Bharati Mukherjee

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Expatriate Indian or Immigrant American? A Study of ‘A Father’ and ‘A Wife's Story’

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In the following essay, Barat considers two of Mukherjee's short stories and concludes that Mukherjee, despite her own denials, writes in the tradition of Indian women authors.
SOURCE: “Expatriate Indian or Immigrant American? A Study of ‘A Father’ and ‘A Wife's Story,’” in The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium, Prestige Books, 1996, pp. 116-24.

In an interview with Alison B. Carb five years ago, Bharati Mukherjee made it very clear that she regards herself as being part of the American tradition rather than the Indian one: ‘I view myself as an American author in the tradition of other American authors whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island.’1

This is a very interesting statement from someone who was born and spent the formative years of her life—the first twenty-one years—in India. The USA, it must be borne in mind, is a nation of immigrants: at first colonized by the British and the French, who had made the native inhabitants an endangered minority in their own land, by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a multi-racial country, for its population was enlarged by the descendants of African slaves and by people emigrating to the New World from all over the Old one, from Central and East Europe and from Asia. By specifying ‘Ellis Island’ Mukherjee is clearly identifying herself not with the Asian immigrant community but with the white and Jewish settlers who flew persecution and poverty for the American dream. Indeed, Mukherjee believes there is ‘a strong likeness between [her] writing and Bernard Malamud's, while Singer is her ‘literary ancestor’ (Ibid); she makes no mention of the Blacks, the so-called ‘Orientals' or the South Asians who also form so important and integral a part of the American literary scene.

Not only does Mukherjee reject her Asian background, she also rejects the tradition of Indian writing in English to which one might think she should belong. Her comments on Indian novelists in English deserve to be reproduced in full: ‘There is a large difference between myself and these authors. Unlike writers such as Anita Desai and R. K. Narayan, I do not write in Indian English about Indians living in India. My role models, view of the world, and experiences are unlike theirs. These writers live in a world in which there are still certainties and rules. They are part of their society's mainstream. Wonderful writers as they are, I am unable to identify with them because they describe characters who fit into their community in different ways than my naturalized Americans fit into communities in Queens or Atlanta.’ (Ibid.) Obviously, Mukherjee has little acquaintance with Indian writing in English, perhaps because when she left India it had not yet become respectable in academia. Her patronizing condescension is clearly misplaced: Anita Desai's characters are far more alienated, far greater misfits, than Mukherjee's, and contemporary Indian fiction in English hardly projects individuals in harmony with ‘the mainstream’ of society. And can Desai's English be dismissed as ‘Indian’? How much of Mukherjee's own language is ‘American,’ as she claims, (Ibid.) apart, of course, from the spelling and a few lexical items?

Mukherjee does not wish to be called an ‘Indian expatriate’ either (strangely enough, she cites V. S. Naipaul as the typical Indian expatriate writer rather than the more appropriate Rohinton Mistry or Farrukh Dhondy, or even Salman Rushdie). Naipaul, she says, ‘writes about living in perpetual exile and about the impossibility of ever having a home.’ (Ibid.) Whether or not this is an accurate assessment of Naipaul's theme is a moot point. What is more pertinent here, however, is that by her own admission she herself writes about ‘a minority community which escapes the ghetto and adapts itself to the patterns of the dominant American culture.’ (Ibid.) For her, ‘immigration from the Third World to the United States is a metaphor for the process of uprooting and rerouting,’ (Ibid.) which means that her subject is in the last analysis not all that different from Naipaul's, at least from her own point of view, except that she believes he is pessimistic. How far Mukherjee's characters do in fact adapt to the patterns of their new environment is again debatable: this is what will be examined in the two short stories on which this paper is based: “A Father” from Darkness and “A Wife's Story” from The Middleman and Other Stories. Both these stories have been frequently anthologized, but in collections of Asian or coloured women's writing2; indeed, only a few of Mukherjee's stories have found a place in anthologies of ‘mainstream’ American writing. Mukherjee is evidently accepted in her adopted country as an Asian American or a ‘woman of colour,’ but not as part of the ‘mainstream’ of American writing (to which Jewish writers now belong), or even to the ‘mainstream’ of American women's writing.

What, then, is Bharati Mukherjee, an expatriate Indian or an ‘ethnic’ (read non-WASP) American? The difference may seem unimportant: as Elaine Kim remarks, ‘Cultures, whether Asian origin cultures or the “majority culture,” which is no more monolithic and unitary than “Asian” or “Asian American culture,” have never been fixed, continuous, or discrete. … Asian American literary work may be about Asian American experiences, but this is never all it is about.’3 But there is a point behind the query, which it is hoped will become clear in the reading of the two short stories mentioned earlier. These two stories have been chosen here not simply because they were written after Mukherjee deliberately set out to write ‘American’ fiction, (Carb, 35) but because they show each in its own way how Indians respond to the American experience. In many other stories and novels too, Mukherjee has described non-Indian immigrants; here, because she deals with Indian characters, the stories can be interpreted with almost equal validity as the work of either an expatriate Indian or an immigrant American.

“A Father” is the story of Mr. Bhowmick, narrated, tongue-in-cheek, from his point of view by an omniscient narrator (certainly Mukherjee has not discarded the use of irony here, though she declares (Ibid.) that since she turned away from British literature for the American one she has also rejected both irony and the authoritative point of view, which she believes are characteristically British), a middle-aged, middle-class Bengali from Ranchi. This is an interesting touch—could it be unintentional?—for many Bengalis had migrated to Ranchi in Bihar in the last century, and Mr. Bhowmick's migration to the United States is thus part of an unending chain of journeys in search of a better life all over the world and within India too: but would this point occur to a reader unacquainted with India?

Mr. Bhowmick—it is important that neither he nor his wife are ever called anything else, suggesting, among other things, their isolation, their distance from each other, and the formality of their relationships in a country famous for its backslapping cordiality—had many years ago given up his dream of beauty and poetry to marry an unattractive but rich girl whose father would finance another and even more important dream for a struggling middle-class Bengali, of two years' study in America. Her stay in America had changed his wife ‘from pliant girl to ambitious woman. She wanted America, nothing less,’ (346) and when he returned to Ranchi she had refused to conform to the norm of middle-class Indian existence, but had ‘screamed and wept’ (345) until he applied for permanent resident status in America. While his papers were being processed he had found another job in Bombay—which meant another migration, albeit of a lesser kind—which had fulfilled both him and his energetic wife. Then the long-awaited green card had arrived, and he, his wife and his daughter had finally left for America and had settled in Detroit.

His wife had very quickly adjusted to her new life, and while he himself feels lonely, in spite of his social interaction with other Bengalis and his hobbies, he knows that ‘There was no question of going back where he'd come from. … All through his teenage years, Mr. Bhowmick had dreamed of success abroad. What form that success would take he had left vague. Success had meant to him escape from the constant plotting and bitterness that wore out India's middle class.’ (343) His daughter, though, is a disappointment. The most intelligent of all the Bengali children in Detroit, she earns well as an engineer; she can sing Indian film songs and has taken lessons in Indian dancing: but she is unattractive, down-to-earth and practical. If Mrs. Bhowmick is bigger and harder than he is, and impervious to his threats of physical chastisement that his father, too, had tried out on his mother, Babli is nowhere ‘the child of his dream,’ because she is so unfeminine, according, that is, to his ideas of ‘real femininity’: ‘She wasn't womanly or tender the way that unmarried girls had been in the wistful days of his adolescence.’ (341)

Mr. Bhowmick turns to religion, therefore, for solace, for his life is bleak and stereotyped, his marriage a meaningless ritual of battling for supremacy, and his role as a father insignificant, without any sense of joy or intimacy with his child. He understands, of course, when she speaks irreverently of her religion, for he knows that ‘It was her way of surviving … in a city that was both native to her, and alien.’ (343) But Babli is invariably on his wife's side. She accuses him of ‘holding things in’ and having an ‘affect deficit’ because he has not allowed them to penetrate through to him. But that is because there are some emotions that cannot be shared, especially with the clever, self-assured, Americanized women in his family. (340)

His worship of the goddess Kali, whose image he has painstakingly carved out and painted in his carpentry class, bonds him to the roots he had thought he had outgrown: Kali, it may be recalled, is especially revered among Bengalis. Kali is the terrible Mother-Goddess, Shakti incarnate: ironically, however, Mr. Bhowmick does not realize her presence in the women of his own family, because they are Americanized and therefore apparently very different from the primeval force she represents.

Then comes the day the father discovers that his daughter is pregnant. He is not shocked; it is perhaps only to be expected in such a society, and, besides, it is all his wife's fault. Though he has so far seen no evidence of a boyfriend, it is obvious that ‘his daughter, his untender, unloving daughter whom he couldn't love and hadn't tried to love, was not, in the larger world of Detroit, unloved.’ The idea excites him: ‘At twenty-six Babli had found the man of her dreams: whereas at twenty-six Mr. Bhowmick had given up on truth, beauty, and poetry and exchanged them for two years at Carnegie Tech.’ (344) He does not interfere, therefore, as the traditional father might: he waits, instead, for matters to take their expected course, for Babli to abort the baby, or to announce her marriage, preferably, of course, to a white American. When neither happens, he decides she must have got involved with someone unavailable for marriage. His sympathy and curiosity are aroused, and he can imagine an illegitimate grandchild without any sense of moral outrage. Indeed, when he finds his wife screaming and attacking his daughter with a rolling pin, he tries to stop her, telling her that it was her fault, not Babli's. ‘Girls like Babli were caught between rules, that's the point he wished to make. They were too smart, too impulsive for a backward place like Ranchi, but not tough nor smart for sex-crazy places like Detroit.’ (348)

But the point of the story is not this piece of conventional wisdom about the immigrant sensibility, nor about the father's newly acquired ‘crazy, progressive ideas.’ The fact is that there is no romantic story about Babli's pregnancy, no romantic hero; his daughter is neither in love nor interested in getting married. She just wants a child, and has got herself artificially inseminated, for ‘Who needs a man?’ If this means that child-bearing and rearing has been reduced to an animal activity, what, his daughter demands, is the Indian marriage and Indian parenthood: ‘Matching bloodlines, matching horoscopes, matching castes, matching, matching, matching.’ (348-49) Babli's rejection of a father for her unborn child is also her rejection of her own father and everything that paternity stands for and that Mr. Bhowmick had clung to in the exile of an adopted home; indeed, because he can suddenly identify Babli with Kali, it seems to him that his goddess, too, has deserted him.

Where “A Father” is about Indian immigrants in the United States, “A Wife's Story,” told in the first person and the present tense by the wife herself, is about a woman who has won a brief respite from wifehood in India through her two-year Ph.D. course in Special Education in America. The story progresses in the narrative mode particularly favoured by Mukherjee, through internal monologue and shifts in time sequence. Panna Bhatt has left her husband and home in Ahmedabad to pursue her studies in New York. This has been a major step for her, for she comes from a traditional Gujarati family in which the women have just begun to get an education: her mother had been beaten by her illiterate grandmother when she had wanted to learn French. She herself, however, has had an expensive education at Lausanne (no matter if this seems improbable for such a conservative family) and Bombay, and has learnt to conduct herself according to Old World norms: ‘My manners are exquisite, my gestures refined, my moods undetectable. They have seen me through riots, uprootings, separation, my son's death.’ (237) She has learnt, that is, always to hold herself back and not to disturb the status quo.

Her marriage, too, was arranged in traditional style. She had not had the opportunity or the need to get to know her husband—‘All I had to do was get to know his taste in food’ (240)—and had not thought in terms of a honeymoon either. Her husband was an eminently eligible man, at present Vice-President of a cotton mill, with a degree from the IIM at Ahmedabad (once again, a detail the significance of which only an Indian would understand): his education, too, has taught him to overcome pain and loss and emotion: ‘He's been trained to believe in turnovers. Every morning he rubs his scalp with cantharidine oil so his hair will grow back again.’ (241)

Panna has settled down, physically and emotionally, in New York, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a Chinese American, who is separated from her husband (who is a Rajneesh disciple), sleeps with her doctor, and is seeing a nutritionist and a musician, who is quite open about the physicality of their relationship: ‘I'm shy in front of the lovers. A darkness comes over me when I see them horsing around.’ (240) Charity's relationships might be a contrast with her own, but one thing is clear; in both societies ‘Love is a commodity, hoarded like any other.’ (240) Panna, that is, is learning all the time, and widening her horizons to include all experience, so that there is some compensation for her when she hungers for the past that she has left behind her.

Not only has she learnt more about the world and areas of experience hitherto closed to her, she has also learnt to protest effectively. When she goes to see a Mamet play with a Hungarian friend (which would have been unthinkable in India) she is annoyed about the Patel jokes and the gibes at Indians, but then she decides, ‘Maybe I shouldn't feel betrayed,’ (236) for this kind of insult is, paradoxically, a mark of acceptance: ‘No instant dignity here. A play like this, back home, would cause riots. … This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up.’ She realizes that the ubiquitous Ugandan Gujaratis have made themselves the butt of ridicule, and if she feels sorry for them she can also understand the ordinary American response to them. ‘It's the tyranny of the American dream that scares me,’ she feels, longing for the certainties of the past, whether it is ‘instant dignity’ or even ‘simple, brutish, partisan hate.’ (237) When the white American sitting next to her rests his elbow on the arm of her seat, she can speak with ‘the effortless meanness of well-bred displaced Third World women’ and American rhetoric, “Excuse me, … You're exploiting my space.” (237) She is so assured that she can hug Imre publicly on Broadway, though he is a friend and no lover, thinking as she does so how much she has changed from her brothers and her husband calls her up from Ahmedabad. Things are difficult for him at work, and he is missing her, but Panna feels remote from it all, and wonders what it is she feels for her husband, affection or love: ‘Who can tell the difference in a traditional marriage in which a wife still doesn't call her husband by his first name?’ (241) He has managed to get leave from work, and will be joining her for a short holiday. To greet him, Panna reverts to the Indian clothes and jewellery she had discarded, but he is still ‘disconcerted’ by the woman his wife has become. She is self-confident and knows her way around, something like what he is in India, and the change in roles disturbs them both.

Charity leaves home to give Panna and her husband privacy, and now the wife learns new things about her husband, and thus about herself. He is the quintessential Indian tourist, trying out everything that she now takes for granted, shopping with a fervour that turns the hated chore of India into ‘a lovers’ project’—the noun perfectly expressive of her feelings—buying up ‘anything small and electronic and smuggleable.’ (242) She begins to believe that what she and her husband share must after all be love: ‘My husband doesn't chase me around the sofa, but he pushes me down on Charity's battered cushions, and the man who has never entered the kitchen of our Ahmedabad house now comes toward me with a dish tub of steamy water to massage away the pavement heat.’ (243)

It is when her husband decides to try out a sight-seeing tour that the ambivalence in her attitude returns with force. He resents her trousers, her assurance, the attention she attracts from the men, while she finds him gauche and pathetic. (There seems to be another slip up here on Mukherjee's part; would an Indian professional from that kind of background, and from the IIM of a number of years back, no less, speak quite that brand of Indian English, or be quite so eager for pavement bargains?) She may remain beside him physically, but her mind is free to roam far away, until the pain in his voice brings her back to the present as he pleads with her to return home with him. She refuses, of course, for, as she explains, she has to finish her course.

The disappointed husband is suddenly recalled to India. When she reminds him that as an employee on vacation he need not return so soon, he is touched by her concern for him, which seems so much at odds with her refusal to do as he wished. Because he is to leave the next day she decides, ‘Tonight I should make up to him for my years away, the gutted trucks, the degree I'll never use in India. I want to pretend with him that nothing has changed.’ And what that ‘something’ is suggested by her awareness of her naked body in the mirror: ‘I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.’ (246) Panna, that is, is an immigrant in mind and soul, who has found and made her home literally and metaphorically, in America, though she may have to leave the country physically when she completes her course.

Literally speaking, “A Father” is the story of an immigrant and “A Wife's Story” that of an expatriate, written as only an Indian could, but the former uses the irony and the omniscient narration which Mukherjee regards as being the hallmark of the British tradition, and therefore by extension that of Indian writing in English; and the latter uses the subjective mode and the present tense so characteristic of the American tradition, as seen, for example, in the Rabbit series. Certainly the alienation and marginalization that Mukherjee presents is especially associated with the Jewish sensibility, so that the Jew has become representative of the universal estrangement of man. What Mukherjee has undeniably learnt from them, and from Malamud in particular, is the view of life: that human beings must inevitably lead half-lives, unfulfilled, poised between wish-fulfilment and disaster, that there can be no happy endings, and that compromise is the essence of survival. But is that all very different from Indian women's fiction in English? From Nayantara Sahgal to Shobha Dé, from Namita Gokhale to Nisha da Cunha, and in the tradition of her native Bengal too, from Hannah Catherine Mullens and Swornakumari Debi to Mahashweta Devi and Giribala Debi, Indian women writers have portrayed, in their novels and short stories, life as trial, not promise, the individual as victim, marginalized, bound to her psychological ghetto, and learning to face the reality of existence. Achievement must fall short of desire, sexual agony is the symbol of the lack of emotional security, and regret, poignancy and loss the only certainties of the human condition. Bharati Mukherjee belongs unquestionably to this tradition. She may be an Asian American, she may be an expatriate Indian, but she is primarily an Indian woman who explores through her fiction the meaning of life in a way that the Indian woman writer continues to do, in English and in her mother-tongue.

Notes

  1. ‘Bharati Mukherjee: The Immigrant Sensibility,’ Span, June 1990, p. 35.

  2. ‘A Father,’ in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Writing, ed. Jessica Hagedorn (NY: Penguin, 1993), pp. 338-49; ‘A Wife's Story,’ in The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, ed. D. Soyinit Madison (NY: St Martin's P., 1994), pp. 236-46. All references to the texts are from these anthologies.

  3. Preface, Charlie Chan is Dead, pp. xi-xii.

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