Chapter VI HOLDER OF THE WORLD (Hannah: The Adventurer) T. Ramesh Reddy
Amidst the gamut of English prose writing in post-Independence India, the fiction of expatriate writers is increasingly gaining recognition, echoing as it does the diverse but popular trend of emigration and travel. Bharati Mukherjee’s novels express these nomadic impulses of Indians, often in deliberate search of a materially better
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Fictional characters, incidents and events coalesce with historical personages, places, events and incidents to give it a local colour and habitation, like history plays of Shakespeare. That makes the novel interesting and exciting. But, at several places, in the novel, there is a lack of passion, feeling and poetry, so badly needed to make a work of art more stimulating, exciting and readable. Hoping to humour her Indian and American readers, Mukherjee fails to please both. The “heard melodies” of the seventeenth-century England are sweet to Americans but, not sweeter to Indians. Adversely, ‘those unheard’ are not sweet to Indians but are sweeter to Americans. This interplay of “heard” and “unheard,” the enactment of ‘dehousement’ and ‘rehousement’ make her, a sort of the mythical …show more content…
The story of Hannah is a metaphor for the process of uprooting and rerooting. It could be a semi-autobiography of Mukherjee, dressed in American clothes, to visit the exotic Mughal India?” The Mughal India of the time of Aurangazeb is now modern USA of Regan and Bush, and the colonial India of Mukherjee’s time is the colonial America of Hannah. The story of the novel is also a meeting place of three cultures – Christian, Muslim and Hindu. Unfortunately, by their nature, birth and nourishment, these cultures do not
“Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen” (Lahiri, My Two lives). Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize winner, describes herself as Indian-American, where she feels she is neither an Indian nor an American. Lahiri feels alienated by struggling to live two lives by maintaining two distinct cultures. Lahiri’s most of the work is recognized in the USA rather than in India where she is descents from (the guardian.com). Lahiri’s character’s, themes, and imagery in her short stories and novels describes the cultural differences of being Indian American and how Indian’s maintain their identity when moved to a new world. Lahiri’s inability to feel accepted within her home, inability to be fully American, being an Indian-American, and the difference between families with same culture which is reflected in one of her short stories “Once in a Lifetime” through characterization and imagery.
In “My Two Lives”, Jhumpa Lahiri tells of her complicated upbringing in Rhode Island with her Calcutta born-and-raised parents, in which she continually sought a balance between both her Indian and American sides. She explains how she differs from her parents due to immigration, the existent connections to India, and her development as a writer of Indian-American stories. “The Freedom of the Inbetween” written by Sally Dalton-Brown explores the state of limbo, or “being between cultures”, which can make second-generation immigrants feel liberated, or vice versa, trapped within the two (333). This work also discusses how Lahiri writes about her life experiences through her own characters in her books. Charles Hirschman’s “Immigration and the American Century” states that immigrants are shaped by the combination of an adaptation to American...
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
Kothari employs a mixture of narrative and description in her work to garner the reader’s emotional investment. The essay is presented in seventeen vignettes of differing lengths, a unique presentation that makes the reader feel like they are reading directly from Kothari’s journal. The writer places emphasis on both her description of food and resulting reaction as she describes her experiences visiting India with her parents: “Someone hands me a plate of aloo tikki, fried potato patties filled with mashed channa dal and served with a sweet and a sour chutney. The channa, mixed with hot chilies and spices, burns my tongue and throat” (Kothari). She also uses precise descriptions of herself: “I have inherited brown eyes, black hair, a long nose with a crooked bridge, and soft teeth
Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, places Jane Austen’s emphasis of equality in marriage within an intercultural context, where the difference in culture is the source of social tension. As West meets East, American tycoon William Darcy sparks cultural conflict with his presumption of Indian girls’ “simple” and traditional characteristics and of their ready subordination to American men. Parallel to Elizabeth’s assertion of her father and Darcy’s equal class standing, Lalita’s fierce rebuttal of Darcy’s assumption highlights his ignorance of the Indian culture, especially his inability to understa...
Suppose we give you pretty English names’” (1). The headmistress feels she needs to change the students to fit her British standards, not taking into account their Indian culture and heritage. The British were the foreigners, and yet were still trying to conform the country they have invaded. The abusive power is immensely strong so that even the children can feel it as they receive new names. Using her power not only as a headmistress but as a white individual, she changes Santha’s identity making her feel as if she has a “dual personality” (2). Similarly, further in the story, a new character is introduced as an Indian girl in Santha’s class. She is described to be wearing Indian jewelry and makeup but also wears “a cotton dress” (2). Rather than wearing traditional Indian clothes, the children are forced to conform to British standards, wearing the same clothes as British children. The Indian students lose the native part of their identity to a larger force of power. Furthermore, a ruling force should not just changes someone’s identity. They should take into consideration the facts of specific cultures and
The woman narrator of ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ does not reveal what she is running away from when she leaves her home and family. In fact, she does not seem to know what is wrong with her, or what the importance of the old stories might be in her life. Catherine Lappas explains in an essay excerpted in this volume, that ‘‘Hers is a condition born of cultural dislocation: She is an Indian woman living in a Western world that dismisses all stories as irrelevant.... In her Indian world, however, stories have an ongoing connection to people's lives.’’ Or do they?
One statement in the beginning of the book was especially poignant to any one who studies Indian culture, It is easy for us to feel a vicarious rage, a misery on behalf of these people, but Indians, dead and alive would only receive such feelings with pity or contempt; it is too easy to feel sympathy for a people who culture was wrecked..
Mukherjee compares her experiences in Indian culture, Canadian culture, and finally American culture in her quest to describe “American.” In India, she was a part of a primarily “…Hindu, Bengali-speaking, a...
Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri is well-known for her Pulitzer-winning book Interpreter of Maladies. An Indian by birth and descent, Lahiri migrated to the United States along with her parents when she was 2. In her third book, Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri puts forth for her reader her character’s sense of alienation, the struggles and complexities of the new life and the need to blend into a new culture. Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories. When asked to comment on her personal life as a migrant; she says ‘No country is my motherland.
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he is bias towards the women in the novel. The society when Forster wrote the novel in the 1920’s had different views on women than it has today a...
Indian Writing in English has a special status in English Literature owing to its treatment of women characters. Short stories help the writers to project select characters in an impressive way to the readers. In Indian context the status of woman in a society and her treatment is very different from those of her European or American counterparts. Women are depicted both as a good and evil in literature by various writers. However, in no literature is a women stereotyped as was done in Indian literature. Away from the mythical stereotyping of women, Ruskin Bond portrayed his women in a different way. The female characters of his short stories range from a small child to a grandmother. These characters are as powerful as men and have left a strong impression on the readers. I have chosen following eight short stories for the critical analysis of Ruskin Bond’s Women in this paper.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing world. In his works one can find the agony of an exile; the pangs of a man in search of meaning and identity: a dare-devil who has tried to explore myths and see through fantasies. Out of his dilemma is born a rich body of writings which has enriched diasporic literature and the English language.