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Multiculturalism in the Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee Chapter II: Multiculturalism in Bharati Mukherjee’S Short Stories

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Multiculturalism in the Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee Chapter II: Multiculturalism in Bharati Mukherjee’S Short Stories CHAPTEE - II Multiculturalism in the Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee Chapter II: Multiculturalism in Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories 2.0 Bharati Mukherjee: Life and Work Early Life and Education 2.1 Bharati Mukherjee: Literary Career 2.1.1 Short Stories 2.1.2 Novels 2.2 Multiculturalism in 2.2.1 Cultural Encounters 2.2.2 Familial Ties 2.2.3 Generation Gap 2.2.4 Nostalgia 2.2.5. Maladies of Migration 2.3 Multiculturalism in ^The Middleman and Other Stories’ 2.3.1 Cultural Encounters 2.3.2 Familial Ties 2.3.3 Generation Gap 2.3.4 Nostalgia 2.3.5. Maladies of Migration 2.4 Summary Works Cited 42 Chapter II Multiculturalism in Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories 2.0 Bharati Mukherjee: Life and Work Bharati Mukherjee was bom on July 27, 1940. She belonged to an upper-middle class Hindu Brahmin family in Calcutta, India. Her father, Sudhir Lai was a chemist, and Bina (Baneijee) Mukherjee, a housewife. She lived in the joint family until the age of eight. The three daughters of Sudhir Lai got excellent schooling because of good family background and financial condition. Her father’s short stay in England during 1947-1951 helped her lot to get English language acquaintance and competency. Mukherjee earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Calcutta in 1959. She and her family then moved to Baroda, India, where she studied for her Master's Degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture, which she acquired in 1961. Her ambition to be a writer since childhood drove Mukherjee to the University of Iowa in 1961 to attend the prestigious Writer's Workshop. She planned to study there to get her Master degree in Fine Arts and then return to India to marry a bridegroom of her father's choice from their class and caste. However she married Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer, after only two weeks of courtship. She received her degree and proceed to obtain in her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa in 1969. In 1968, Mukherjee immigrated to Canada with her husband and became a naturalized citizen in 1972. Her 14 years stay in Canada was an unforgettable span of her life. She was ill treated as a member of the "visible minority." She confessed in many interviews of her difficult life in Canada, a country that she refers as hostile to its immigrants and one that opposes the concept of cultural assimilation. Although those years were challenging, Mukherjee penned down her first two novels. The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975), while serving professorial status at McGill University in Montreal. During those years she also collected several sentiments found in her first collection of short stories, D arkness (1985), a collection that in many ways autobiographical. 43 Mukherjee shifted from Canada to the United States in 1980. She led a life of exile for long 14 years in Canada, Mukherjee applied for permanent citizenship of US. She continued to write. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She justified several posts at various colleges and universities, she ultimately settled in 1989 at the University of Califomia-Berkeley in 1989. Mukherjee had various experience as an immigrant, a survivor and an adapter in the foreign soil. She utilized her several lives and backgrounds together with an intention of creating a "new immigrant" literature. Mukherjee is known for her playful and live language. Mukherjee rejects the concept of minimalism, which, she says, is "designed to keep anyone out with too much story to tell." She considers her work a celebration of her emotions, and herself a writer of the Indian diaspora who cherishes the "melting pot" of America. Her main theme throughout her writing discusses the condition of Asian immigrants in North America, with particular attention to the changes taking place in South Asian women in a new world. Her characters in all her fiction are often victimized by various forms of social oppression; she generally draws them as survivors. Mukheijee has often been praised for her understated prose style and her ironic plot developments and witty observations. As a writer, she has a crafty eye to view the world, and her characters share that quality. Although she is often racially categorized by her thematic focus and cultural origin, she has often said that she strongly opposes the use of hyphenation when discussing her origin. In order to avoid otherization and the self-imposed marginalization that comes with hyphenation. Rather, she prefers to refer herself as an American of Bengali-lndian origin. Bharati Mukherjee and Canada The life in Canada is an account of conflict between the native people and newcomers, between the charter groups and the later arrivals, between the retainers of the old culture and advocates of a new one, among the imperialists, nationalists and annexationists and even between the immigrant and his offspring. This conflict is the conflict of an attitude of people. Underneath the current of chaotic process of integration runs for the search of an identity. 44 Canada like US was peopled by waves of immigrants coming from the various parts of the world. Canada was always the fascinating destination for immigrants due to freedom, employment opportunities, and rich available land. In the initial stage, maximum numbers of immigrants were peasants arrived to pursue their dreams to own their farms. The immigrants left their native home due to either push factors or pull factors. The immigrants were visible distinct from the large city around them. They live in sections of the city that were not quite ‘Canadian’. Such neighborhood existed as a response to the prejudice of the receiving society. Immigrants were treated as outsiders by the native Canadians. They used to live in outsider area populated by the people identical in language, nationality or race. The "ghettos’ is the term associated with such inhabitants. Unlike the United States, Canada did not accept the 'melting pot" theory, but believed that each distinct group could maintain its identity and hence it would be a ‘mosaic’ with each contributing to the fabric of the country. Canada posed new hazards and challenges to such immigrants. The difference in taste, customs and language bring about conflicts. Eyes, height and skin color become a highly inalterable and visible identity badge. Therefore, it is easy to plan and carry out discriminatory practices. Broadly speaking, there were two kinds of newcomers to Canada, those who saw themselves as immigrants and those who were migrant, not uprooted but deeply committed to their home village, their family. Bharati Mukheijee noticed such patterns of discrimination. She has first-hand experience to face brutal discrimination on the part of immigrants. She was refused service in stores; she would be followed by detectives in the department stores for she was considered to a shoplifter or treated like a prostitute in hotels. As a result of the influx of South Asian immigrants into Canada, frightening outbursts of ’pakibashing’ and ’dot-busting' towards Asians by white Canadians started taking place. 45 Bharati Mukherjee discovered that in polite company she was an ‘’East Indian' and in an impolite company she was ‘a paki\ a British slur unknown in America. She was a part o f‘visible minority’. Most Indians face violence, physical assaults, the spitting, the name calling, the bricks through the windows, the pushing and shoving on the subways. The government gave implied consent to racism. Expressing her deep agony, the author said; I cannot describe the agony and the betrayal one feels, hearing oneself spoke of by one’s own country as being somehow exotic to its nature- a burden, a cause for serious concern. In that ill-tempered debate, the government itself appropriated the language, the reasoning, the motivation that had belonged - to disreputable fringe grounds. (Tendon, 2013:22) Mukherjee came to Canada in the late 1960s with the desire to be accepted as a Canadian writer. She published her two novels namely The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife. Unfortunately, she was still treated as an outsider. On the contrary, she was questioned about her claim and identity as a Canadian writer. The Canadian interviewer objected the content and intent of the writer in the context of these two novels. Later on she was insulted by Canada Council letters. Mukherjee had a major public breakthrough through these short story collections. It placed her into the galaxy of diasporic writers. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for her short story collection, The Middleman and Other Stories. Mukherjee acts as a middleman linking disparate worlds. She becomes a mediator between develop the country like Canada and undeveloped Third World nations. She has multi-dimensional perspective in telling her tales, with a sharp eye for the contrast between self and the larger society. She wrote this collection in a lighter, more celebratory tone, with characters that are adventurers and explorers, rather than refugees and outcasts, and are a part of a new. changing America. Her characters in short stories are victimised, pathetic creators in the initial stage of the story. However they emerge as successful survivors and adventurers to combat with the hostile surrounding 46 2.1 Bharati Mukherjee: Literary Career Bharati Mukherjee has a splendid literary career of seven novels and two short story collections exploring complex, touching and adventurous experiences of immigrants. 1. T he Tiger’s Daughterl 971 2. Wife 1975 3. Days and Nights in Calcutta 1977 (nonfiction with Clark Blaise) 4. Darkness 1985 (short story collection) 5. The Sorrow and the Terror; The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy 1987 6.
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