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Cross Cultural Conflict in “the Tiger's Daughter” of Bharati Mukherjee

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Cross Cultural Conflict in “the Tiger's Daughter” of Bharati Mukherjee
CROSS CULTURAL CONFLICT IN “THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER” OF BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Rajaram Solaimalai
Associate Professor in English,
Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai625 015
Tamil Nadu, India

email: sreng@tce.tce website: www.tce.edu
____________________________________________________________

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ABSTRACT:
Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian born American novelist, is a familiar voice in the Indian Diaspora. Her fiction truly reflects the temperament and mood of the present American society as experienced by immigrants in America. She 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 (1972) deals with an upper class Bengali Brahmin 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. The author also attempts to portray how the novelist herself intimately projects her own self through the heroine in this novel. **************** 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 Cartwright, a Benghali Brahmin 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 the Americanness and Indianness in the mind of Tara and


References: Mukherjee, Bharati. The Tiger’s Daughter. Houghton Miffin, 1972 Chowdhury Enakshi Prestige Books, 1996. Iain, Jasbir. Foreignness of Spirit : the world of Bharati Mukherjee’s Novels. Journal of Indian Writing in English,13, 2 ( 1985) Writing: A Study in Expatriate Experience. New Delhi , Prestige Books, 1994 Sivaramakrishna, M
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