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| Bharati’s
Visible Ghosts |
By
Sandip Roy |
| What’s their
in science to tell me that spirits don’t
exist, asks Bharati Mukherjee. |
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When Bharati Mukherjee came to America
in 1961 to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop,
Indian American writers were not just
a rarity, they were practically non-existent.
Over decades of writing and novels like
Holder of the World, Jasmine and the National
Book Critics Circle award-winning The
Middleman and Other Stories, Mukherjee
has been dubbed the grande dame of diasporic
Indian literature. It’s a crown
she’s worn uneasily often wanting
to be just a writer, rather than a hyphenated
one like Indian American. |
But her latest novel, The
Tree Bride is both Indian and American.
The second in a trilogy that started
with Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride
switches back and forth between Tara Chatterjee
in post dot-com San Francisco and her
great aunt Tara Lata sequestered in a
mansion in pre-Independence Bengal. Mukherjee
says she has been thinking a lot of these
journeys back and forth.
When she came to the nited States in
the 60s she was at the forefront of a
wave of doctors and engineers that crested
with the 90s boom of software engineers.
Now when she goes back to India she notices
the US-returned NRIs. |
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| “I
was amazed at the number of Silicon Valley
families who have settled in towns like
Bangalore and set up hybrid Indo-American
lives,” says Mukherjee, describing
the “McMansions” she has seen
in areas of Bangalore nicknamed Dollar
Colony.
In The Tree Bride, entrepreneur Bish
Chatterjee could have been one of those
freshly-returned engineers. Mukherjee
is amazed at the confidence with which
this new generation of Indo-Americans
“present themselves as having the
best of both worlds. They want their children
to have the kind of schooling that would
make it possible for them to max their
SATs and go to Princeton and Harvard and
MIT. But they are also the guardians of
Kathak and Kathakali and ancient Indian
culture.”
Mukherjee certainly never thought in
1961 that she could be both Indian and
American in quite this way. “When
I was a child, we were wary of Bengalis
who had moved out of Bengal,” says
Mukherjee. “To be a “probashi
(diasporan) Bengali” was to be a
sorry creature, cut off from true Bengali
culture.”
She remembers at that time, even in a
place like Manhattan, Indians were so
few that when passing each other on the
street, they nodded and smiled. “By
the time I came to write Jasmine, Indian
immigrants were far more visible as a
community, but the rhetoric for talking
about immigration was stuck in the old
melting pot versus rejection of American
culture,” says Mukherjee. “That
meant either you had to reject wholly
the culture that you had come from or
you became very American and gave up something
in order to acquire the other.”
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| In fact many South Asians
have criticized Mukherjee for what they
have seen as jettisoning of her Indianness
in order to be American just as her character
Jasmine re-invents herself.
“I am an American, not an Asian-American,”
Mukherjee wrote in an essay in 1997. “My
rejection of hyphenation has been called
race treachery, but it is really a demand
that America deliver the promises of its
dream to all its citizens equally.”
She finds that dilemma less compelling
now and her characters reflect that. Tara
and Bish Chatterjee are perfectly at home
sipping wine on deck in Marin County looking
at sail boats dotting the San Francisco
bay as they are at an Indian function. |
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| In Tree
Bride, she describes them as part of “an
immigrant fog of South Asians (that) has
crept into America.” It’s a
fog that has completely changed the contours
of places like Silicon Valley.
“Of course, Silicon Valley will never
be what it was,” writes Mukherjee.
“By the time Bish walks again, it
will be a memory, ripe for a twenty-first-century
Fitzgerald to make it come alive. The Great
Gupta, perhaps.”
America to Mukherjee may not have been
a glittering Great Gatsbyesque party, but
it was a conscious escape from the tug-of-war
of identities in Kolkata. She came from
a traditional Brahmin family but went at
her mother’s insistence to Loreto
Convent School in Kolkata. “I had
grown up watching the funeral processions
of young freedom fighters,” remembers
Mukherjee.
“So I was personally upset at the
way the Irish nuns in my very British school
continued to display colonial attitudes.”
But she knew her going to Loreto and getting
an English education was important to her
mother. Her mother had long had to suffer
the barbs of her in-laws for producing three
daughters. “English for her was looking
outwards,” reflects Mukherjee. “The
roots of the do we want to acquire English
or do we want to reject English goes back
to the different ways of reacting against
the influx of colonial educational policies.”
Colonization is a central theme of Tree
Bride containing characters like John Mist
who completely go “native” in
India, even abandoning English as well as
Virgil Treadwell, a pugnacious Churchill-devotee
who thinks the Empire needed to show its
subjects some tough love for their own good
as well as Nigel Coughlin, an officer of
the Raj who is deeply conflicted about his
role.
Though all of that is set in pre-Independence
India, Mukherjee notes “these conflicts
are relevant to American enterprise like
the war in Iraq.” Mukherjee admires
the “pioneer toughness” in characters
like Mist who are even capable of murder.
But she says unemphatically it doesn’t
mean the British with their sola topis were
more qualified to be Emperor than the Americans
trying to rule Iraq by remote control. “I
don’t think anyone is more qualified
to be emperor,” says Mukherjee unequivocally.
The solution? “My short answer is
get out and vote,” she says without
hesitation.
Growing up in fifties Calcutta, Mukherjee
was keenly aware of the colonial legacy
that English held as well as its power.
America was in some ways, a way out of the
dilemma. “For me coming to America
rather than Britain was a sense of relief,”
says Mukherjee. “I think of American
English as my step mother-tongue.”
But it was a kindly stepmother. “The
discarding of the British English we were
forced to respect and copy in Calcutta and
adopting instead the much looser make-up-your-own-grammar
and pronounce-it-the-way-you-want-freedom
American English provided was very liberating.”
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Though
she finds her Bengali remains strong and
vibrant, she doesn’t think she can
write fiction in anything but “American.”
“Probably because I can be free
to be any character I want in English,
but I am stuck, constrained, restrained
to be the good well-brought up Bengali
woman in Bengali,” she laughs.
Tara Chatterjee in Tree Bride is just
such a well-brought up Bengali woman,
though as a divorcee who shacks up briefly
with a boyfriend she may not fit the Rashbehari
Avenue definition of “good”.
But in Tree Bride, Tara is tentatively
re-assessing her relationship with her
ex-husband. When the book opens she is
pregnant with her second daughter from
Bish.
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In Desirable Daughters,
Tara was anxious about the shackles of
her “wife-of-Bish-Chatterjee identity.
In Tree Bride she is avidly searching
out the family history of her great aunt
Tara Lata who had been married off to
a sundari tree when her husband-to-be
died on their wedding day.
She is also more acutely conscious of
where she comes from, even seeking out
an Indian gynecologist. Of course, the
V. Khanna her health plan offers her is
neither Veena or Vibhuti but Victoria
with blondish-white hair and gray-green
eyes. |
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| “In
Desirable Daughters, Tara concentrated
on the very American pursuit of individual
happiness,” says Mukherjee. “Now
she has to discover for herself how her
identity has been shaped by social historical,
political and colonial forces that are
beyond the individual.”
In that sense she says Tara is a very
different creature than Jasmine of yore.
“Tree Bride tabulates the regrets
and the limitedness of the concept of
free will that had been embraced by my
earlier characters like Jasmine,”
says Mukherjee.
She admits that might make some of her
more American readers unhappy, but she
says that this “dance of free will
and destiny is a complicated one in which
each side casts a shadow.”
Even in her home in San Francisco’s
Upper Haight, Mukherjee is keenly aware
of these shadows. Who knows if ghosts
can cross the Pacific but Tara always
turns on the lights of her San Francisco
home at dusk to drive away the roaming
spirits just as her mother used to do
in India. “I do literally turn on
the lights in my room in my home and I
did have ghosts at one time there before
we renovated,” says Mukherjee, laughing.
“What is there in science to tell
me that spirits don’t exist? So
I am turning on the lights even more vigorously.”
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..- End
Of Article..... |
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