Immense Psychological Pressure to Redefine their Identity in the Tiger's Daughter and Wife

Exploring the Psychological Pressure and Identity Formation in Bharati Mukherjee's Books

by Nishu Anand*, Prof. Anjana Vashistha Rawat,

- Published in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, E-ISSN: 2230-7540

Volume 19, Issue No. 6, Dec 2022, Pages 215 - 219 (5)

Published by: Ignited Minds Journals


ABSTRACT

Bharati Mukherjee's main protagonists were not placed in a repressive socio-cultural setting, but rather in confusing milieus questioning their ethnicity, identity, and place of belonging. To defend their acts of assimilating with new culture and rejecting traditional principles, they attempt to compromise with both old and new world ideals. The main character of the book, Tara, felt rooted less not just in her chosen home but also in her ancestral location among the folks she had grown up with. She experienced psychological trauma and social rejection in which no one showed her affection. Her emotional breakdown and isolation led to a point where she now feels alone and longs to return to her adopted home. Female identity is built in Mukherjee's books using a variety of codes, elements, language, myth, history, psychology, gender, and race. It is closely related to both the subject's unconscious inherited placement and their perception of themselves. These complications are reflected in the development of this third place and its cultural locationality. Space offers history a dynamics all by itself. The type of interactions formed by the junction of power in the Diaspora mix of exclusion and inclusion in global ethnicities is significantly influenced by space.

KEYWORD

Bharati Mukherjee, psychological pressure, identity, Tiger's Daughter and Wife, ethnicity, assimilation, traditional principles, ancestral location, psychological trauma, female identity

INTRODUCTION

Discover the tranquilly integrate herself into the socio cultural environment

Bharati Mukherjee's writings, in the words of Sushma Tandon, "primarily reflect her own experiences as a woman stuck between two cultures." Like Bharati Mukherjee, Tara, the lead character of Tiger's Daughter, longs for her Indian life while living in America. She makes the decision to go back to her origins in order to discover the tranquilly of which she had always dreamed while living in America. Tara Banerjee Cartwright returned to her ancestral home after spending her formative years in the United States for seven long years, but she was unable to integrate herself into the socio cultural environment of Calcutta; to her, everything appeared odd. She came to the realisation that the nation had significantly altered from the one she had been dreaming about. Her ambivalence is evident in her behaviours and emotions, such as how she compared hospitals to train stations and loathed such settings, which she had formerly admired. She "becomes painfully conscious that she no longer gets substance from values and mores of her own place" while not having fully assimilated into American society. Bharati Mukherjee's main protagonists were not placed in a repressive socio-cultural setting, but rather in confusing milieus questioning their ethnicity, identity, and place of belonging. To defend their acts of assimilating with new culture and rejecting traditional principles, they attempt to compromise with both old and new world ideals. The main character of the book, Tara, felt rootedless not just in her chosen home but also in her ancestral location among the folks she had grown up with. She experienced psychological trauma and social rejection in which no one showed her affection. Her emotional breakdown and isolation led to a point where she now feels alone and longs to return to her adopted home. Tara is on a journey to prove that she belongs in both realms, but she has so far been unsuccessful. She no longer identifies as a Brahman, an upper caste Hindu, as evidenced by her marriage to American David Cartwright. In times of need, she prayed to a Hindu deity in America, but she left the prayer chamber in India because she did not feel at ease. She is a proponent of hyphenated identities but couldn't decide where she fit in the world. In Tandon's opinion:

She discovers that neither her friends nor her family think highly of her. Being a Brahmin from an elite caste, the Indian criticises her marriage to a "mleccha" as having descended too low, but David, her husband, does not give

She begins to consider her sense of belonging as a result of her sabbatical in Calcutta and some surprising behaviour from a close friend. The more she considers her life in Calcutta, the more she realises how out of place she is in the old world and how she is unable to make peace with the new one. The multifaceted, cosmopolitan characters created by Mukherjee in a few of her novels are the definition of cultural bankruptcy. Tara is the archetypal figure who is transitioning emotionally from one realm to another. Mukherjee has made an effort to define dual and biculturalism among immigrant populations who are always in the middle of negotiations with the past and present. These populations face the diasporic problem of being stuck between the promises of America and the memories of India. They are under tremendous psychological pressure to redefine who they are and where they belong. Because Tara acknowledged the past and showed compassion for the present, she developed a psychosomatic disease. The ideal illustration of an immigrant who is suffering due to their ambivalence and inability to assert their commitment to a specific nationality is Tara Banerjee Cartwright. "The political connotation of the hyphen in relation to an ethnic socio cultural identity underlines the divided loyalties towards the nation of origin and the nation of adoption where both cultures have imprinted indelible marks upon the self," writes Chakraborty. "The hyphenated identity refers to an identity when a person gives equal stress to both the worlds.".

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

1. To study on Bitterness of the Host Societies towards the Immigrant Population 2. To study on Immense Psychological Pressure to Redefine Their Identity and Belongingness

Bitterness of the Host Societies towards the Immigrant Population in The Tiger's Daughter

Migration from one place to another has become a common trend in this ultra-modern world as a result of globalisation and advancements in science, communication, and technology. This is done to improve their daily lives. The term "diaspora" refers to people who have voluntarily migrated to other countries, such as Asian immigrants to the western world, particularly in Europe and America, rather than those who have been forcibly ejected from war-torn areas like Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, or any other conflicted country.:

Due to the elimination of the nation-state as a mediator, individuals and groups can now directly participate in global processes in the modern world. This is because home

In a few of her pieces, Bharati Mukherjee has examined the lives of immigrants who use hyphens. The Tiger's Daughter shows a failed assimilation attempt and a failed attempt at root-to-soul reconciliation by an immigrant. In a different book, the protagonist Jasmine successfully adapted to American society but Dimple, the protagonist of Wife, struggled to adapt and ended up killing her husband. The immigrant psychology of those who were unable to choose their location is shown in books like The Tiger's Daughter and Desirable Daughters. The Tiger's Daughter depicts people who are disenfranchised in both worlds, while Desirable Daughters imagines the lives of people who are mired in the past and the present. People with hyphenated existences are currently in a state of self-destruction to self-construction. Instead of choosing their groups on their own as they should, people with hyphenated existences are unable to exercise their right to free will. Due to their dual nature and usage of a hyphen, which is enough to show the conflict and disarray of their identities, they are unable to disaffiliate from existing organisations or join new ones.: On the one hand, members of various minorities work to dispel the stereotypes that group them with people of similar origins and strive to be accepted as individuals instead. On the other hand, they work to retrace their history and forge fresh group identities that can help them feel proud of their past and valuable. There is always tension between these impulses, even though they aren't really opposing ones and they don't cancel each other out. This tension is particularly noticeable whenever a writer is singled out by the majority as a recognised representative of a minority fighting for the right to self-expression

Immense Psychological Pressure to Redefine Their Identity and Belongingness

All of the immigrants have the ambition to live permanently in America. Therefore, as immigrants, they go through a process of adjustment and personality development. She travels through several stages, including immigration, transition, and expatriation. Her paintings reflect her struggles with the ethos, customs, and people of her native India and the place of her immigration (America). The core of her success as a creative artist is in the nature of cultural clash that causes psychological turmoil in all of her stories. She performs best when she portrays how a cultural clash between the East and the West causes psychological crises in the characters' inner minds. The sensitive female heroines of Mukherjee's novels lack a solid sense of personal and cultural

with an understandable and engaging portrait of Indian life. People who use hyphens often have a strong desire to learn about and appreciate their significance, but they also often feel distant from their roots and their prior recollections. They are being plagued by ghosts from the past, which makes them doubt their existence in their newly adoptive homes. They relish every second of their new adopted existence despite the duality and uncertainty that surround it. They vary from native inhabitants of the host country and their country of origin due to the trauma and turmoil of their destination and place of origin. Some immigrants do, however, succeed in assimilating into the new culture at the price of their ancestral ethos and attempt to abandon their origins in favour of a new way of life. They make an effort to erase everything from their history, but due to their origin, colour, and ethnicity, this is almost impossible. When they initially fail, they attempt to maintain a balance between two different cultures and nationalities, which results in a cultural collision, dilemma, psychological imbalance, and a life in which they are hyphenated:

Whether we like to admit it or not, the hyphen is an issue. Because it necessitates a difficult act of balancing, it permits not only a floating but also a rotating identity, it is closely related to visibility (in an alien space), and it frequently leads to fracturing. The hyphen's relationship to the country of origin is not always one of connections; it can also be one of withdrawal and self-withholding.

In Bharati Mukherjee's Wife, Dimple, a young lady from Calcutta, is the subject of a psychological study on her difficulties adjusting to married life in New York. She was raised to be submissive and reliant in accordance with Indian notions of women, thus she lacks the inner strength to deal with anxiety and difficult circumstances, which leads her to act violently without warning. As she is portrayed in this instance, Dimple is a neurotic and solipsistic person who kills her own spouse to put an end to their marital strife. Here, Bharati Mukherjee examines the protagonist's inner aspects and surrealistically portrays Dimple's psyche. Dimple is stuck between the stages of immigration and expatriation: between the "Manhattan Enclave" of immigrants and the "Ballygunge Ghetto" of expats. She also struggles with choosing between the Western version of the assertive, independent wife and the traditional Indian role model of a humble, self-effacing wife. She finally gives in to societal and cultural pressures and ends up not just a frustrated "expatriate," but also a neurotic sufferer. shows up as a person who is motivated to modify her fate in order to consider all possible outcomes, not as a tragic figure. Of course, the pain she endures—physical, mental, and emotional—drives her to violence to escape her suffering. The narrative of an Indian peasant lady who travels from Punjab to Florida to New York to Iowa and is about to leave for California as the book comes to a close by Bharati Mukherjee explores female identity. The main character reinvents herself with each relocation and adopts a new name—Jyoti, Jasmine, Jase, or Jane—getting closer to her goal of becoming an American citizen and a member of the new world. Jasmine's continual travel brings her rootlessness and identity quest to light. In reality, an immigrant's life is a cycle of reincarnations. She experiences numerous lives in one lifetime. This fact explains both the novelist's and Jasmine's conditions. Mukherjee appears to be trying to say that if one needs to adapt oneself to the dominant culture of the chosen area, one should forget one's background by exposing her heroine to various social conventions and geographical regions. The fictitious universe of Bharati Mukherjee paints a pitiful image of the diverse experiences of immigrant women, their cultural and psychological conflicts, challenges, traumas, trials, and tribulations, as well as the high price some of them had to pay in order to immigrate to America successfully. Bharati Mukherjee has tackled all the concerns related to the expatriate experience, as shown by the cultural and psychological analyses of her fictional universe. She made an effort to examine the diversity of this issue, which is based on their fight to transcend inherited ideals, by selecting her characters from across the globe. Her thematic interest expands with her expanding artistic vision, and the difficulty of cultural integration takes on a new dimension. Her use of personal experiences to inform much of her work lends it beauty. Her stories have a unique flavour that is uncommon among expat writers because of a special sense of affinity with her characters.

Immigrating, Experiencing Displacement And In-Betweenness Being Positioned In The Third Space

Female identity is built in Mukherjee's books using a variety of codes, elements, language, myth, history, psychology, gender, and race. It is closely related to both the subject's unconscious inherited placement and their perception of themselves. These complications are reflected in the development of this third place and its cultural locationality. Space offers history a dynamics all by itself. The type of interactions formed by the junction of power in the spatial and culturally disjointed circumstance. We are virtually face to face with culture's twofold bind right now—a certain slippage or splitting between human artifice and culture's discursive agency—to paraphrase Bhabha. One must learn to be a bit false, out-of-congruent with the meaning of cultural generalisability, in order to be genuine to oneself. Bharati Mukherjee tried to delve deeply into this "slippage" and "splitting" and the distorted psyche of those immigrants who had been surviving in the conflict of traditional Indian values, which were inherent in their personality. She did this with her unusual sensibility for the cross-cultural crisis in the era of globalisation. Mukherjee is also interested in the uprooted immigrants and their attraction with the Western way of life that they had chosen due to professional obligations or a desire to experience more freedom in the liberal and vibrant society of America. In her work, she has deftly addressed issues of several homes, as well as the recurrent splits and slippages in the process of constructing one's identity in a foreign place at a particular period of social transition. Bharati Mukherjee attempted to delve deeply into this "slippage" and "splitting" and the distorted psyche of those immigrants who had been surviving in the conflict of traditional Indian values, inherent in their personality. She did this with her peculiar sensibility for the cross-cultural crisis in the era of globalisation. Mukherjee is also interested in the uprooted immigrants and their attraction with the Western way of life that they had chosen due to professional obligations or a desire to experience more freedom in the liberal and vibrant society of America. In her work, she has deftly addressed issues of several homes, as well as the recurrent splits and slippages in the process of constructing one's identity in a foreign place at a particular period of social transition.

CONCLUSION

This novel deals with a comparable subject of request, be that as it may, shaped in an especially American style. She is a gotten Italian American, imagined in Devigaon, India. Dismissing this, Debby regards herself remarkable comparable to her brief guardians and family. Thusly, she secures a significant family of an extremist, American mother and a sketchy, expert of the Eurasian beginning stage. Being discarded the female child, she is cruelly gone out, where she is given the name Faustine, after the tempest, by the sisters of the safe house. In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee has skillfully blended the unbelievable strategy in with the story. Debby Di Martino, the essential person, changes her name to Devi, subsequently, tolerating the piece of the amazing Goddess Devi, for the pursuit and decimation of her profile gatekeepers, who through their malicious activities stays for the wild shrewd presence. By and by, she will be Debby Di social, economic, and cultural repercussions for all of the individuals involved. Integration of cultures is a trend that can be seen all across the world nowadays. A person will have feelings of dejection, despair, and hopelessness when there is a significant gap in their lifestyle between two different approaches to living. The outcome of this is a jolt to the culture. When a person leaves the culture that they value and embrace and enters a new culture, the previous values often come into conflict with the values of the new society. The cross-cultural crises that the ladies in Bharati Mukherjee's novels go through is portrayed in the author's fiction. From a sociological perspective, Bharati Mukherjee meticulously demarcates the process of migrants' absorption into the host nation and evaluates the level of social integration and assimilation. The novel's main protagonists struggle throughout the story to reconcile the conflicting cultural norms of their traditional Indian beliefs with those of the modern American society they inhabit.

REFERENCES

[1] Hossain, Jakir.(2012). The Notion of Identity Explored inWife by Bharati Mukherjee. Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal I.IV [2] Jamwal, Reetika. (2014). The Notion of selfhood in .Bharati Mukherjee’sWife and Jasmine: A Comparative Study [3] Indian Ruminations Ravichandran, M.(2013).Reflections of Female Sufferings in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and. The Criterion 4.IV [4] Ray, Aparjita. (2014)Immigrant Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s novels. Muse India 55.MayJune. [5] Deshmane, Chetan. ―Negotiating Power from the Margins: Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine."South Asian Review 31.2 (Dec 2010): 51-65. Print. [6] Futehally, Shama. "Vying for an Identity."Rev. of Jasmine. The Book Review 14.2 (Mar-Apr 1990): 23. Print. [7] Itwaru, Arnold Harrichand. "Who Jane?." Rev. of Jasmine. The Toronto South Asian Review 8.2 (Win 1990): 70-77. Print. [8] Monti, Alessandro. "Globalising the Postcolonial Text: The Rise of the "Supermarket" Ideology."The Atlantic Literary Review Quarterly 1.2 (Oct

[10] Prabha, M.. "Plagiarised Pap Alienated Work." Rev. of The Holder of the World. Indian Book Chronicle 20.2 (Feb 1995): 7&8. Print. [11] Rajeswar, M..―Sado-Masochism as a Literary Device in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife." The Commonwealth Review 4.2 (1992-93): 61-71. Print. [12] Sampat, Manju. ―Expat Exuberance."Rev. of Desirable Daughters.Biblio: A Review of Books 3.9-10 (Sep-Oct 1997): 27. Print.

Corresponding Author Nishu Anand*

Research scholar, K.A PG College, Kasganj