Identity Crisis in Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee

Identity Crisis in Desirable Daughters by Bharati MukherjeeABSTRACT Immigrants pass on envisioned tales that exhibit experiences of indep oddmentent and emerging countries. Cultures throw off taken up new form in the coetaneous times, where the issues of Diaspora, globalization, consumerism, transnationalism heathen hyberidity and indistinguishability crisis have become new motif in the postcolonial literatures. The new issues give beginning to identity crisis that evokes feelings of an individual that portrays socio-cultural setup that shows the bl finish of tradition and modernity. The new identity creates problems for Tara in Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee, where she is lost, languishing in the angst and ennui of the diasporic experience, yet to compartmentalize out a niche for herself.In the newfangled, Bharati Mukherjee has struck a balance between tradition and modernity by representing prehistorical and present which is achieved through with(predicate) the female protagonist -Tara, who severed her links with tradition except trunk tied to her native country. Tara is influenced by ancient customs and traditions, only when is grow to modern customs. She is conscious of her existential predicament which is mirrored in the epigraph No one behind, no one ahead the path the ancients cleared has closed. And the new(prenominal) path e very(prenominal)ones path goes directhere, I am alone and find my way. Tara is alienated from the ships company as she oscillated between the nostalgic fascinations of a conventional past and the romantic and adventurous allurements of the present. The diasporic qualities exhibited by Tara establish the merging of the East and atomic number 74 which shows the clash.The Identity of the protagonist is highly assimilative, can adopt and accommodate herself two to her traditional Indian way of life and to her newly adopted American ethos. She tries to move away from the constrained identity and vacillates between two lives maybe I really was between two lives.(251)Taras reconstruction of identity is root in her nostalgic and romantic recollection of her past. It is based on the fuse of her thoughts active the past coming to her mind in the present but in fragments, and not whole. She tried to reconstruct her identity through her diasporic experience. She was attempting to define the importance of her cultures through space and time. Loneliness had made Tara a teeny-weeny wanton and wantonness had made her very lonely. In these five geezerhood she had changed beyond recognition, but other character Bish had not changed at all.Bish is in handle manner an upholder of tradition. He prefers the determine of an imagined past than those of contemporaneity.The concept of home and migration is very much embedded in the narratology that Bharati Mukherjee presents in Desirable Daughters. It is the sense of migration which brings about a change to the identity of Padma, who has finally made New York her home, her put d hold of choice. But her inalienable attachment to her home makes her the sustainer and preserver of Bengali tradition in America. The alien culture thus fails to subvert her traditional identity. On the other hand it only remaps nad reconstructs her cultural identity. and so migration plays a crucial role in restricting individual identifies and cultural attitudes and perceptions.The novel is woven brilliantly which depicts the thoughts and feelings of tether Calcutta, India-born brahman upper-class infants, noteworthy for their beauty, brains, wealth, and privileged position in high society.Mukherjee narrates their lives as they leave their conservative, sheltered childhood home, where they are inundated with culture, tradition, and values and inculcated with education by the Catholic nuns in their convent structured school and college. Two of them emigrate to America and the other relocates to Bombay, India. The three sisters, Padma, Parva ti, and Tara, are born exactly three years apart from distributively other and share the same wearday.They are named after the goddessess name,hoping that they will inhabit and prosper in whatever they do.We are sisters three/as uniform as three blossoms on one lessenering tree. (But we are not), says Tara, the protagonist, quoting a poem.Desirable Daughters is the novel that takes a long time to lift itself from the come along and once it releases its themes and characters, it seems to get liberated from the trapped situation. Engrossed in Indian culture old and new, it keeps strucking down in tight little circles of concomitant that create an atmosphere of cramped inwardness, even suffocation. Bharati Mukherjee, equivalent in her introductory four novels and short stories, tries to portray the repression that enables the women of her culture nailed down in subservientness to male desires. The feelings and emotions are discovered after exploring traditional Indian society .The novel is based on three strikingly-beautiful sisters from a privileged Bengali Brahmin family in Calcutta feel the tug between tradition and freedom as they try to meet expectations that are often wildly contradictory. The youngest, Tara Chatterjee, seems to have flown utter roughly from the nest. Tara is divorced from Bishwapriya (a Silicon Valley multimillionaire hand-picked for her by her stimulate), shes raising a stark naked teenaged son on her own. The depressing part is that, she works as a lowly teacher, a choice which would be unthinkable in the culture of her birth.The story is narrated by Tara from her adopted San Francisco home, where she lives with Andy Karolyi, a strange crystalliseing of Hungarian Zen carpenter who earthquake-proofs houses. The lifestyle of the protagonist implies, a sort of free and easy hippie lifestyle, but nothing could be far from the truth. In the novel the rebellion-gestures are merely trappings, or reactions against the gagging rest rictions of Taras girlhood.Tara initiates her tale of repression in a curious way, with a legend about her namesake Tara Lata, also k now as the Tree Bride a remarkable figure who became prominent in the fight for Indian freedom. After going in for more than twenty pages, Tara then delves into telling story of her own, which seems to be dislocating in nature. She recalls the utter deficiency of romanticism in her marriage, in which her father told her, There is a son and we have found him suitable. Here is his picture. The marriage will be in three weeks. Tara, not knowing any other way, submitted I espouse a man I had never met, whose picture and biography and bloodlines I approved of, because my father told me it was time to get married and this was the best maintain on the market.Mukherjee dwells on every detail of this highly traditional occurrence. The father of the child bride is a traditionalist even though he is a lawyer educated in English and English law. The groom di es of snakebite and his family blames the bride as unlucky. Greedily the father of the groom demands the dowry. But the brides father takes his daughter into the set where he marries her to a tree. She becomes a woman noted for her courage and generosity. Her American granddaughter visits her home. She has the same name, Tara Lata, as the old woman and like her she has two sisters.The contemporary woman is a divorced woman. Her ex-husband was the traditionally pre-selected bridegroom like his former wife a resident in America and now she lives with her lover, an American, in San Francisco. Her son introduces a young man who claims kinship as the son of her oldest sister, Padma. This is a kind of impossibility. An impossibility since her sister never had a child and a possibility since the familial relationships are so convolutedly penny-pinching as to make the existence of the young man as her nephew plausible. It seems credibly that the young mans claim is true and that Padma, Taras sister, did bear an shit child. This is a important event for Tara. As the pampered child of wealthy Calcutta parents, she was sheltered from the poverty of the metropolis and from all but the most severe political crises. She suffers the stress now of an immigrant with a child that belongs wholly to her new country. The discovery of Padmas child brings into emphasis all her inner disquiet and the need to find valid connections.In the novel, Taras relationship with her two sr. sisters is complicated, the flow of affection blocked by a certain formality and adherence to preset roles. Middle sister Parvati married a rich man and stayed in India, but by some miracle was able to select the suitable match for her. Parvati in her own way had established her identity, because of which it was saidParvati, the pliable middle daughter had do the unthinkable shed made a love match. He was sure not what brains-and-beauty Parvati Bhattacharjee could have commanded on the Calcutta m arriage market.Even though Paravati was inclined right to select her right match but after that she is envisioned as one who is a meek follower and gets diminished by losing her real.She writes to Tara I hope you arent doing bad things to yourself like taking Prozac and having augmentative surgery. Please, please dont become that Americanized.The third, and the eldest sister of Tara, Didi, is married to a Mehta (an notable family which includes the conductor Zubin) and moved to New Jersey to pursue a career in television. But again, all is not as it seems. Her lifestyle is a thin veneer laid over the dense, pressed-down bedrock of tradition. She is considered to be most glamorous of all the three sisters.The other character Chris Dey, is represented as crisis in the novel. He is a young man who represents himself to Tara as Didis illegitimate son, conceived through an affair with a prominent businessman named Ronald Dey. This exposes an ugly on a lower floor layer of culture t o Tara, not the India of doting grandparents, not the India of comfort and privilege, but the secondyard of family, the compost heap.The characters in the novel are not portrayed in the liberated form, they are trapped into different set of emotions trying to carve out a new identity for themselves. Tara is projected as a character who more of a status conscious tries to uphold the values of traditional society despite falling for different allurements in the present. Her elder sister, Didi pretends hard to be a pure character but falters when gives birth to her son, which represents misalliance.Chris Dey isnt really who he says he is, and in fact he feels like a device, something dropped into the story to keep things moving forward.In the end, the novel, tries to come back from where it started, where and the legend of Tara Lata the Tree Bride, but this device doesnt quite work either. The calamity somehow goes slack and does not yield a satisfying end to the story. The novel see ms to be a family saga which could not bring out the loveable characteristics in the characters of the novel, that portrays them as a dominant in any sphere. The end is quite suspenseful and complex where the description of homeland may be magical but symbolic intention was lost.Bharati Mukherjee depicts a liquid society in her novels, ie a society in flux. It is a society of constant flow, the flow of migrants, the flow of machines, flow of criminals, flow of power structures, flow of people and commodities.Amidst all the confusions the message was brought out clearly and it is represented as a fascinating beautifully written work of art that exhibits pic that cannot be missed out.