LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Cross-Cultural Conflict in Bharati Mukherjee's
The Tiger's Daughter

Solaimalai Rajaram, M.A. M.Phil., B.Ed.
S. Kanagaraj Ph.D

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee, an India-born American novelist, is a familiar voice in the Indian Diaspora. Her fiction depicts the cross-cultural crisis faced by her women in her novels. She found herself difficult to adapt to the culture, customs, and traditions, which she depicts through her female protagonists' cultural crisis.

Bharati Mukherjee's first novel The Tiger's Daughter (1971) deals with an upper caste Bengali girl named Tara Banerjee Cartwright, who goes to America for higher studies.

This paper throws light on the cross-cultural conflict of the 22-year old heroine when she revisits India after a seven-year stay in the United States. It highlights the cultural turmoil faced by Tara when she refuses to accept Calcutta as her home again. This paper also analyses how Tara, caught in a gulf between the two contrasting worlds, leads to her illusion, depression, and finally her tragic end in a violent incident. The author also attempts to portray how the novelist herself intimately projects her own self through the heroine in this novel.

Fusion of American and Indian Traits

The Tiger's Daughter and Wife are about two different problems of expatriates. The Tiger's Daughter, Mukherjee's first novel, is about the cultural conflict of Tara Banerjee, a Bengali girl, who goes to America for higher studies at the age of sixteen. Having married a white American, she returns home for a holiday trip to visit her parents. The fusion of Americanness and Indianness in the mind of Tara and the resulting of split personality due to the cultural conflict is the theme of the novel. In The Tiger's Daughter, Mukherjee creates a heroine Tara, who like herself, returns to India after several years in the West to discover a country quite unlike the one she remembered. Memories of a gentle lifestyle are usurped by new impressions of poverty, hungry children and political unrest.

Bengal Tiger

The novel is given an interesting title, which can be variously interpreted. The novel's location is Bengal. Bengal is known for its Tiger. Bengal's well-known Hindu deity is Kali, a fearsome goddess, who rides on a tiger or lion. Perhaps, Tara is compared to Kali, who tames the powerful force and rides on the powerful animal. Valiance amidst adversity is represented here. Tara Banerjee, the protagonist of the novel, is from Bengal. Bengal Tiger is also the nick name her father earned because of his entrepreneurship.

Tara's heritage does not begin with her father. Her grand-father Harilal Banerjee was also a renowned zamindar. Bengal tiger represents not only elegance, awe, strength, vitality and vigor but also money - Indian coins used to have the visual of a powerful and vibrant Bengal tiger! Tara comes from a prosperous and powerful family. Tara, who is portrayed as a daughter of a tiger, represents all these characteristics, undergoes tremendous strain and stress and intellectual confusion, and creates her own cage because of her reasoning prowess. When liberation was in sight, her life is snatched away by violent hunters.

Last but not the least is an amusing feature. White tiger has become an interesting phenomenon in several zoos around the world, including those in India, Kali is also the name of the rare white tiger in the Knoxville Zoo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv1Yg-Iea10). Does it mean that the cub of an original Bengal Tiger becomes a White Tiger, losing some of her original features and adopting some strange features alien to her? A semantic nuance or meaning born out of contradictory terms? Tara's reincarnation - predicament, misunderstanding, incomprehension in her cross-cultural encounter - is brought out more vividly through this metaphor.

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