The Tiger's Daughter

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The Tiger's Daughter

• Bharati Mukherjee

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Bharati Mukherjee (1940)

• Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta
• studied in Iowa, where she met her husband, Clark
  Blaise
• "I fell in love before the elevator ride was
  over"
• Days and Nights in Calcutta (with C. Blaise)
• Jasmine (1989)

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Bharati Mukherjee

• first lived in Canada
• strong aversion to Canadian notion of
  multiculturalism
• embraced the idea of becoming "American"
• melting pot rather than multiculturalism

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Michael Ondaatje
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Bharati Mukherjee's embracing of Americanness

• I am an American, not an Asian-American. 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 of its
  citizens equally.

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Acculturation

• falling in love beginning of acculturation
• irreversible
• return becomes a problematic endeavor

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The Tiger's Daughter (1972)

• The Catelli-Continental Hotel on Chowringhee
  Avenue, Calcutta, is the navel of the universe.
  Gray and imposing, with many bay windows and fake
  turrets, the hotel occupies half a block, then
  spills untidily into an intersection. A
  first-floor balcony where Europeans drank tea in
  earlier decades cuts off the sunlight from the
  sidewalk. In the daytime, this is a gloomy place
  only a colony of beggars take advantage of the
  shade, to roll out their torn mats or rearrange
  their portable ovens and cardboard boxes.

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• The Catelli is guarded by a turbaned young man,
  who sits on a stool all day and stares at three
  paintings by local expressionists on permanent
  display by the hibiscus shrubs. He is not without
  love, however, this guardian of the
  Catelli-Continental Hotel. He loves the few
  guests who come every day but do not stay. He
  sees flurries of exquisite young women in pale
  cottons and silks and elegant old men carrying
  puppies and canes, and he worships them.

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• While small riots break out in the city, while
  buses burn and workers surround the warehouses,
  these few come to the Catelli for their daily
  ritual of espresso or tea. And the doorman
  gathers them in with an emotional salute.

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What is the Catelli-Continental Hotel a symbol of?
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The Catelli-Continental Hotel

• legacy of colonialism
• Indian ruling class has taken the place of the
  colonizer
• "middle men" former translators between natives
  and colonizer
• middle men have become the cultural elite

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What is the relationship of the Catelli to the
rest of Calcutta?

• hotel as a fortress against the poverty of the
  city (beggars in cardboard boxes)
• Western flair aloofness (espresso)
• cf. Lamming landlord having tea on the terrace
• artificiality

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What do we expect?
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• There is, of course, no escape from Calcutta.
  Even an angel concedes that when pressed. Family
  after family moves from the provinces to its
  brutish center, and the centers quivers a little,
  absorbs the bodies, digests them, and waits.

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How is Calcutta portrayed?
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Calcutta

• city of poverty
• city of paradoxes (Catelli Continental beggars
  in cardboard boxes)
• city of riots
• politics stronghold of Communist party

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Return

• the enigma of return
• cf. Naipaul the enigma of arrival England is
  not what it has been promised to be
• enigma of return "India" has lost its meaning,
  its "naturalness"

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Where can you find meaning?
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Family

• Arupa, Hari Lal's younger daughter, who had from
  infancy shown signs of chronic nervousness, was
  abandoned by her husband in the first weeks of
  marriage. In time the young woman lost her beauty
  and her strength. In time she became a legend in
  Pachapara, an eerie shape beneath the red cotton
  quilt of her bridal four-poster, her hair cropped
  close as a gesture of defiance, her limbs bare of
  all ornaments, her eyes cold and accusing.

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• Occasionally driven by some memory or anger, she
  would steal from under her quilt, unlock from a
  drawer her bridal photograph yellowing in its
  silver frame, and stare at the man who was still
  her husband. (11)

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Role of Women in Bengali society

• dependence on husband
• impossibility of divorce
• small gestures of defiance ("cropped her hair
  close")

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• Years later a young woman who had never been to
  Pachapara would grieve for the Banerjee family
  and try to analyze the reasons for its change.
  She would sit by a window in America to dream of
  Hari Lal, her great-grandfather, and she would
  wonder at the gulf that separated him from
  herself. But her dreams and her straining would
  yield a knowledge that was visionless. (11)

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The enigma of return

• once traditions are denaturalized, they lose
  their meaning
• naturalness is impossible to recover
• suspension migrant in-between the US and India,
  her country of origin

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• Tara had never been farther than Shambazar. She
  could not fully visualize tenements and beggars.
  Nor did she wish to talk about it. Dark skinny
  buildings, devious alleys, rotting garbage, idle
  men leaning against barred windows, child-beggars
  in front of food stalls all this made her
  physically sick. She was a sensitive person,
  sensitive especially to places.

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• She remembered in Calcutta the chauffeur had
  always carried smelling salts for her in the
  glove compartment. Her memory, elastic, warm and
  gentle, showed her families asleep on sidewalks,
  children curled in wooden crates, and this
  undermined her remarks. (11)

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• Within fifteen minutes of her arrival at the
  Greyhound bus station there, in her anxiety to
  find a cab, she almost knocked down a young man.
  She did not know then that she eventually would
  marry that young man. (18)

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• It was difficult to determine the Marwari's
  response to the question. His teeth were buried
  in a chapati as he sat, still and malevolent, in
  his corner.
• "I'm Tara Banerjee Cartwright."
• "You are so beautiful and you are married to a
  European, Madam?" The Nepali's question, or
  charge, went unanswered. (29)

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Suspension

• New York was certainly extraordinary, and it had
  driven her to despair. On days she had thought
  she could not possibly survive, she had shaken
  out all her silk scarves, ironed them and hung
  them to make the apartment more "Indian." She had
  curried hamburger desperately till David's
  stomach had protested.1
• 1 Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger's Daughter (New
  York Fawcett Crest, 1971) 41.

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Irony

• New York attempt to establish a fortress of
  Indianness
• alienation from India when she is in India

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• If she were more passionate she might have said,
  I don't hate you, I love you, and the miserable
  child, the crooked feet, the smoking incense
  holder, I love you all. (Tiger 46).

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• 'How to explain our God to these Europeans?'
  Arati had said at the time. To Tara's mother all
  white men were Europeans and she trusted them
  only when they were in their proper place. . . .
  Disturbed by the authentic religious emotions
  of her mother, she thought it best to go away.
  (Tiger 63)

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The impossibility of return

• return is possible but the original meaning is
  impossible to recapture
• migration as a loss of authenticity

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Ending

• riot breaks out in the city
• Catelli Continental is taken over by rioting
  "mob"
• Tara escapes to the US