of survival of the diasporic individual/ community in
between the “home of origin” and the “world of adoption” is the voyage undertaken in the
whole process from “alienation” to final “assimilation.”

Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian born Canadian/ American novelist, has made a deep
impression on the literary canvass. Her novels, honestly, depict the issues of her own cultural
location in West Bengal in India, her displacement (alienation) from her land of origin to
Canada where she was “simultaneously invisible” as a writer and “overexposed” as a racial
minority and her final re-location (assimilation) to USA as a naturalised citizen. For the
writer in The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife, the dilemma of belongingness in these two novels is
a matter of flux and agony, which explores the problem of nationality, location, identity and
historical memory in Canada. The “cultural diaspora-isation” what Stuart Mall calls marks
the beginning of the desire for the survival in the community of adoption. The paper aims to
explore her sense of alienation in Canada where life as an immigrant was unbearable, that
forced her to make an effort towards the process of economic, social and cultural adjustment.
Further, the paper will explore her desire for cultural fusion in the new dwellings, which in
fact, is her own inward voyage in The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine. Finally, she
visualised “assimilation” as on “end-product” which implies in totality “conforming to a
national culture” of a “nationalist way of life.”

KEYWORD USED: Expatriate, Alienation, Assimilation, Belongingness, Belief,

Diasporaisation

*****

“I am an American citizen”1 vehemently asserts Bharati Mukherjee from the core of

her heart in her short story, Two ways to Belong in America, published in New York times in
1996. This story of the two sisters epitomizes a paradigm of becoming accustomed to a
conventional American culture and its effects on a person's individuality. She begins the story
with a sanguine note of the cultural milieu of herself and her sister, Mira, “almost identical in
appearance and attitude”2 and their subsequent migration to America for further studies,
2 The Theme of “Alienation” and Assimilation” in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee
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which inexorably escorts us to ponder and brood over the “two facets”. The two sisters made
their own choices-regarding their lifestyles, their respective matrimonial alliances and finally
their level of association in the host country.

The preamble of the term ‘alienation’3 by Karl Marx in the last decade of the 19 th
century has been invigorated in the mid-20th century with the progression of migration to
America which has reached to the new high in terms of émigré populace. In the social
sciences, ‘Assimilation’4 is an approach towards incorporation and amalgamation, through
which, not only immigrants but also other marginalized groups – African-Americans in
American , women in society, schedule castes in India- are "wrapped up" into an integrated
conventional society.

Bharati Mukherjee is an investigative pioneer--of innovative terrains, practices, and

literatures—co-existent with her wide-ranging mission to discover new worlds. Bharati
Mukherjee’s foremost concern, as a postmodern writer, has been the life of South-Asian
expatriates and the dilemma of ‘acculturation’ and ‘assimilation’. Acculturation is the
depressing upshot of post-modern scenario, which Mukherjee had comprehended much early
in her life when she joined the Creative Writing Programme in the United States in 1961. Her
odyssey through different nationalities can be recounted through her expedition at a juvenile
age to study in America; her entering into matrimony with “an American of Canadian
parentage”5 novelist Clark Blaise; her migration with her husband to Canada; becoming a
Canadian citizen; then their emigration to America and final settlement in the States; Bharati
Mukherjee has altered several citizenships and lived in assorted cultural milieus with
inexplicable alacrity. Mukherjee’s characters are autobiographical portraits of her
interpretation and reaction of her experience as an expatriate in Canada which was “a cultural
and psychological ‘mongrelization’”6 and her mounting identification of the self as ‘an
immigrant nobody’7 in America. The two different sets of experiences- of an expatriate as
well as an immigrant- are reflected through five novels, two collections of short stories and
two non-fictional works co-authored with her husband, written in two different countries. The
different periods of her literary profession can be assembled as – the period of alienation; the
period of evolution; and the period of assimilation. Her two early novels The Tiger’s
Daughters (1972) and Wife (1975) were written during the period of alienation in Canada.
Her characters are not controlled by one faith, one ethnic, racial or cultural proclivity. The
Canadian occurrence, however, has left its own scratch marks and blemishes on Mukherjee’s
inherent sense of worth and stimulated and provoked her individuality. “I was always well-
employed but never allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society.”8

The women portraits are the spokesperson of her own experiences; through them she
extricates the trials and tribulations. Instead of limiting to the constricted paradigm of
3 Chetana Pokhriyal
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deliberation, alienation also refers to the concept of transnationalism, multiculturalism and
the theory of Diaspora. The idea and usage of transnationalism came into vogue with the term
“transnational nation”9 by Randolph Bourne in 1916. The spotlight is on both transnational
communities represented by Bharati Mukherjee as well as transnational interpretations
represented by the characters in her novels and short stories and their experiences.
Transnationalism in Bharati Mukherjee is a broader expression. The intrinsic triangular
relationship exists between her as a migrant, and the “place of belonging” i.e., India and
destination countries- first Canada, and finally America, that in due course becomes the
“place of belief”. While it is difficult for an Asian person to assimilate into American culture,
it is similarly difficult for an Asian- American to assimilate back to their native country. In a
paradoxical situation, Tara Banerjee in The Tiger’s Daughter is alienated in her American set
of connections and then alienated from her roots of pedigree. She suffers the spasm of
estrangement which is awfully unfortunate. Her pain of alienation is evident not only in
Canada and America but even in her indigenous terrain of Bengal and wonders “how does the
foreignness of spirit begin?”10, when she returns to India after seven years. It is at that
moment she excruciatingly realises that she is neither an Indian nor an American.With the
advent of globalisation, Diaspora, in particular, has attained new connotations, significance
associated with design such as global deterritorialisation, transnational migration and cultural
hybridity

Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel The Tiger’s Daughter is a materialization of the

diasporic community and hence alienated. Tara Banerjee, the main protagonist, is the ‘other’,
disjointed community who struggles to hook-on to the nationalised community by entering
into the wedlock with an American, David Cartwright. According to Milton Gordon, the
eminent sociologist, inter-marriage leads to marital assimilation which is an “intermixture of
the two ‘gene pools’ which the two populations represent, regardless of how similar or
divergent these two gene pools may be”11. David Cartwright is wholly Western, the more Tara
becomes cognizant of this point of divergence between- the Indian wife and the American
husband, the more she is apprehensive of the verity that that she is a detachable entity from
the nationalised community. Her first manifestation of alienation in a territory of immigration
is through The Tiger’s Daughter. Tara Banerjee, the key protagonist, is a Brahmin girl who
travels to America for advance studies. In order to assimilate herself to her new surroundings
she marries an American like Mukherjee did. A sociological theory, proposed by Glazer and
Moynihan (1970) arose in the sixties. They proposed a ‘melting pot paradigm’12, which takes
a closer look at the process of migrants’ integration in the case of New York City. The authors
argue that migrants like Tara Banerjee are more prone to assimilate to a common (American)
model but at the same time they increasingly retain their ethnicity more than ever. Tara
Banerjee evaluates her life and ethics with that of her husband’s. Contrary to the cultural
4 The Theme of “Alienation” and Assimilation” in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee
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belief, her ethnicity comes to direct blows when her conjugal life which was supposed to be
based on the standard code of ‘union’ identified by her right from her childhood, was actually
based on the principle of ‘contract’ as identified by her husband. The wistful, passionate
sensitivity of an immigrant for her mother country is dashed to pieces when it comes into
direct blows with reality. The “Americanisation” of her finer sensibilities; her unruffled and
frosty response to her nickname ‘Tultul’; her response to her relatives’ house which seemed
elegant and chic to her previously looked shabbier afterwards, startle her. The character of
Tara is aghast and horror-struck at this swing in response. Tara is an immigrant ‘sandwiched
between personality’ woman and suffers the ‘duality and conflict’ very divergent to her
American life. The moral fiber of Tara’s character, like the novelist, suffers from the cultural
dichotomy “surrendering those thousands of years of ‘pure culture”13. The ‘epidemics,
collision, fatal accidents, and starvation’14 of Calcutta, the omnipresence of her husband
David in the midst of rioting rabble and her own westernisation over the period of seven
years add to her anguish and misery. The husband and wife have different estimations and
assessments of Indian encounter, her distress and his apprehension, are seen in one of their
joint publications, Days and Nights in Calcutta. Mukherjee, like Tara, felt self-estrangement
at a ‘loss of identity’.

Not only “alienation” but also the “transcendence of alienation” is an inherently

historical concept. If Bharati Mukherjee in the initial years of her writing career was
influenced by V.S.Naipaul and “tried to explore state-of-the-art expatriation,”15 she later
rejected Naipaul as a model and chose Bernard Malamud, the Good Samaritan, whose
essential anxiety for the life of the marginalised and their anguish, gave her “the self-
confidence to write about her own community”16. Bharati Mukherjee learnt to overcome the
traumatic experiences of the ‘other’ from her mentor Malamud but at the same time she
realised “the different sense of self, of existence and of mortality”17 that differentiated her
from Malamud.

Estrangement is a generalist standpoint and it, too, has been condemned to some
disgruntlement. In Wife (1975), Mukherjee writes about a woman named Dimple who has
been suppressed by men, is desirous to be the idyllic Bengali wife, but out of foreboding fear
and delicate volatility, she assassinates her husband and ultimately commits suicide. Bharati
Mukherjee’s characterisation of Dimple lends a divergent and an intricate perspective to the
theme of immigration and subsequent alienation. Dimple is a middle–class married woman
who wishes to migrate and finally migrates from Calcutta to New York with a hope that
“Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, and fund-raising
dinners for noble charities. Marriage would bring her love”18.
5 Chetana Pokhriyal
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For her, migration and marriage are synonymous with each other. She presumes that
her migration to New York with her husband after marriage would gratify, enchant and
liberate her from the expected unhappiness and afflictions. The author impresses upon her
readers that immigration for some is an exodus from reality. Her failure to grasp the pleasures
of existence in New York with its bigness which “she had never seen before”19 is symbolic of
failure of her marriage to Amit. The novel, Wife, is a perfect version of peripheral confusions
regarding American culture and habitat and internal commotion to choose between personal
deliverance on the one hand and matrimonial bondage on the other that Dimple suffers from.
Dimple shows signs of dilemma of cultures which is a domino effect of her phobic condition
in the end. Two incidents from the novel, one, her enforced self-abortion and the other, her
atrocious assassination of her husband are emblematic expression of her turmoil flanked by
the other and the self.

In the intervening period between the publication of Wife in 1975 and Jasmine in
1989, Bharati Mukherjee wrote about two dozen stories, dealing with heartrending facet of
rootless distinctiveness. This phase corresponds with Bharati Mukherjee’s migration, along
with her husband, from Canada to America, owing to intimidating racial discriminations in
Canada. This phase has seen the publication of two volumes, Darkness (1985) and The
Middleman and Other Stories (1988). The wrenching pain, indolence and the wistfulness of
the previous novels is replaced by the aspirations of the immigrants in the novels written after
her settlement in America. The Middlemarch and Other Stories is an anthology with an
extensive insight into the demeanor of an immigrant, more insightful and more Americanised.
The experiences of an immigrant portrayed are not in isolation but in a more relative
perception.

Jasmine builds up the proposal of the amalgamation, combination and absorption of

the East in the West with a story telling of a young Hindu woman who leaves India for the
U.S. following her husband's assassination, merely to be raped and in the long run return to
the understanding of a caregiver through a succession of jobs. Jasmine voluntarily undergoes
transformation of the self from Jyoti to Jane to Jase to Jasmine. At every conversion of the
personality she stands unyielding in resistance to her providence and destiny. It is not the
uncertainties of the new continent that challenge her but the uncertainties of her life in an
unknown terra ferma. Her journey to the New World is a sort of “regeneration through
Violence”20 and her ultimate realisation in America “that it won’t disintegrate’21.

Taking into consideration the Chicago School, in particular the work of Park (1930),
and his socio-political analysis into consideration, Bharati Mukherjee’s assimilation is a
progressive and an irreversible phenomenon, justified by her struggle for subsistence in an
6 The Theme of “Alienation” and Assimilation” in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee
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alien milieu. Warner and Srole (1945) were the first to launch the notion of “straight line
assimilation”22. This has been a seminally decisive model in the sociological literature, the
crucial squabble being that migrants’ behaviour will become in due course increasingly
similar to that of natives. Jasmine’s assimilation in the American way of life is more in tune
with the notion of “straight line assimilation”. Jasmine, the female protagonist from the third
world, travels to the States from India and illustrates the eagerness for incorporation in the
mainstream American culture. In other words, at any rate it will converge to the American
approach towards life. This model of convergence of Jasmine into the conventions of the
society is somewhat detailed, pointing through numerous steps after her widowhood-
travelling to the New World, getting raped, murdering the person who raped her, her
absorption into the Americanised way of life, her live-in relationship with Bud Ripplemayer
without marriage and different impetuses of adaptation en route to assimilation which
however pushes toward a homogeneous and harmonised way of living. This prototype was
strongly influenced by early migrants’ integration experiences in America, despite their very
different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic background. A further radical blow to the
straight line assimilation paradigm came from the work of Gans (1979, 1996). His “bumpy
line theory”23 question, the very existence of a progressive assimilation, highlighting that
migrants’ greater length of stay in the host country was not necessarily associated with a
visible improvement in their economic and social conditions. This social theory ricochets the
wistful nostalgia of an expatriate whose entire subsistence reclines on the ‘ex’ status of the
times of yore. Bharati Mukherjee metamorphoses, through her novels, from an expatriate in
Canada to an immigrant in the United States of America. Canada offers a mosaic of
multiculturalism that persuades people to preserve their unique cultural characteristics
whereas United States proffers an assimilating melting pot to persuade all and sundry to
become part of a homogeneous mass.

A most recent development in the analysis is the “segmented assimilation”24 paradigm

developed by Portes and Zou (1993). In this view, migrants assimilate in different strata of
the host society. Bharati Mukherjee’s stay in Canada reflects “the sense of betrayal had its
effect and drove me and thousands like me from the country”25 on the paradigm of
“segmented assimilation”. Bharati Mukherjee industriously demarcates the process of
migrants’ integration into the host country from a social point of view assessing the degree of
social integration and assimilation. From being an expatriate deracinated from her roots in the
early 70’s, her autobiographical projection of characters in the early 80’s explore the dilemma
of transition. Secondly, through her characters, she explores the migrants’ own perceptions
about their integration rather than natives’ attitude toward migrants.
7 Chetana Pokhriyal
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“I need to feel like a part of the community I have adopted (as I
tried to feel in Canada as well). I need to put roots down, to
vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the
immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the
trauma of self-transformation”.26

Dimple realizes the ethnic characteristics of the “little India” where Indian-
Americans live. It is very difficult to evaluate whether these Indian migrants that live in
ethnically homogeneous communities have a predilection to socialize more. Jasmine has a
monocultural, and monochromatic, view of the American society, and responds promptly to
the behavioural patterns of America rather than the ethnic community of Indians. On meeting
her husband’s former teacher Devinder Vadhera with “artificially maintained Indianness”27 ,
Jasmine realises the naked reality and wants to run away from the “fortress of
Punjabiness”28 .She instantaneously indoctrinates the Americanisation of the personality in
her character but the persistent Indiananess seems to stick to the subsurface of her
adaptations. Jasmine’s metamorphosis from her so-called Indianness and Punjabiness into a
new–found ‘liquid’ identity of an American, translated into words through the live-in
camaraderie of Bud Ripplemayer, is the celebration of amalgamated, multipart, egalitarian
society. Jasmine, apart from conforming to the “straight–line theory” also conforms to
“bumpy-line theory” of progressive assimilation.

Migrants like Tara, Dimple, Jasmine have a propensity to converge, and so does
Bharati Mukherjee albeit quite gradually, to the standard of natives. Bharati Mukherjee in her
candid confession bemoans the state of “overseas citizenship while expecting the permanent
protection and economic benefits that come with living and working in America” 29. The
constant reminder of language, physical differences and loss of the native land no longer
problematises the exceptionally intricate endeavour of assimilation, rather, Jasmine’s
peculiarity of her personality adds to the mystic charm.

“Amalgamation” is distinguished by Park and Burgess as “a biological process, the fusion of

races by interbreeding and intermarriage. Assimilation on the other hand is limited to the
fusion of cultures”.30 Bharati Mukherjee unambiguously has castoff the hyphenated sticky tag
"Indian-American," regardless of the fact that she is an expatriate from India.
8 The Theme of “Alienation” and Assimilation” in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee
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REFERENCES

Bharati Mukherjee. Two ways to Belong in America, The New York Times, 22nd September,
1996,in Amitava Kumar(ed.) Away : The Indian writer as a Expatriate, Penguin, New Delhi,
2003 xxvi, p. 271
2
ibid., p. 272
3
The concept of ‘Alienation’, developed by Marx is the subject of much interest in
sociological discussions relating to the human condition and our relationship to society and
the workplace.
4
Assimilation is the process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the customs and
attitudes of the prevailing culture.
5
Two Ways to Belong in America, p. 272
6
Ibid. p. 272
7
Ibid. p. 273
8
Ibid. p. 273
9
Randolph Bourne. “Transnational America”. The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1916, Vol.118. No.
1; p. 86-97. Quoted from The Atlantic Online.
http. //www.theatlantic.com/issues/16jul/bourne.htm
10
Bharati Mukherjee. The Tiger’s Daughters (Boston:Houghton Miffin,1972;rptd.
London:Chatto and Windus,1973), p. 37
11
Milton M. Gordon. Assimilation in American Life p. 71
12
N. Glazer and D.P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Rican, Jews,
Italians and Irish of New York City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970(1963)),p. 363
13
Two ways to Belong in America,op. ct.
14
ibid., p. 97
15
Bharati Mukherjee. “Introduction”, Darkness (Toronto; Penguin, 1985, Indian reprint
1990), p. 1.
16
Ibid. p. 2.
17
Alison B. Carb. ‘An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee’, The Massachusetts Review,
Winner 1988-1989, p. 650.
18
Bharati Mukherjee, Wife (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1975; Penguin Indian reprint), p. 3.
19
Wife, p. 52.
20
Malashri Lal. “Bharati Mukherjee: The ‘Maximalist Credo” in K.N.Awasthi,ed.
Contemporary Indian English fiction: An Anthology of Essays (New Delhi: ABS
Publications,!993), p. 59
21
Bharati Mukherjee. Jasmine(New York: Grove Weidenfeld,1989), p. 181
22
Warner, W.L., Srole L., 1945, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups. (New Haven,
Yale University Press).
23
Gans, H., 1979, ‘Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in
America’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2(1): 1-20.
9 Chetana Pokhriyal
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24
Porte, S. A., Zou M., 1993, The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its
Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences 530:74-96.
25
Two ways to Belong in America,op. ct.
26
Ibid.
27
Jasmine, p. 145.
28
Ibid., p. 148.
29
Ibid.
30
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burges, Introduction to the Sciences of Sociology, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press,1921, p. 737

Dr. Chetana Pokhriyal is Reader & Head, Department of English, MKP (PG) College,
Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Her current areas of interests are the new literary theories like
Multiculturalism, Theory of Diaspora, and Cultural Studies. She is an avid reader and takes
interests in new inter-disciplinary approaches to literature.

Mobile: +91-9412900913
E-Mail: chetanapokhriyal@yahoo.com
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