High Technology Letters ISSN NO : 1006-6748

The Immigrant’s Search for Root in Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘Desirable

Daughters’
1
V.Jayajothilakshmi, 2Dr.R.Kannan
1. Research Scholar, Department of English, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and
Education, Krishnankoil.
2. Professor, Department of English, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education,
Krishnankoil.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to bring forth the feelings and experience of the immigrants with
special reference to Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters. People migrating from their
native country to another country in order to lead sophisticated life and to achieve their
ambitions and goals are common today. A person who crosses boundaries cannot survive
there if he has no flexibility. He should have the ability to manage with the life there. But at
the time, he should not forget his native land’s culture and identity. But in reality, these
immigrants move away from one culture to another. Without any force of others, these people
discard the native country’s bond and try to fix themselves in the immigrated country. It is an
impulse present in the unconscious state of human mind. Many writers like Bharati
Mukherjee, have entered into American identity, and struggle to set their Indian roots. The
protagonists of many contemporary Indian Immigrant writers, like Bharati Mukherjee, are
portrayed as women who try to discard the old thoughts and and acquire the new land’s way
of life and later try to find their root. This paper presents the protagonist’s thirst of finding her
root and also her initiative to disclose it. Her life answers the question of women’s capability
and stability.

Keywords:- Immigrant, Quest, Identity, Culture, Modernity

I. INTRODUCTION
In the present age of international migration the idea of ‘home’ is such a key factor to be
associated with ‘original root’. Rootedness connotes temporal, cultural and psychological
meanings. Apart from the important ingredients connected with the rootedness, there are
ethnic identities, language, food, religion, costume, culture, rituals act as symbols to be linked
with the home country. The migrated people, when return to their native country, will imitate
their own culture and will not follow it. They feel as foreigners in their own country. While
the immigrants enjoy the life in adopted country, the expatriates live with the memories of
their native past. Expatriation is a complex state of mind longing for the past, and struggle to
maintain their living condition in the alien land. But the immigrants enter into the life-style of
the new country and accept it completely. The protagonists, in the novels written by the
expatriate writers, are portrayed with the life in despair and disillusionment. In their life in
the alien land, they have quest on their identity. It is quest which gives meaning for existence
and sustains the human journey.

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II. Bharati Mukherjee

The protagonists of Mukherjee’s novels reveal their likeness towards the freedom of their
immigrated country. The characters develop multiple consciousness, resulting in a self that is
neither unified nor hybrid. As the protagonists perceive both their race and sexuality through
new and different lenses throughout the course of the text, they come to realize that the belief
of a singular identity is a fallacy. Mukherjee’s way of depicting the protagonists with the
quest for identity is as follows:

The identities that Mukherjee’s women eventually emerge with exemplify the
characteristics of a whole new breed, the ‘ethnic’ who is also ‘American’. The process
of finding their identities must be a matter of intense struggle with the self, with
tradition, with the wonders and horrors of a new culture, with growing aspirations,
hopes and desires. . . . Mukherjee’s westernized Indian women return to seek the
comfort of traditional faiths, they increasingly discover them to be cold and so the
quest for a new identity continues. (Nayaki, 119)

Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters is a protest against the limitations imposed on

women’s lives in traditional societies. The author also highlights the life of the expatriate
Indian women in America who cannot have a link totally with their homeland. But at one
point, they face a need to have a link with their past.

Bharati Mukherjee’s yearning to Indian soil and culture is rooted in her fictions. Mukherjee’s
concept of Americanization is integral to the concept of the ‘composite culture’ of the nation.
With the experience of immigration to America, Mukherjee’s protagonists are also shown to
engage in the process of fashioning a new independent self. Because one is in the process of
‘rebirth’ or ‘reincarnation’, and the pull of the cultural past may really be a hurdle for being
absorbed in the new immigrant culture of the multicultural nation.

III. Contradictory Life

Identities and culture though get transformed and delocalized across space and time,
immigrants are seldom detached from the memories of the past places and times. It is difficult
for the immigrants to feel oneness with the alien environment and the sense of solitariness
binds the immigrants with the soil of indigenous land. Mukherjee’s novel Desirable
Daughters presents a feminine immigrant experience.

In Desirable Daughters, the protagonist Tara comes away from the stereotyped life, gives up
nostalgia for home country and shows her desire for the foreign country. Mukherjee presents
the protagonist’s complete acceptance of American culture by discarding her own Indian
culture and her failure in it. It ranges widely across time and space, with a murder plot that
links India, the Indian community in America, and the narrator Tara Chatterjee’s quest for
root.

Tara, who is newly married, arrives in the United States, and completely depends on her
husband both legally and socially. In her life, the exposure to America is depicted as creating
the desire for freedom and independent selfhood. She enjoys the freedom she gets in the new
world. Tara, who was grown up in a strict Hindu family, admires the freedom in America.
When she decides to acquire the freedom, Bish, her husband, who is a staunch Indian Hindu
man, does not accept it.

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Bish is more traditional in his outlook. According to him, marriage is a spiritual bond that
should not get affected by social or environmental changes. Though he is well versed in
modern technological developments, he wishes to follow the traditional life style without any
changes in it. Bish’s dominance over his son exposes him as an Indian patriarchal father. He
wants his wife and son to be under his control and expectations, as it is the general character
of an Indian family man. But Tara does not want to be a woman who has to satisfy her
husband’s wish and son’s expectations.

IV. New Identity

The novel Desirable Daughters begins with the story of Tree Bride. This has its influence on
the rest of the book. A Bengali Brahmin, Jai Krishna Gangooly was a staunch believer in
Hindu culture. He had three daughters, Tara Lata, Parvati and Padma. The youngest named
Tara Lata was five years old and her father arranged marriage for her. The traditional way of
that marriage is portrayed by Mukherjee as:

… the youngest dressed in her bridal sari, her little hands painted with red lac dye, her
hair oiled and set. Her arms are heavy with dowry gold; bangles ring tiny arms from
wrist to shoulder. Childish voices chant a song, hands clap, gold bracelets tinkle. I
cannot imagine the loneliness of the child. A Bengali girl’s happiest night is about to
become her lifetime imprisonment. It seems all the sorrow of history, all that is unjust
in society and cruel in religion has settled on her. (4)

In the story Tree Bride, the bridegroom died of snake bite and so the bridegroom’s father
increased his demands for dowry. At the end of this argument, Jai Krishna Gangooly took his
daughter into a deep forest and married her to a tree. Thus Tara Lata became a Tree Bride.
This incident happened before some decades. The story of Tara-Lata, the tree-bride, serves to
highlight the extreme orthodoxy of the Gangooly family and descendants.

Tara, the heroine of the novel Desirable Daughters, who comes from the family of the tree-
bride, is a self-possessed and curious woman, having a strong quest for root. She has done
what is unimaginable for a woman who born in traditional India. Tara feels that her process
of leading American life will not get fulfilled unless she divorces Bish. Hence she does not
feel for her divorce and seeks it, but she stays in touch. A typical American way of divorce
follows. In that society, divorce is an open secret. Divorce marks her transition into a new
identity and a liberated self. She expects her own identity.

Tara’s quest for independent identity makes her to grant full freedom for her son to do
whatever he wishes. She liberates herself from the conventional Indian socio-cultural patterns
by discarding the tradition and the role of dutiful and obedient wife to her husband and
behaves in favour of the American society. She has divorced her extremely rich husband and
frees her artistic son from him and decides to live with her lover without marrying him.

Tara never bothered to turn back and examine her life. The only thing she used to do like
earlier days is having conversation with her sisters and parents over telephone. Tara is
hanging in the air, she does not know many things about her ‘desh’ and also she does not
belong to America which she considers as her own home.

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V. Valuing Old
When Tara goes to San Francisco police station to file an ambiguous missing person notice
and to get help regarding Chris Dey, it is interesting to note how she asks someone with
Indian background, and gets assigned to Jack Sidhu, an Indian-American SFPD officer.
Sergeant Jack Sidhu, a non-Bengali, neither Hindu nor Muslim works here as a tool of
deconstruction. Tara’s sister Parvati’s life-style is notable in this novel. Her life is more
traditional. She is a domesticated, traditional and dependent Indian woman. Even Tara feels
envy towards Parvati’s thinking and her ability to run the family successfully. She knows the
way of bringing up the children with good manners. The heart-rending statement of Tara
comes out when she is a kindergarten teacher in the foreign country:

I am not the only blue-jeaned woman with a Pashmina shawl around my shoulders
and broken-down running shoes on my feet. I am not the only Indian on the block. All
the same, I stand out, I’m convinced. I don’t belong here, despite my political
leanings; worse, I don’t want belong. (79)

Tara quickly learns to adopt American way of living and American culture, but often thinks
over her family history in India. The re-creation of the new home seems rather a vain attempt
in the alien environment. The journey of her inner self is unveiled in the foreign country. Her
outer self aspires for the liberal life and it is contrasted with the inner self which cannot keep
aside the memories of the days in Calcutta. Unlike the sweet old home in Calcutta, the city of
San Francisco emerges as the place of residence without any emotional attachment.

Mukherjee gives out the quest for identity in the alien country. When Tara’s house is fired,
she is completely shattered and yearns for homeland and traditional life. Tara’s boyfriend
Andy asks Tara not to investigate about their past life, because it has the power to bring the
past life in her memory. But Tara proceeds with analyzing the past and with her quest for
root. This makes Tara to face her family, her past and the culture that she has kept herself
distanced and it results in a conflict between the old way of thinking and new forms of
consciousness she has created. Tara’s way of life and her nostalgia is described by a critic as:

The novel is not only a nostalgic romanticisation of the past but also a reconstruction
and revalidation of Tara’s identity. . . .describing the cross-cultural impact on Tara’s
identity partly Indian and partly Americanized, the novelist portrays her as a hybrid
subject, a mimicry of the American socio-cultural ethos. (Swain, 128-29)

In Jackson Heights, which is like ‘Little India’ and which consists of Indian restaurants, food
stores, sari shops, beauty saloons and other Indian enterprises, Tara willingly identifies
herself belongs to Indian community. But inspite of being with the Bengalian community, she
feels alienated. But after attending the party given by Didi, there is a conflict going on in
Tara’s mind between her need to follow the family’s old tradition and desires to be an active
participant of the contemporary American culture. Many people invited for the party arranged
by Didi are Indo-Americans. At the end of the party, Tara realizes her mistake. At this
situation, the readers understand Mukherjee’s idea:

Mukherjee had been gradually working out her ideas of a migrant’s relationship with
both the ancestral nation and with the host nation. She came to realize that for a
proper integration to the new nation one needs a strong personality to withstand

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impediments and oppositions and a proper mentality for accepting changes. (Lahiri
Himadri, 51)

This shows that Didi has become the representation of ‘homeland’. The plot turns upon a case
of attempted identity theft when Tara finds a stranger. The conflict arises in her, when Rabi
brings a young man and introduces him to Tara as her nephew. Tara’s identity caused her to
be totally dismissive and outraged when Chris Dey comes in her life. He introduces himself
as a son of Tara’s elder sister Padma. The sudden appearance of Chris Dey raises question
about the family secrets and community. It leads her to question her belief about her past.
This incident precipitates a crisis in Tara’s life, leads in questioning their family traditions
and cultures. Only after this incident she reconsiders her assumptions about her quest of
reality.

Tara’s culture does not make her to tolerate the girls lighting up the cigarettes with men in the
Unites States. In spite of her thought to become an American woman, she cannot avoid the
Indian tradition completely. She says:

The rhetoric of modern San Francisco makes me invisible. I am “Asian,” which is

reserved for what in outdated textbooks used to be called “Oriental.” I am all things.
When the little kids climb on my lap to be read to, or just listened to, I don’t think
they see me as anything different from their parents, the school nurse, or their
teachers. (78)

VI. Search for Root

Tara has not been able to distance herself completely from her Indian roots. She comes to
know about the need to go to India in search of the roots to define her identity. She looks
back at her family’s past and their future and comes in terms with her history and legacy,
from which she is almost separated. Her trip to India makes her to find her family’s ancestral
roots and their place and value in the history of pre-independent India. Through this, she tries
to find out herself. After the trip, she finds that she is comprised of multiple selves and not
has fulfilled by even one. Though Tara stays for a long time in United States, when she
returns to her native she has the mentality to find out their original root.

Tara’s search for root and identity leads her back through childhood memories. She seeks
information about her heritage. She is trying to find out the life of a five year old child
married to a tree in the nineteenth century. The things Tara discovers about her family’s past
help her in opening up to a wider world. Tara talks about the historical past to her
gynaecologist which leads her to get a wider view about her family’s past. This conversation
leads her to the history of Treadwell’s family and their connection to Tara Lata Gangooly, the
tree bride. From her ancestor Tara Lata, she learns the courage to face the difficulties in life.
In this process she comes to know that the person in the name of Chris Dey is a false man and
starts to take her own decision and actions.

Tara’s quest for root increases when she visits Tara-Lata’s home in Mishtigunj, Bangladesh.
The novel comes a full circle as it ends with Rabi and Tara going for a ‘root-search’ to
Mishtigunj, the village where the ‘tree-bride’ lived (Sampat, 2). Through Tara-Lata, Tara
understands the significant part of her identity. Tara’s step towards acquiring her true self
makes her directed between prescriptive Hindu traditions and American notions of
individuality and freedom. She has not rejected or accepted certain aspects of both Indian and

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American way of life. At last she comes to a conclusion that she never has a proper identity
but has been dispersed between India and America.

Tara does not have any struggle for root in her life when she lives with Andy. She realizes
later that living temporarily in the past is a dangerous thing to have a proper identity. By
reinventing her root, she is trying to have permanent identity for her life. Through her critical
reconstruction of the Tree-bride’s history, she is able to get an awareness of her root and
identity, which is largely shaped by her Indian affiliations mediated through her acquired
American consciousness.

Tara says: “I’m feeling just a little alien and uncomfortable, a tinge of not-belonging, in the
midst of such welcoming comfort and I think it must be the way Bish feels” (75). Her
physical living in the foreign country with a very little network with her sisters and family,
presents before her the past days of family relationship in Calcutta. As a part of the outsider
community, her lack of adaptability in his host country makes her unable to build such a
sweet ‘home’ from where she can smell the soil of old home with bond.

As her character develops her honesty and her assessment between the two worlds, she
moves back and forth being an American and an Indian. Her travel is both physical and
psychological. Tara’s dwelling within dual identities and her search for ‘root’ is the
transmigration phenomenon in the twenty first century. Tara and her sisters have no scope to
establish their own individual identities, as they born in a traditional Bengali Brahmin family.
Her life in the United States never makes her to feel like being in home. . Tara’s return to the
traditional world is given as:

Desirable Daughters is at best an exploration of Tara’s quest for identity as her

traditional Brahmin roots and the American interlude coincide. . . . The novel sends
out the message that in the adapted land, one must not entirely reject the traditional
well-springs of one’s family and one’s ethnic origins, that very often help in
transcending the traumas and the sense of rejection experienced while navigating the
alien world. . . . The crisis in her life propels her back towards her family and her
cultural origins, which eventually reconciles her with her estranged husband. (Joseph,
98)

Bharati Mukherjee has significantly connected the story of ‘Tree-Bride’ with Tara’s quest for
root. Parvati asks Tara to come to her home in India. That journey to her native land makes
Rabi to explore the inherited culture of his parents. The spiritualism of India appeals to him.
Tara’s memory of her great-great grandmother, who is living as a saint in Mishtigunj denotes
her longing for returning to India. Tara’s visit to that place makes her to think that the old
home and family in India presents real life to her. The tale of the tree-bride covers the entire
story of the three daughters.

Mukherjee, moves back and forth between cultures and across continents, and weaves an
enchanting story of the tree bride. The Tree bride delves deep into the complex story of
India’s fight for freedom from the British Raj. Later in the novel, Tara feels proud about her
community and family. When talking about the society she belongs, she says:

To be Calcutta bhadra lok, as we Bhattacharjees were, was to share a tradition of

leadership, of sensitivity, of achievement, refinement, and beauty that was the envy of
the world. That is the legacy of the last generation of Calcutta high society, a world

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into which we three sisters were born, and from which we have made our separate
exits. (22)

Bish feels sympathy towards Tara and wants to protect her when Chris Dey appears in her
life. This made Tara to realize that one cannot totally cut oneself from the root. Tara’s mother
has Parkinson’s disease, but she has refused to take treatment in the United States. The reason
is she could not be there without her husband. From her parents, Tara learns the wisdom of
acquiring the tradition and adhering the Hindu Dharma. She is tempted to create a
homogenous ‘Gangooly’ identity for her sisters and herself.

Bish and Tara again get their real happiness in their life, when they reconnected to their
cultural roots. The new land has changed them into emotionless persons. The power of their
root makes them to reconcile and bring unity between them. The quest for the diasporic
consciousness in Desirable Daughters makes Tara to become one of those typical Indian
wives.

VII. CONCLUSION
Immigration is a stage in human life. Immigrants’ life is affected by culture. In facing this
cultural problem, some get succeed and learns to live within both the cultures, but many of
the immigrants fail in it. It shows the dilemma of modern woman, because of homelessness
and loss of identity. Mukherjee’s growing concern for the immigrants is that they should not
suffer with marginalization that occurs everywhere for the immigrants. The immigrants’
acceptance of the new land is because of its spirit and later the same spirit of the country will
lead them to homesickness and nostalgia. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator gets into
the new land and fixes her in it. But later in the novel, the narrator makes herself relieve from
the new world and try to fix herself again in the homeland. Through Tara, Mukherjee
expresses the individual’s belief in the liberty and freedom and how they mould themselves
to reconstruct their identity.

References
1. Nayaki, M. Thayyal. Mongrelization as an Immigrant Experience in Bharati
Mukherjee. “Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives”. Ed. Somdatta Mandal. New
Delhi: Pencraft, 2010. 48-62.
2. Mukherjee, Bharati. Desirable Daughters. New Delhi: Rupa, 2010.
3. Swain, S.P. Problems of Identity: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable
Daughters. Journal of Literature and Aesthetics 3.1 and 2 (Jan – Dec 2003): 127-33.
4. Lahiri, Himadri. Nation, Nationalism and Cultural Citizenship in Bharati
Mukherjee. “Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives”. Ed. Somdatta Mandal. New
Delhi: Pencraft, 2010. 48-62.
5. Sampat, Manju. Expat Exuberance. Desirable Daughters. Biblio: A Review of Books 7.7
and 8 Jul – Aug 2002: 15.
6. Joseph, Eliza. Perspectives on the Mestiza Consciousness: Bharati Mukherjee’s
Desirable Daughters. Indian Journal of Postcolonial Literatures 9.1 (Jun 2009): 91-
99.

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