Analysis Of The Holder Of The World

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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 …show more content…

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

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