Document Abstract
Bharati Mukherjee is a versatile genius and one of the greatest expatriate novelists from Indian origin. Though she has willingly migrated to America and considers herself as naturalized American but her creative writings revolve around the characters who almost belong to Indian origin, especially from Calcutta, her native home town, comparatively a liberal Indian cultural state, upright in the perspective of liberalization and modemization, fascinated and drawn to westernization earliest than any other Indian states, for being the first to be visited by colonial masters and so to overpower the state culturally in return, who look towards it with great fascination. The assimilation of Bharati Mukherjee in European culture, especially in Canada is full of travails and trammels on account of strong bigotry against Indian immigrants but she finally succeeds on account of her education and liberal modern attitudes of her family and above all her own fascination for American culture. Being an Indian expatriate considers herself as main stream of American and does not like to be compared with V S Naipaul whom she discovers engaged in locating his root un to the last. But a close and an unimpassioned analysis of her novels beginning with The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, Jasmine, Holder of the World and finally Desirable Daughters unfolds the startling fact that almost none of her characters viz Tara, Dimple, Hannah Easton, Jasmine or Tara don't appear as part and parcel of American culture, completely absorbed in American culture for very long,for almost all her novels conclude with her central characters being torn into inherited and acquired culture, reflected in their attitudes, behavior, mental exposure and verbal expression. Definitely her effort is plausible in emancipation of Indian women through enlarging their cultural dimension, laying down the foundational stone of "new women' as champion feminist but her character are not transformed the way she has aspired for upeated from one and rooted into another of their dream, alt alien as result Leep on fluctuating to and fu at the reckonings of heen and being, pant and persent, seeking percations balance between the two apparent in their interaction and well selected in their mental condition. A person cannot be synthetically transformed from one cultural set to another, almost contrary to one another, mechanically; rather it would require a long process in acclimatization, sometimes it extends to generations, which is acclaimed in a very shout span of life, supuisingly in the life of projected characters itself. Desirable Daughters present thace possible attitudes to life with the help three characters, Parvati, Padma and Tara, where Parvati and Tata present two extremes whereas Padum presents the 'cultural appropriation, maintaining the valuable and the best aspects of both the cultures, without being maniac either to her dream or to her inheritance, seeking and attaining the apotheosis of the two. But contrary to her almost all of her characters are reflective of being caught into the labyrinth of cross-cultural situations, tortured, buttered and bruised, well exemplified in Jasmine's painful confessions, I could not imagine a non-genetic child. A child that was not my own or my husbands, struck me as a monstrous iden. Adoption was a foreign to me as the idea of widow marriage (Jasmine, pp. 170-171) Here the statement of Jasmine is not only reflective of her predicament as the most dependable and highly professed character, rather is reflective of the predicament of almost all the character Mukherjee relies most for the justification of her thesis. The present paper is in intended to explore the cross- cultural situations, into which her character wriggles, which comparatively more is harrowing than trans- cultural situations, which at least has some scope and apace of time in adaptation.