The Diasporic Pulse of Chitra Banerjee Divakarunishodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/5071/9/09...143 Chapter IV The Diasporic Pulse of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni In the globalization

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Chapter IV

The Diasporic Pulse of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

In the globalization era everyone wants to move out of his or her

native soil for a better living. Indian engineers, doctors, computer

scientists and other professionals migrate to various parts of the world

for better prospects. Indian diasporic writers like

Uma Parameswaran, Gita Hariharan, V.S. Naipaul, Shauna Singh

Baldwin, Jumpa Lahiri, Bharathi Mukherjee, Sashi Tharoor,

Amitav Ghosh, Meena Nair and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni are not an

exception to this. Though settled in far off countries, their love for

their motherland remains deep-rooted.

Alienation, adoption, assimilation, despair, discontentment,

death, nostalgia, marginalization, re-adjustment and rootlessness are

some of the features of the diasporic writing. The gap between home,

i.e., the culture of origin and world, i.e., the culture of adoption

remains unbridged and the boundaries are often in conflict.

The migrant existentiality that determines a specific aesthetics is

faced with two centres, the external colonial or modernist centre

filtering into a personal identity.

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The chief feature of the poetics of exile is the trial during which

it deals with these centres, sometimes rejecting and sometimes

accepting them. Edward Said’s words are the best example for this

trial. In The Politics of Dispossession, Said says, “The whole notion

of crossing over or moving from one identity to another is extremely

important to me, being as I am -- as we all are, a sort of hybrid” (122).

In his popular essay, “Culture and Imperialism” Said, elaborates

the journey of the exile from his homeland to the globe in three phases

such as tender, strong and perfect. Tender is the phase in which

homeland alone is sweet; in the strong phase every soil is as sweet as

his native; perfect phase looks at the entire world as a foreign land.

On the other hand for Homi Bhabha, it is not the nation but the

culture which is the focus of attention. He recommends a hybridity

which is not found in hierarchical or binary structures. The poetics of

expatriate elaborates itself without centres in the writings of

Homi Bhabha. In his celebrated essay, “Dissemination, Time,

Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Bhabha projects

culture as hybrid from the side of migrant and subaltern. This double

inscription or two references is to live on borders. Bhabha employs

the term “liminality” (139-140) which means tension of differences;

the difference of historical past and the present, and of the subjecting

and the subjected clashing or meeting in a capital now; which in other

words is called as “disjunctive temporality” (140).

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Bhabha’s disjunctive temporality is analogical to Salman

Rushdie’s notion of broken mirrors. Rushdie generalizes the

excitement of the homeless in Imaginary Homelands, when he says;

“Human beings do not perceive things whole. We are not gods but

wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable of fractured perceptions”

(122). This according to Bhabha is “the twilight existence of the

aesthetic image” (15). Writers like Rushdie mythologize history

whereas writers like Uma Parameswaran re-mythologize history, epics,

legends and myths of the native land. This passionate desire and the

existential need to relocate the philosophy and vision of the homeland

in the midst of the alien culture is one of the features of diaspora as

William Safran expresses in his essay “Diasporas in Modern Societies:

Myths of Homeland and Return” in Diaspora II (85).

V.S. Naipaul, a Caribbean writer in his works, tries to transform

his sensibility to a perpetual homelessness and uprootedness.

Neil Bissoondath, an Indo-Caribbean writer, rejects the

homogenization of ethinicity and projects immigration as essentially

about renewal, about change. Bharathi Mukherjee prefers to be called

as an American writer. She advocates Mongrelization -- a mixing and

mingling of two races. She wants the immigrants to take deeper roots

in the foreign soil and become global or international citizens. As a

literary member of diaspora, A.K. Ramanujan feels closer to his fellow

Indians of the South than to fellow Americans. He entertains a hope

that diasporic consciousness is an intellectualization of a barren

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condition that is made better by an imaginary homeland to which one

hopes, one will return someday.

As an Indian immigrant to the United States of America,

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, tries to break free from stereotypes and

uses her past experiences and the desire to communicate the plight of

Indian women in America, as the driving force behind her writing.

Her writings constitute an attempt to re-connect her, emotionally and

physically to her immigrant status. She has explored the force of

tradition of her native country as well as the challenges faced by the

immigrants in her adopted country. Divakaruni turns to her inner

consciousness to develop a new narrative, which highlights not only

the oppressive force exerted over women in both their native and

non-native cultures, but how transposed traditions survive and

mutate on foreign soil. Divakaruni has once said, “I am a listener, a

facilitator, a connector of people” (qtd. in Miri 83).

Literature of diaspora affords the area of critical studies in

themes, forms, modes, characters and techniques. The focus in

literature before 1950 was on the centre, the colonizer and the

political domination. The cynosure of attraction after 1950 in

literature is on the oppressed, the colonized and the indigenous.

The most affected and oppressed are those who are criticized as the

second sex; and they have been treated as the wretched of the earth.

Homi Bhabha in his The Location of Culture has affirmed that the

contemporary literary tradition concentrates on those who

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“have suffered the sentence of history” (15). He further observes that

“there is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of

social marginality transforms our critical strategies” (15). Women are

treated as the wretched of the earth since time immemorial and hence

the recent trend is to focus on the gender issues.

Locating the site has become a narcissistic pre-occupation with

the immigrant writer. Exiled by choice or circumstance, the

immigrant finds himself displaced from his roots, his antecedents and

his centre. The quest motif seems the archetypal pattern in the

literature of the predominant mainstream culture. Literature not only

reflects persistence and change in society but can lead society into a

better appreciation of its multicultural and etho-centered fabric.In the

novels of Divakaruni, the social and psychological development of the

non-western immigrant and the culturally displaced European

transplant can be explored.

The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni’s first novel “stirs magical

realism into the new conventions of culinary fiction and the

still-simmering cauldron of Indian immigrant life in America”

(MS 4). Divakaruni inculcates American societal notions that women

should remain silent, particularly immigrant women. Divakaruni has

succeeded in conveying a marginalized woman’s message.

Divakaruni’s adroit encroachment into the territory of culinary fiction

facilitates the transmission easier. Divakaruni combines the

unfamiliar -- the female Indian immigrant experience with the familiar

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-- urban life in America blending the two into a narrative that relates a

gifted young woman’s plight as an outsider in Southern California.

The spice Bazaar in Oakland, California run by Tilotamma,

becomes the locus foci for the expatriate and immigrant Indians who

go there not only to buy spices that they need for their pilaos and

kheers, but also for that magic spice that will grant them their desires.

Tilo, “a bent woman with skin the colour of old sand”, is the

“architect of the immigrant dream”, the one who “can make it all

happen, green cards and promotions and girls with lotus eyes”

(MS 28).

Though Tilo cannot step into the world outside that world steps

into her shop and makes constant demands on her. She is torn

between her mistress code of detachment and her empathy with the

people who turn to her for help. The struggle gathers momentum

when Raven walks into the shop. The conflicts that she must resolve

between her real self and her outer, aged, powerful self which keeps

her on strictly imposed limits, are a re-working of the very same

conflicts that all exiles experience.

Tilo’s journey through the re-definition of self in exile is an

extension of the conflicts that Indian women experience in

establishing their identity and self-hood. The insider and outsider

dichotomy seems the natural, inherited condition of the Indian

woman. As Geeta’s grandfather remarks, “Even from birth a girl’s real

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home is with her future husband’s family only” (MS 88).

Sudhir Kakar’s observation in his book The Inner World also echoes

the same.

. . . as a guest in her home . . . Her real family is her

husband’s family. Whatever her fortunes, when she

marries, an Indian girl knows that, in a psychological

sense, she can never go home again. (73)

Moreover the templates, the role-models who mould, inform and

define an Indian woman’s sense of identity -- Sita, Draupadi, Savithri

or Damayanti are also archetypal exiles.

The dialectic of power and control is apparent in the custom

whereby Indian women are enjoined to take on themselves the

well-being and safety of those whom they love. For example, a wife

will regularly fast for her husband, for his welfare. Likewise, Tilo is

kept in check by the implied threat of destruction to those whom she

loves lest she violates the mistress laws. The images of power and

confinement recur throughout the novel, exemplified by the powerful

spices contained in jars. One of the symbols that have dominated the

landscape of the Indian woman’s mind is that of the Lakshmanarekha,

the white protective line that Lakshmana drew around Sita but which

she crossed and in doing triggered off the events of The Ramayana.

In The Mistress of Spices, this symbol can work contrapuntally: it

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either restricts a woman, keeping her within bounds, or defines her by

her act of rebellion. Tilo repeatedly chooses to rebel.

During her spell on the island of spices Tilo lives in a gynocracy

of sister mistress apprenticed to the benign and caring First Mother --

a period of learning and empowerment i.e., in direct contrast to her

earlier unhappy existence. This recalls the traditional set up of

girlhood in India, where every “female is born into a well-defined

community of women” and where the “experience of apprenticeship

and the activities that transpire in this feminine sphere are

independent of the patriarchal values of the outside world”

(Kakar 2004: 61).

In seeking to establish the territoriality of her self, Tilo is forced

to find recognizable cognates that span both cultures. The novel

teems with such refractions and reflections. For example, Tilo shares

a “legacy of power” (MS 203) with Raven, whose grandfather was a

curandero; the burning village, at the start of the novel when Tilo is

born, mirrors the city in flames at the end of the novel when she is

reborn: “I know what burning smells like. I have not forgotten the

death of my village . . . A city would be different. But the smell of

charred flesh is the same everywhere” (MS 313).

True to her rebellious nature filled with life-lust, Tilo oversteps

the lines that she willingly drew around herself. She sets about

making inroads into the world outside going a little further each time

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from the first hesitant steps she takes to admire Haroun’s new car

parked in front of her shop to her trip to the supermarket and to

Geeta’s office block, to finally speeding out of Oakland, fleeing the

earthquake, and crossing the “final bridge” (MS 31). The earthquake

is the spatial equivalent of the psychological upheaval that Tilo has

faced.

Tilo decides to go back instead of travelling in search of the

earthly paradise that she and Raven had hoped to find. By returning,

Tilo has seized the freedom to go back. Tilo is convinced that it is her

rejection of the mistress life that has caused the earthquake: “I made

it happen”, she says (MS 313). It is a statement on the dual nature of

exile and immigration. Just as the landscape of the immigrant mind

has been irrevocably altered by the new homeland, the immigrant

dramatically alters the landscape of the new country.

The underlying principles in the Indian quest for self realization

are dharma and karma, duty and action, not only towards others but

also towards one’s own self. The exile’s quest for a new identity

dovetails with the traditional, although world view of the individual

juggling past, present and future lives in order to realize his self.

Tilo is forced to choose between her grandeur, mythic destiny of

spice-mistress and that of ordinary mortal. Tilo consummates her

relationship with Raven and returns to the shop to commit what can

only be regarded as the mistress equivalent of Sati, only to find that

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nothing untoward takes place. Having accepted death and therefore

mortality, she has redefined the territoriality of herself in time.

I, Tilo, am no goddess but an ordinary woman only.

I admit it, this truth I have tried to escape all my life.

And though once I thought I could save the world,

I see now that I have only brought brief happiness into

a few lives. (MS 298)

The reduction in Tilo’s sense of destiny is the corollary of the

inevitable sense of loss that accompanies the act of letting go and of

stepping into life, of discovering what it is to be a mortal human being,

unpowered by magic, but empowered by self-hood.

Tilo goes through a bewildering succession of personae:

Nayantara, the dark-skinned, ugly baby who refused to die and the

clairvoyant; Bhagyavati the pirate-queen and the novice; Tilo the

old-young spice-mistress; Tilotamma, the aspara of one night with

“goddess-face free of mortal blemish, distant as an Ajanta painting”

(MS 279); and finally Maya -- “not particularly young or old.

Just ordinary” (MS 306). Sudhir Kakar observes: “. . . the Indian

body-image stresses an unremitting interchange taking place with the

environment simultaneously accompanied by ceaseless within the

body (2004: 235).

Tilo’s image is invested with a sense of self which is porous: she

feels invaded by the problems and anguish of her customers; at night,

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she says, “When I lie down, from every direction the city will pulse its

pain and fear and impatient love into me” (MS 60). Although mirrors

are forbidden to mistresses, Tilo is constantly confronted by reflective

surfaces that send back a dim and vague reflection of her.

Significantly, one of the first things that she buys when she decides to

“step over the threshold of prohibited America” (MS 132), is a mirror

that she keeps veiled until she is ready to confront her new image.

One of the most enduring and pervasive archetypes of the

Indian woman is Sita; several elements of her story flicker between the

lines of the novel The Mistress of Spices. Just as Sita was born of

the earth, and by the dictates of dharma, she was required to go

through the agnipariksha (the test by fire) twice, in order to prove her

purity and to assume her rightful place beside Rama, Tilo was placed

face down on the earth but refused to die; twice Tilo is required, by

the dictates of the mistress-laws, to step into Shampati’s fire. Just as

Sita was lured by Ravana to step over the protective Lakshmanarekha,

Tilo is lured by Raven and steps over the threshold of the protective

shell of the shop.

The one-to-one relationship between Tilo and Raven, with its

implications of love and romantic attachment deviates significantly

from the traditional Indian concept of mythic, male-female

complementarity as embodied in the Rama and Sita story. This is

perhaps the ultimate Laksmanarekha, the final limit that can be

crossed by an Indian woman. Divakaruni exploits this idea to

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establish gender role models such as that of inter-marriage and that

of the older woman and younger man as when the old Tilo is courted

by the young Raven. Tilo and Raven share a vision of an earthly

paradise a place “high up in the mountains, pine and eucalyptus,

damp odour of redwood, bark and cone” (MS 199). After the

earthquake, they head out in search of this almost mythic primeval

space and in a reversal of the customary female role, Tilo refuses.

She has learnt to say “NO, that word so hard for Indian women”

(MS 81). Tilo decides to return to Oakland, and Raven follows her.

Tilo’s re-created self will always be marked by her cultural

inheritance, just as Raven’s self will carry the stigmata of the legacy of

which he has been deprived. Raven was brought up by an

American-Indian mother who totally cut herself and her family off her

origins. Raven, the immigrant, born and brought up in the United

States of America and Tilo, the visible immigrant, are both Indians

moving from the polarities of east and west towards the precarious

balance of being American. Together they personify the Janus -- face

of exile and what Rushdie calls “the Indian talent for non-stop

self- regeneration” (1994: 16).

Divakaruni is at her best in the depiction of cross-cultural

conflicts and how her heroines take control over their destinies.

The heroines endeavour for self-realization and move towards

liberation. Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices reveals the

predicament of the immigrant Indians in America, with an Indian

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spicy touch. All Divakaruni’s heroines find themselves within the

confining boundaries of their cultures and religions. She presents the

disruptiveness of change and the power, beauty, strength and validity

of re-defining one’s individual identity within a broader universal

context.

Divakaruni is able to offer an authentic perspective on the social

constraints placed on the immigrant women. Divakaruni fully

explores the themes of cultural oppression, racial discrimination,

cultural assimilation and the discovery of voice, through a multitude

of both male and female characters. Divakaruni portrays a list of

smorgasbord of personalities and their corresponding tales: Ahuja’s

wife Lalita who strains to evade her husband is in search of the power

to confront mental abuse. Geeta, who refuses to marry a man

selected by her Indian family preserves a stoic silence in order to

maintain freedom. The stories of Tilo and Raven are rebellious.

Their love and discrimination combine to form the backbone of the

narrative.

The last section in the novel The Mistress of Spices, which

deals with Raven and Tilo, knits together the many themes that run

as separate strands throughout the book. It also vividly illustrates

many of the complex conflicts that multi-ethnic groups experience in

America. Quite apart from the convincing blend of fantasy and

realism Divakaruni succeeds in presenting to us a balanced picture of

the world of immigrants in America.

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Divakaruni has taken literary risks in the novel The Mistress of

Spices. She has bridged the purely realistic world with the mythical

one; she has extended her subject matter from dealing exclusively

with the Indian-American community to include three other ethnic

groups living in the inner city – Latinos (Hispanic), African Americans

and Native Americans. She has tried to bring together the language of

poetry and prose. Divakaruni deals with identity and self-definition in

her works. She is more traditional and re-inforces the binary

opposition of the east and the west. Divakaruni presents a picture of

pain and transformation which is breathtakingly descriptive in her

tale of the mistress of spices.

The Mistress of Spices brings together a panoramic view of

socio-cultural experiences of the characters in India and America.

It is also a novel about the quest of the characters in search of

stability. Sister of My Heart revolves around the dizygotic bondage

between Anju and Sudha. The book draws heavily on Divakaruni’s

own experiences as an immigrant. The book carries on the theme

capturing the dilemmas and opportunities confronting women with

one foot in traditional Indian society and the other in the modern

world.

Sister of My Heart is written in the realistic mode and

describes the complicated relationships of a family in Bengal. In this

novel Indian discrimination against women stands exposed.

The cousins Anju and Sudha consider themselves inferior because

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they are women. Divakaruni’s purpose is to write about a

female-centric theme in a South Asian setting. The novel is her

perception of an utter lack of emphasis on women’s independence in

South Asian literary genres. Influenced by her grandfather, who told

stories from South Asian epics like The Ramayana and

The Mahabharata, Divakaruni has woven those childhood folktales

into her novel.

In San Francisco Examiner article, Divakaruni declares that in

South Asian mythological stories,

. . . the main relationships the heroines had were with

the opposite sex: husbands, sons, lovers or opponents.

They never had any important friends. Perhaps in

rebellion against such thinking, I find myself focusing

my writing on friendships with women, and trying to

balance them with the conflicting passions and

demands that come to us as daughters and wives,

lovers and mothers. (Feb. 1999)

Divakaruni shares the emotions of her protagonists and finds in them

a mode of feminist expression. Though Sister of My Heart is set in

Calcutta, Divakaruni admits that the rest of the story is not

autobiographical and is based on observation and imagination.

Anju and Sudha are intelligent, independent and pragmatic.

More than just a linear tale of the two women, the novel explores the

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backgrounds of the mothers and their adventuring husbands.

We learn about Indian culture. We are given just a taste of the

women’s future in America, when Sudha and her daughter move in

with Anju and Sunil. Divakaruni’s review of Indian culture both in

India and in America is full of insights. The novel is both a lesson and

in the present scenario a jaunt through Indian society and culture.

Divakaruni is a master storyteller, who weaves elements of everyday

life and dreams into an engaging, seamless tapestry, which are

truth-filled as they are complex, wonderful, captivating and beautiful.

Kapil Kapoor has identified seven elements, which are used to

investigate or recognize diasporic consciousness. They are memory,

return, strangeness, desire to integrate, transience, desire for

permanence, a sense of belonging and embedding (qtd. in Kirpal 50).

Divakaruni has employed these elements in her novels. Almost all the

women characters in the novels of Divakaruni co-operate with other

women to achieve their rightful, equal and independent status. It is

indeed a goal directed activity -- to liberate women from the

dependence attitude and to establish a society without discrimination

including gender inequality.

The conflict in every woman between the desire to please the

people around as taught in childhood and the desire to fight for justice

as a reaction to the existing situation has been pictured well through

Sudha’s life. This conflict within her explains her delay in taking a

decision. The marital disharmony that is common in the modern age

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has been highlighted through Sudha-Ramesh relationship. The entire

social system comprising religion, myth, education and other social

norms focuses on training women to be secondary. Women have to

endeavour to come out of these shackles created and maintained

carefully through generations. Sudha’s feminist thinking overtakes

her and she realises the meaninglessness of her mechanical life with

Ramesh through arranged marriage.

Sudha’s decision to get separated from Ramesh is not an Indian

woman’s way of life. Her behaviour shows that a marriage bond will

have meaning only if there is mutual love and respect. Otherwise it

would be a mechanical existence. Sudha has successfully wriggled

herself out of the stifling influences of tradition and has started to

think about living her life for herself and her daughter Dayita.

She has planned to soar up high into the heavens of fulfillment as a

woman.

Divakaruni points out that, “As a girl, I was not encouraged to

ask questions. Women in my family were not expected to work

outside the home, except perhaps to teach” (qtd. in Sarvate 33).

Instead of writing from the perspective of a minority influenced by an

invading culture in her homeland Divakaruni elucidates the struggle

of the minority in the homeland of the dominant majority.

The strength of Divakaruni lies in uncovering the struggle that female

immigrants face when dealing with the cultural mosaic of a twentieth

century United States of America.

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Divakaruni has interceded and reworked the study of feminism

in her writings. Feminism in her works has something of what

Caroll Smith Rosenberg argues is “the emotional segregation of women

and men, which led to the development of a specifically female world”

(qtd. in Miri 90). Divakaruni advocates many facets of feminism

encompassing agitation for equal opportunity, sexual autonomy and

right of self-determination. This brings her closer to her contemporary

women writers like Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya,

Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,

Gita Hariharan and Bharathi Mukherjee. Divakaruni feels that

limitations placed on women’s activities result in profoundly

destructive effects.

The plot of Sister of My Heart focuses on the relationship

between the two young girls, Anju and Sudha, from the shared

experiences of their youth to the varied experiences of their married

lives. The simplicity of the plot allows Divakaruni explore thoroughly

the themes of womanhood, such as the limits of the female, social and

economic freedom as a wife in and outside of India. Sudha reflects,

In my husband’s house, I am always the first to wake.

. . . And as long as I join in my mother-in-law for

morning tea so that we can go over the day’s plans,

she’s satisfied. (SM 111)

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Anju and Sudha together experience the joys, pains and

mystical tales that accompany growing up in a traditional Indian

house in Calcutta. Their exceptional bond remains the core of the

novel and throughout the work we are acutely aware of how strong

their affection for each other shapes their lives. Till recent times,

women have been assessed by male standards and have been forced

to play subordinate roles as the obedient wife, the self-sacrificing

mother and the dutiful woman. Divakaruni’s fiction explores women

searching for their identity as human beings independent of their

traditional role as a daughter, wife or mother.

In the ever changing and evolving reality of life, the status of

women has undergone rapid and phenomenal changes. The woman’s

past has been a pathetic one governed and dictated by male

standards. Today, changes brought about by education and economic

freedom enables her to emerge from the cocoon of the suffering and

sacrificing self. Women, moving towards the new millennium make

rapid strides in all walks of life. Women have succeeded to a great

extent in breaking the fetters of their servility and oppression and

prove their worth to the world.

The Vine of Desire continues the story of the friends the two

young women at the centre of Divakaruni’s novel Sister of My Heart.

They re-kindle their friendship in America and demonstrate the female

independence that Divakaruni celebrates, although such

independence is not achieved without trauma and pain.

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Divakaruni suggests that women can assert themselves as

individuals who set their own boundaries with their partners only

through the importance given to education in their lives. Unlike other

immigrant narratives, Divakaruni conceives the Indian women’s

immigration to the United States of America as a journey from

oppressed conditions to freedom and discovery of the self with the

inspiration of western influence.

In The Vine of Desire, the union of the friends is challenged

when Sudha and Sunil become dangerously attracted to each other.

Sudha experiences a nightmare of guilt and she exiles herself from

America. In Anju’s life the black comedy is her friend’s deception, and

her role as the devoted wife is fragmented, but Anju privileges their

individualities and gets on with life. Their love for each other

surpasses all obstacles; their silences, invisible vibrations and

emotional bonding encircle them in critical moments. Sunil has no

qualms of disintegrating his home and prioritizing his personal need

for Sudha who in a way sacrifices security for herself and Dayita,

because her inherent conscience would not validate it. Simon de

Beauvoir in The Second Sex writes, “Once a woman is self-sufficient

and ceases to be a parasite, the system based on her dependence

crumbles; between her and universe there is no longer any need for a

masculine mediator” (689).

Emboldened by her own strength Sudha opts to lead a

meaningful life of her own and for her daughter. It becomes necessary

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that women must achieve their own individuality for a purposeful

survival. Sudha and Anju fight against these forces within society

which do not allow them to be themselves. Realisation dawns on

them that if they have to progress for the better and march towards

freedom, they have to wrest from men what they do not want to give:

control, power and privilege. They are no more passive agents; they

have become activists who have taken steps to remove many of the

misconceptions imposed on them in the family as well as in the

society.

The family that Divakaruni portrays in The Vine of Desire

constitutes both men and women who are both strong and weak.

In the domestic sphere, the patriarchy has been encountered with

strong intelligent and sensitive women, who have taken certain

unprecedented decisions and emerged as women with well-defined

self-hood. The novel The Vine of Desire discusses both innovation

and conservation. It makes difficult Sudha’s position as a fatherless

child, a divorced woman and as a mother in love with her cousin’s

husband. The complex intersections of identity marker govern the

narrative of the novel.

In The Vine of Desire, the most interesting aspect is how Anju

and Sudha deal with their increasing westernization. Divakaruni has

beautifully observed the creeping onset of this cultural change.

The emotional detachment of each is noted in detail. Sudha receives

an important letter from India and yet spends hours cleaning and

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tidying the apartment before sitting down to read the missive.

This emotional coldness is in direct contrast to the lives of Sudha’s

and Anju’s mothers in India who lead an open lifestyle, discussing

their daughter’s lives, offering advice and speculating on how the

situation can be improved.

In an interview with Robbi Clipper Sethi, in They Forgive My

Fiction Divakaruni says “I come from a traditional family.” A novel to

Divakaruni, is a tapestry to be woven continuously.

Divakaruni experiences that friendships among immigrants,

particularly women have been important to her immigrant status.

She has also commented that “living in the United States is a complex

experience” (Sethi 9). Divakaruni does not expect to treat her

characters as Indians or Americans, but to feel for them as people; she

aims at scattering stereotypes.

Quest for self-definition and search for identity are the main

features of the characters portrayed by Divakaruni. They are caught

in the flux of tradition and modernity. Divakaruni highlights the fact

that women meet with different problems which they cannot solve

unless they have knowledge of their inner strengths. In Queen of

Dreams, Mrs. Gupta is a first-generation Indian Immigrant. She is

the queen of dreams. Mrs. Gupta’s daughter, Rakhi is a

second-generation immigrant. Rakhi is born and brought up in the

United States; yet she has a longing for India. Rakhi’s obsession with

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India is only for its myths and mystery intertwined with her mother’s

unspoken past.

Mrs. Gupta dreams for herself and for others. She predicts the

future of her customers. Mrs. Gupta is totally involved in her

dream-telling technique. This dream technique is familiar to an

Indian. It is exciting for the westerner. Contrary to the western

concept of analysis the dream-telling of Mrs. Gupta is viewed with an

eye of suspicion by Rakhi.

Expatriate writing occupies a significant position between

cultures and countries. Cultures travel and take root or get

dislocated. Individuals internalize nostalgia or experience amnesia.

There is a need to realize the significance of the cultural encounter

which takes in diasporic writing, the bi-cultural pulls and the creation

of a new culture which finally emerges. It is important to understand

the dynamics of reception at both the ends for reception is also rooted

in cultural contexts.

Tilo, is not the elderly woman that she appears to be.

Trained as a mistress of spices, she evokes the magical powers of the

spices of her homeland to help her customers. These customers

mostly first or second-generation immigrants, are struggling to adapt

their old world ideals to the unfamiliar new world. Though trapped in

an old woman’s body and forbidden to leave the store, Tilo is unable to

keep the required distance from her patrons’ lives. Her yearning to

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join the world of mortals angers the spices, which she administers to

her immigrant customers and Tilo has to face the consequences of her

disobedience.

Anju and Sudha have travelled away from their home city of

Calcutta to California. California is so foreign to their native culture

and traditions. Through them Divakaruni presents the challenges

and freedoms of modern day America with the issues, both personal

and cultural. Anju seeks the help of her friend to enable her to cope

up with the dissatisfaction with her husband, Sunil. Sudha is both

comforted and suffocated by her life as an escapee from her past and

becomes a servant in her cousin’s household. At the same time the

friends have to acknowledge Sunil’s unspoken but obvious attraction

to Sudha.

The sisters are Indian-born girls. When they mature into

womanhood, they are torn between two cultures. They are both

liberated and trapped by cultural changes on both sides of the ocean.

These women struggle fiercely to carve out an identity of their own.

Sudha is forced into a divorce, because she has refused to abort a

female foetus. She travels to America to visit her cousin Anju and her

husband Sunil. Sunil has not got overcome his infatuation for Sudha

which he had developed at the time of their double marriage.

This fetish feeling in Sunil drives him to betray his wife. But more

important, it paves the way for a gradual realization on the part of

both the friends although in very different ways, of their independence

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from the traditional expectations that have been laid upon them.

Anju realizes her identity through writing her stories seriously.

Sudha comprehends her identity through the awareness that the

desire for her beauty on the part of Sunil, her first love Ashok, and a

new love Lalit, is only a trap that she must be on her own before she

can give herself again.

The women find that thay cannot live a life dependent on men.

They begin their separate searches for independence. As both women

gain self-respect through autonomy, the price seems to be a loss of

humour and joy. Women can evolve different strategies to assert their

individuality and act independently with a sense of freedom and

conviction. Women should become self-reliant and fearless to

articulate their own independence. So it is clear that the woman’s

path to authentic individuality is full of thorns and unexpected

pitfalls. It is in the woman’s power to extricate herself and find her

own happiness.

Divakaruni has cleverly imbued each character with not only

personal disappointments and shortcomings, but public ones as well

as those that are nearly irreconcilable within the orthodox Indian

community: divorce, single parenthood, childlessness and adultery.

There is a balanced view of facts in Divakaruni’s fiction. The fact that

Sudha determines to go back to India shows the hope and trust that

she has towards her native land. Her homeland also plays a

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significant role in her redemption and renewal. Culture can be

defined as a,

total of non-biologically inherited patterns of shared

experience and behaviour through which personal

identity and social structures are attained in each

generation in a particular society, whether ethnic

group or a nation. (Miri 15)

The characters portrayed in the novels of Divakaruni experience

cultural shock because they cannot forego their native tradition to

adopt to the American culture. Their native Indian culture needs a

transition. Indians believe that the meaning of being human is found

in interpersonal relationships, since no human being exists alone.

The American system compels an individual to make his or her own

realization in order to comprehend its system. Tilo, in The Mistress

of Spices, realizes her individuality and moves towards emancipation

by falling in love with a Hispanic named Raven. Tilo is an example of

the amalgamation of traditional culture as the mistress and the

modern culture when she emerges to break the mistress laws.

Homecoming indirectly exhibits Sudha’s thirst for identity.

Her alienation and segregation from her native land engulfs her with a

sense of loss. This sense of alienation is the outcome of her social

background. She belongs to the traditional Chatterjee family of

Calcutta where women are instructed to be submissive and accept

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their arranged roles as a daughter, mother, and wife and in-laws.

She is married into the Sanyals family again where submissiveness is

insisted upon. As an obedient daughter of the Chatterjee family, she

trains her mind to be a good daughter-in-law and a wife. But when

her individuality is shaken, she walks out of the Sanyal household in

order to give birth to the female child and bring up the child.

Sudha’s education enables her to decide her next course of

action. She goes to America to live with Anju and Sunil. She is not

able to escape the fetish feeling of Sunil. One day she becomes a prey

to Sunil’s emotions. In succumbing to Sunil’s advances, Sudha has

betrayed Anju. This sense of guilt urges Sudha to leave Anju and take

up a job of a caretaker in an Indian family. The grandfather in the

family slowly develops affection for Dayita and Sudha. The three of

them come back to India.

In Sudha, there is a sense of loss, particularly for her roots and

her bond with her motherland. This provokes in Sudha, a search for

identity. There is a sense of homelessness and a feeling of insecurity

in Sudha. In order to hide her agony and the sense of feeling lonely,

she journeys to America, in search of security. Contrary to her

expectations, Sudha neither finds solace in Anju’s apartment nor feels

secure. Sudha searches for a personal, social and human identity

and hence she personifies the history of her cultural transition.

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In the modern context people strive to belong to a group, to a

nation, to a religion or a community. Conformity to a group results in

a loss of individual identity. An individual clings on to the centre to

forge an identity. One of the most powerful of group identities is that

of the nations. Identifying oneself with one’s nation empowers the

individual. The loss of a nation’s identity results in alienation and

isolation which paves the way for diasporic studies.

The diasporic writers in their attempt to restore a centre either

remain static in the parent culture or totally embrace the alien

culture. Both these attempts end up in an estrangement. This is the

root cause for the alienation and rootlessness of the diaspora.

The characters do not realize that this quest for identity does not

dawn on them suddenly. There is plethora of tension evolved during

this journey to re-invent as is evident in the characters of Anju and

Sudha.

Divakaruni says that her books are partly based on experience

and partly on social observation (Bauer: 1993) Divakaruni strives to

weave such observations with the Indian culture alongside

contemporary American culture. Divakaruni tries to fuse Indian

culture and the daily realities of immigrant life. Mrs. Gupta, a

first-generation Indian immigrant to America is the queen of dreams.

Her daughter Rakhi is born in the United States. Mrs. Gupta has fled

India to escape from the gift that she has been blessed with and to

experience passion and motherhood. The gift of dream-telling proves

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to be inescapable, causing her to help many persons but to remain

distant from her husband and daughter.

Mrs. Gupta dies in a strange accident, bringing the daughter

and father together. The father and the daughter attempt to translate

and understand the dream journals. The paternal love and affection

resolves the indifference found in Rakhi’s relationship with her

musician husband, Sonny. The terrorist attack of 9/11 reveals Rakhi

that her own daughter has the dream-telling gift like her grandmother

and so she must reconcile with that as well. Rakhi is comfortable in

her American life, but she feels a strong connection with her

Indianness.

Rakhi’s love and loyalty weigh in favour of her country of birth,

America. After the death of Mrs. Gupta, the ashes in the urn are

taken to be dissolved in the river. This makes Rakhi profess the

hidden American identity inside her, wrapped in an enticing imagined

India. Rakhi expresses her feelings in the following lines.

If I’d died, I too, would want my remains to become a

part of this land, this water, because there’s a way in

which the geography of one’s childhood makes its way

into one’s bones. (QD 133-34)

In another instance when she sees a group of Indians coming to her

shop she feels she does not belong to them. Rakhi says,

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“The word foreign comes to me again, though I know it’s ironic.

They’re my country men. We share the same skin colour” (QD 194).

A search for identity is manifest in the characters of Divakaruni.

Though born and brought up in India, Anju and Sudha emerge as

independent women. Mrs. Gupta retains her identity as a

dream-teller till her death. Mrs. Gupta creates a space of her own

where none can trespass. Tilo disdains immortality and courts

mortality. Divakaruni’s concern is with the contradictions which her

characters encounter and that which surfaces repeatedly throughout

her novels. In fact, America becomes a symbolic place for the working

out of paradoxes and contradictions that her characters are faced

with.

The female characters of Divakaruni inevitably experience

exclusion and alienation in search of identity. The fragmentation and

alienation of the women characters can well be the result of

Divakaruni’s own immigrant sensibility. The immigrant experience

may be a perennial transplantation in America in which she has lived

in, moved around and has used as backdrops for her fictitious places.

The striking feature of the writings of the Indian diasporic

writers like Divakaruni is alienation, rootlessness, despair, nostalgia,

marginalization, readjustment, assimilation and adoption.

Among these the basic feature of diaspora is the uprooting of the self

from the native land and of settling down elsewhere. Tilo runs a store

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of Indian spices in America. Anju migrates to America in search of a

different lifestyle, which she thinks will offer her freedom and which

will permit her to be herself. In India, in the Chatterjee household,

the Indian culture is practised earnestly; the Indian culture which

always offers women the secondary position. Mrs. Gupta travels to

America in order to continue her dream-telling technique.

These aspiring and ambitious characters uproot themselves from their

cultural moorings and migrate to countries which promise them better

living conditions and comforts.

In the diasporic writings, the journey motif also predominates.

There are journeys over continents, between countries, cities and

localities within the same city. In The Mistress of Spices, Tilo

journeys from the Island of spices to America; Haroun travels back to

India, as America cannot offer him a respectable life; Geeta’s

grandfather travels to America in order to get his granddaughter

married through an arranged marriage. In Sister of My Heart, Anju

journeys to America to live with her computer scientist husband.

In The Vine of Desire, Sudha travels to find peace and solace in

Anju’s apartment in America. In The Queen of Dreams, Mrs. Gupta

travels to America in order to guard her ability of dream-telling.

Home for all these characters is not a quest for spatial identity but a

search for roots. It is also a hunt for self in a world arbitrarily divided

into the white world which is progressive and developed and the

coloured world which is backward.

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Caught between the two worlds -- the one which the immigrants

forsook because it holds a bleak chance and the other which has

failed them, the immigrants stay on as marginal nowhere people,

trying to find solace in the new country of adoption and unable to

discard their home country. This tension is evident in the diasporic

writings of Divakaruni.

The first-generation Indian-Americans are acutely aware of the

apparent cultural differences. For Lalit and Geeta, in The Mistress of

Spices, the family becomes a battlefield, where modernity clashes

with tradition where the Indian culture of Geeta’s grandfather clashes

with the American culture of Geeta and where theory clashes with

practice. American culture becomes the basis for interactions outside

home. At home the first-generation Indian-Americans attempt to

preserve their cultural and religious heritage and expect to live

according to the Indian cultural values. For example, women are

expected to do all the domestic chores as well as seek job to share the

economic burden of the family just like Sunil expects of Anju in

America. However the hierarchies of age and gender patterns based

on traditional Indian values are broken along the lines of compromise:

Sunil allows Anju to bring Sudha from India; single mothers like

Sudha find a living in America; Rakhi, a divorced mother, can also

enjoy the comforts offered to her daughter by her divorced husband

Sonny.

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For second-generation Indian Americans like Geeta, Lalita,

Raven and Rakhi, the awareness of being the in-betweens is

particularly accentuated. They compartmentalize their lives according

to the family and the society in which they live. At home and within

the local community they are governed by the compromised Indian

lifestyle. Conflicts typically arise from the cultural clash between

American Individualism and Indian communitarianism. For example,

Lalita, a second-generation Indian American cannot pursue her

sewing classes; Geeta is pulled up for coming home in the late hours;

Rakhi can neither understand her mother nor her husband because of

the diasporic experience.

The characters portrayed by Divakaruni in the selected novels

undergo the expatriate experience. On analysis it is clear that there is

a search for requirements, traditions, a struggle for cultural conflicts

and a search for identity. There is a voluntary and forceful movement

from their homelands and a search of a lost home. There is a feeling

of rootlessness, alienation and marginalization on the part of the

characters like Tilo, Lalita, Jagjit, Haroun, Geeta, Raven, Anju, Sudha,

Singhji, Sunil, Lalit, Mrs.Gupta, Rakhi, Belle and Rakhi’s father.

These are the predominant characteristics found in the novels of

Divakaruni and this constitutes the diasporic experience of the

novelist.

Being an immigrant herself, a sense of exile gains not only the

perspective which allows Divakaruni to see her home clearly, but she

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also has immediate and pressing comparisons to make. Her novels

deal with the real life question of finding balance. Divakaruni takes

full advantage of her position within the cultural borderlands of India

and the United States to portray the diverse life experiences of South

Asian Americans.

Divakaruni exemplifies the distance between the originating

culture of immigrant parents and the daily lives of their children

raised in America which is part of the second-generation experience.

Divakaruni explores the idea of marriage through such characters like

Anju, Sudha and Geeta. Marriage loses its significance in the evolving

culture of the South Asian Americans. For Sudha it is a choice of

arranged marriage over a love- match; for Geeta it is a choice of

love-match over an arranged marriage. It is one of the most important

examples of the choice of one particular cultural practice over

another. Divakaruni portrays both types of marriage in her novels but

ultimately favours neither. Marriage is a complicated manipulation

between the traditional expectations of immigrant parents of Geeta

and the desire of the second-generation Geeta.

Ramesh and Sudha’s (Sister of My Heart) marriage reveal that

any cultural prerogative about the permanence is discarded in favour

of divorce. Divakaruni’s fiction that features arranged marriage, as in

the case of Anju and Sunil demonstrate how cultural connections

indeed can be sufficient to keep the couple together. Inspite of Sunil’s

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deceit, Anju continues to live in the same apartment, until finally

Sunil leaves the apartment.

Divakaruni in her novels explores the complexities inherent in

the formation of cultural identity for the second-generation immigrant

families in the United States. She underscores the unique situation of

this generation of South-Asian Americans: equally at home and at the

same time homeless. They must navigate the cultural borderlands

between the United States and India and consciously examine their

cultural inheritance.

Divakaruni also reveals the transience of these cultural

borderlands for it is only the second-generation who live in a world so

deeply influenced by the culture of their parent’s homelands while

also so firmly entrenched in the American way of life.

Divakaruni thus anticipates the prevalence of a global identity that

relies upon neither nationality nor ethnicity but personal prerogative:

an identity to be forged by the third-generation and beyond when it

emerges.