Multiculturalism In The Tiger's Daughter By Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee, a widdely known diasporic literary celebrity, has captured different shades of the entity called immigration in her novels. Her top agenda in almost all her novels is exptriatehood leading to new identities and related paraphernelia. Her debut novel The Tiger’s Daughter introduces us to the fragile self and in-betweenness of a daughter, Tara belonging to a wealthy Bengali family. After spending good seven years abroad, she finds Calcutta vastly different than what was in her childhood memories wheras Wife, her second novel looks at a new aspect of wifehood in an alien mileu. Wife is a saga of a wife named Dimple, a day dreamer who ruthlessly kills her husband owing to her inability to adopt to the host culture of the US.

She finds only poverty and turmoil. It reflects Mukherjee’s own experience of coming back to India with her American husband in 1973, when she was deeply affected by the chaos and poverty of India.

The novel is a starting point with Mukherjee’s treatment of the theme of the conflict between Eatern and Western worlds, as in her other works. Tara, the protagonist, was born in Calcutta, schooled in the States and married to an American gentleman. After spending seven years abroad, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind and comes back to India. But the place she finds on her return—full of strikes, riots and unrest—is vastly different from the place she remembers. Yet Tara seeks to reconcile the old world—that of her father, the Bengal Tiger—with the new one of her husband David. Mukherjee sketched an Indian society from the perspective of

In the dark mood of bitterness against the plight of Indian women and Canada’s racial discrimination, expatriate Bharati mukherjee composed Wife. This novel exhibits the darker side of the split personality of the central character. She fantasizes about marriage; her perception of marriage originating from Indian films and magazines. She marries after many dreams but develops a passive resistance towards her married life. When her husband immigrates to America in search of prosperity, she fails to absorb into the American culture When it comes to immigrate to America, she does not want to carry her past with her. She forcefully induces miscarriage by skipping rope. Unable to adopt the American culture, she is a marginalized figure, in terms of her Indian as well as American context. She assassinates her husband and finally commits