of Forster’s A Passage to India:

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing steps on the front, as the Ganges does not happen to be holy here; indeed there is no river front and the nearby bazar shuts out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream.

The similarity in the tone, the sentence structure, and the underlying irony of each of these paragraphs is remarkable. The Catelli-Continental and the Ganges River both symbolize something that used to be significant, or is significant somewhere else, but here in the present both have exhausted their importance. Both Forster and Mukherjee communicate the irony by beginning the sentence with a subordinate adjective clause: “Edged rather than washed,” (Forster) and   “Gray and imposing, with many bay windows and fake turrets,” (Mukherjee). Mukherjee, a writing major from the famous writing school of the University of Iowa, seems to be engaging in an exercise of imitating Forster’s style. She succeeds. One needs to point out, however, that Bharati Mukherjee has come a long way from The Tiger's Daughter. By her own admission she has abandoned British models for American ones: “The book I dream of updating is no longer A Passage to India, it'sCall it Sleep.”

Tiger’s Daughter as a Psychosocial Novel 
The Tiger's Daughter is a part of traveling what one psychologist calls the "psychosocial country...a self shared by many other Indians studying, living, and working for long periods abroad in Europe or the United States." At some point in this self-chosen exile, a more or less protracted confrontation with the self as battleground becomes almost inevitable. The Tiger's Daughter is an account of the confrontation with the self. Is Tara herself the source of this violent social unrest that is Calcutta?

Abroad at first as a young woman, Bharati Mukherjee came to study at Iowa. Her younger sister had a stint at Vassar but could not survive the loneliness of a foreign land and returned to India. Bharati, however, stuck it out, completing first an MFA, and then a PhD in comparative literature. She married Clark Blaise, a fellow graduate student during a lunch hour. Blaise, who is also a writer himself, sent her short story "Debate on a Rainy Afternoon" to the Massachusetts Review. It was published and received an honorable mention in Best American Stories. The success brought requests to write a novel from several American publishers. But Bharati was busy raising a family, completing a doctoral dissertation. She told the most insistent publisher, Houghton Mifflin, that she would write a novel when she completed her dissertation and finished teaching her courses during the summer break. That is exactly what she did, and the result was The Tiger's Daughter.

Mukherjee's treatment of the "Other" in The Tiger's Daughter has been problematic for some critics. The subaltern "other" in contemporary criticism is interpreted as those who are exploited and are underprivileged as a result of domination by another more powerful group usually the enslaver or the colonizer, or in the traditional Marxist parlance, of the proletariat by the capitalist. In the Indian context, colonized Indians are the "other."

Mukherjee, both in her novels and in the many interviews she has given, has described herself in elitist terms: top family, top schools, top college, and making herself a poor example of the subaltern other. It is, however, possible that these critics are perhaps not aware that Bharati Mukherjee’s irony cuts both ways.