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Feminism in Indian literature
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Feminism in Indian literature
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For millions of immigrants, America is a nation full of dreams and promise. However, as they come to accept the reality of their new lives, it can either be a barrier that holds them back or aids them overcome their disadvantages. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage: Stories, multiple women grow stronger in their pursuit to better understand and cope with their hardships despite the constant obstacles they face each day. When both Sumita in “Clothes” and Jayanti in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” arrive in America, their different situations force them to realize the bleak reality of living in the same country. In “Clothes,” when her husband is killed, Sumita becomes her own person as she chooses to pursue a life that greatly …show more content…
I don’t know yet how I’ll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings […]. I straighten up my shoulders and take a deep breath […]. In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds” (33).
Through this, she starts wearing more westernized clothing instead of saris that now symbolize the solitude of being a window. She proceeds to ready herself so she can face the remonstrations of her in-laws and begins embracing her new life in America. During her experience, she learns to accept that pain is not always an obstacle, but a way to move forward. In “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” Jayanti learns to accept that a life full of opportunity and happiness is not easily obtainable. Once she steps foot in Chicago, she meets her aunt, and more importantly her uncle, who has a negative view of America. After she sees her aunt’s apartment, she becomes disappointed when it contrasts with her expectations of Westernhomes. When she first goes outside after being isolated in their apartment she says, “The air is so new and crisp that it makes me suddenly happy, full of hope” (46). This shows that despite living Ramos
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
Sandra Cisneros “Never Marry a Mexican” and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are stories that reflect on the cultures in which the characters grew up in. In Never Marry, Clemencia, the narrator, reflects on her past sexual relations as well as her childhood. She speaks of her parents’ marriage and then transitions into her relationship with college professor and his son. In Oscar Wao, Yunior, the narrator, gives a second-hand retelling of Oscar’s experiences in New Jersey growing up as well as in the Dominican Republic. A person’s identity is largely influenced by their culture, this is especially the case in Hispanic cultures. The social constraints that these cultures place on social class, sexuality, and gender norms can be very detrimental to a person’s self-esteem.
Immigrants come to America, the revered City upon a Hill, with wide eyes and high hopes, eager to have their every dream and wild reverie fulfilled. Rarely, if ever, is this actually the case. A select few do achieve the stereotypical ‘rags to riches’ transformation – thus perpetuating the myth. The Garcia family from Julia Alvarez’s book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, fall prey to this fairytale. They start off the tale well enough: the girls are treated like royalty, princesses of their Island home, but remained locked in their tower, also known as the walls of their family compound. The family is forced to flee their Dominican Republic paradise – which they affectionately refer to as simply, the Island – trading it instead for the cold, mean streets of American suburbs. After a brief acclimation period, during which the girls realize how much freedom is now available to them, they enthusiastically try to shed their Island roots and become true “American girls.” They throw themselves into the American lifestyle, but there is one slight snag in their plan: they, as a group, are unable to forget their Island heritage and upbringing, despite how hard they try to do so. The story of the Garcia girls is not a fairytale – not of the Disney variety anyway; it is the story of immigrants who do not make the miraculous transition from rags to riches, but from stifling social conventions to unabridged freedom too quickly, leaving them with nothing but confusion and unresolved questions of identity.
Her realization that she is not alone in her oppression brings her a sense of freedom. It validates her emerging thoughts of wanting to rise up and shine a light on injustice. Her worries about not wanting to grow up because of the harsh life that awaits her is a common thought among others besides the people in her community. As she makes friends with other Indians in other communities she realizes the common bonds they share, even down to the most basic such as what they eat, which comforts her and allows her to empathize with them.
her journey toward self realization. She is forbidden to marry because of a long held
In this short story Sandra uncover the tension between Mexican heritage and demands of the American culture. Cleofilas life consisted of never ending chorus, no good brothers, and a complaining father. She is so excited when the day come for her to become married so she can move away from her town where she grew up, were there isn’t much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards. She was excited to be far away, all she could think about was to have a lovely house and to wear outfits like the women on the tele. Her picture of the ideal Mexican wife soon became a nightmare when she finally arrived to Texas, where she
Moving from the unpleasant life in the old country to America is a glorious moment for an immigrant family that is highlighted and told by many personal accounts over the course of history. Many people write about the long boat ride, seeing The Statue of Liberty and the “golden” lined streets of New York City and how it brought them hope and comfort that they too could be successful in American and make it their home. Few authors tend to highlight the social and political developments that they encountered in the new world and how it affected people’s identity and the community that they lived in. Authors from the literature that we read in class highlight these developments in the world around them, more particularly the struggles of assimilating
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...
Traditions control how one talks and interacts with others in one’s environment. In Bengali society, a strict code of conduct is upheld, with dishonor and isolation as a penalty for straying. Family honor is a central part to Bengali culture, and can determine both the financial and social standing of a family. Usha’s family poses no different, each member wearing the traditional dress of their home country, and Usha’s parents diligently imposing those values on their daughter. Those traditions, the very thing her [Usha] life revolved around, were holding her back from her new life as an American. Her mother in particular held those traditions above her. For example, when Aparna makes Usha wear the traditional attire called “shalwar kameez” to Pranab Kaku and Deborah’s Thanksgiving event. Usha feels isolated from Deborah’s family [Americans] due to this saying, “I was furious with my mother for making a scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar kameez. I knew they [Deborah’s siblings] assumed, from my clothing, that I had more in common with the other Bengalis than with them” (Lahiri ...
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
The short story “Clothes” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is about a young Indian woman, Sumita, and her cultural transition to America that is symbolized by her clothes and the color of her clothes. The traditional Indian attire for a woman is a sari and each one has its own purpose. Her clothes also indicate her progression from daughter, to wife, to woman.
Bharati Mukherjee’s story, “Two Ways to Belong in America”, is about two sisters from India who later came to America in search of different ambitions. Growing up they were very similar in their looks and their beliefs, but they have contrasting views on immigration and citizenship. Both girls had been living in the United States for 35 years and only one sister had her citizenship. Bharati decided not to follow Indian traditional values and she married outside of her culture. She had no desire to continue worshipping her culture from her childhood, so she became a United States citizen. Her ideal life goal was to stay in America and transform her life. Mira, on the other hand, married an Indian student and they both earned labor certifications that was crucial for a green card. She wanted to move back to India after retirement because that is where her heart belonged. The author’s tone fluctuates throughout the story. At the beginning of the story her tone is pitiful but then it becomes sympathizing and understanding. She makes it known that she highly disagrees with her sister’s viewpoints but she is still considerate and explains her sister’s thought process. While comparing the two perspectives, the author uses many
The title of Divakaruni’s book is the result of an aggressive marketing strategy. It is an attempt to carve a market segment in the western societies. Divakaruni looks back at India and its culture from the colonizer’s point of view. Husne Jahan points out “In demonstrating her indebtedness to western feminist notions and in voicing criticism of women’s subjugation in India, Divakaruni repeatedly maligns far too many facets of Indian society and culture” (43).
The novel by Jhumpa Lahiri demonstrates that children of immigrants do not always feel closely tied to their country of origin, but rather, they feel American, living both in the private sphere of their home in India and the public sphere of their American experience. The process of the so-called “hybridization” is manifested in the way how Gogol and Sonia live as tourists in their own home country. They act as translators of the two worlds, which do not threaten their identity, but rather enrich it. The author provides a new updated interpretation of the image of Asian-American immigrants, discussing significant intergenerational differences and constructing the complex identity of cosmopolitan immigrants' children.
Bharati Mukherjee’s novels range widely across time and space dealing especially with the consequences emerging out of cultural confrontation of the East with West in the alien land. All her novels are female centered and deals with the changed psyche of the protagonist’s behaviors. But her latest novel Miss New India (2011) takes a U-turn in dealing with the protagonist, Anjali Bose, in her own country i.e. India bringing the western cultural confrontational effects of highly sophisticated life style in rural and urban India. This paper focuses on the issues of marriage in typical Indian family in which marriage is considered as the utmost holy duty of parents. It also brings out the challenges, implications, outcry and outcome of marriage of the protagonist. Miss New India is the last of the trilogy consisting others two as Desirable Daughters (2002) and Tree Bride (2004).