LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 24:1 January 2024
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Retro Walk to the Eternal Abode of Ancestors in The Tree Bride of Bharati Mukherjee

Dr Mamata Rani Subudhi


Courtesy: amazon.com

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee is a popular India born American writer. Her major works are brilliantly based on the diaspora theme and filled with the feeling of alienation, isolation, and duality. The protagonists are from South Asian background especially from India and struggling hard to incorporate into American society unlike Mukherjee herself. The Tree Bride is such a prolific work of the writer in which the protagonist Tara Chatterjee has fixed her feet in American soil but crazy after a mysterious expedition to unearth her ancestor’s death mystery. A nostalgic craving for her traditional home in East Bengal of India and her anxiety about a fairytale ancestor aunt who married a tree; brings her back to India. The theme of soul and death ritual add mysticism and spirituality to the story. As Tara is mad about the death mystery of Tara Lata, the great grand aunt or namesake Tree Bride also restless for her soul’s release from the bondage of mundane world and return to the home of Super soul. Besides, the freedom struggle of British India adds the historical authenticity of the novel and a philosophical prospective, that nothing in the world is lost and everything in the world is somehow connected with each other is highlighted.

Keywords: Bharati Mukherjee, The Tree Bride, Soul, Struggle, Freedom, Marriage, Woman, Ancestors.

Being churned with diasporic dilemma of longing and belonging and immigrant’s alienation’s sickness, Bharati Mukherjee e?ciently incorporated the same temperament in many of her protagonists. In The Tree Bride (2004), she has fused history with mysticism in an astonishing manner, besides her immigrant mind has suggested a spiritual inhalation for dead and living people. The novel gives the story of a young woman trying to fit her place in the universe. Simultaneously, there is focus on the role and ultimate downfall of colonial rule in India. By a single person narrative style Mukherjee gives us a broad picture of British people who came India to rule as the representative of their government.

The Tree Bride is one part of Bharati Mukherjee’s trilogy, in which Desirable Daughters is the first part. The ground for Tree Bride is created in the preceding Desirable Daughters as it ends with the terrorist bomb attack on Tara’s house and from this The Tree Bride starts. Tara Chatterjee, a thirty-year-old Bengali woman living in a rental on Haight Street in San Francisco with her ex-husband Bishwapriya Ali’s Bish. As a Silicon Valley guru, Bish is rich by an integrated communication system called CHATTY. In the beginning of the book the bomb attack crippled him, and he becomes wheelchaired and starts working on a book titled, “The natural history of coincidence". Tara says, she is enough of a mystic to believe that there are coincidences, only convergence; nothing in the world is lost, but everything in the world is some have connected. So, she attempts to reconcile the present as an assimilated American woman with her past Indian heritage. The novel swings between centuries, continents and cultures of past and present. In press materials for the book, the author admits that she is consciously playing with the American literary tradition of root-retrieval, mixing memory with imagination.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr Mamata Rani Subudhi
Lecturer in English
K B D A V College, Nirakarpur
Khordha, Odisha 752019, India
mamatarani778899@gmail.com
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