Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality

16. “Luminous Brahmin Children Must Be Saved”: Imperialist Ideologies, “Postcolonial” Histories in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger's Daughter

--------------- "Luminous Brahmin Children Must Be Saved" Imperialist Ideologies, "Postcolollial" Histories in Bharati Mukherjee's The Tiger's Daughter Indrani Mitra Few South Asian immigrant writers have commanded as much critical attention as Bharati Mukherjee (only Salman Rushdie comes to mind) or provoked as strong and disparate reactions in critics and readers. Two excerpts may illustrate the spectrum of Mukherjee criticism. The first is from an essay on South Asian immigrant writing by Feroza ]ussawalla : "Bharati Mukherjee definitely seems to have found her 'haven' in the United States, but with this comes an obsequiousness, a pleading to be mainstreamed .... This new generation of South Asian writers are ex-colonials, twice colonized, like the twice born Brahmins, oppressed by their European education and by their hunger to be Americanized.1 The second comment is from a review of Mukherjee's works by Polly Shulman : "It's not only the new-comers who have to learn new rules and ways of thinking in these stories-Americans who love them also end up changing.... In Mukherjee's books, everyone is living in a new world, even those who never left home. As traditions break down, the characters must try to make lives out of the pieces.2 If]ussawalla finds Mukherjee's assimilationist urge somewhat irksome, Shulman (and many would agree with her) discovers in these stories of immigrant lives textual strategies that interrupt the self-'\bsorbed passivity of mainstream American culture with the distinct post-modern dialectics of center and margin , self and other, domination and subversion. The multiplicity of critical perspectives calls for a reevaluation of Bharati Mukherjee, especially of her place in the growing canon of "postcolonial" 285 Mukherjee's The Tiger's Daughter literatures; more important, it necessitates a rigorous reexamination of the term "postcolonial" in its rapid deployment in scholarly and pedagogic exercises today. Mukherjee has herself claimed the label "postcolonial,"3 and readers and critics have consented all too readily, pointing variously to the author's childhood in British India, her supposedly insider knowledge of a Third World" culture, her thematic preoccupation with immigrant identity crises, and her cultural critique of mainstream American life as signs of her "postcoloniality." This disconcerting range of meanings points to the ambiguity of the term "postcolonial" as a theoretical tool; more dangerously, the amorphous critical positions it generates speak of a crisis moment in the emergent field of Postcolonial Studies, one that perhaps signals the appropriation of its political content into the more domestic, poststructuralist preoccupations with identity and difference. My reading of Mukherjee's first novel, The Tiger's Daughter, is therefore framed by some of these larger issues in the politics of Postcolonial Studies.4 Those of us who teach and write in the gray zone now termed Postcolonial Studies no doubt agree that "postcoloniality" is at its very broadest a condition of existence that is anchored in a past of colonial domination and a present of ongoing struggles to overcome the legacies of that past at all levels. The difficulties posed by such open-ended definitions 'are immediately manifest in recent attempts to theorize the literary products of material conditions as global and varied as the legacies of colonialism. Theoretical studies such as The Empire Writes Back, whose editors-Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffinglibly include the American literary tradition as one more site of a "postcolonial " encounter with a dominant culture, warn of dangerous homogenizing tendencies.s This essay is an effort to retrieve the politics of "postcoloniality" by reconstructing the complex topography of colonized societies in which individual subjects are to be located. My reading of The Tiger's Daughter as "postcolonial " text rests on two thematic considerations: First, it examines the novel's formulation ofEast-West relations, both past and present; second, it attempts to uncover the textual ideologies encoded in the novelistic representation of one definitive moment in the history of contemporary India, the Naxalbari uprising of the 197Os. This study, will, I hope, encourage another look at Mukherjee's place in the canons of "postcolonial" literatures. In their undoubtedly challenging task of defining this category, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin point to the narrativizing ofdisplacement-geographic, cultural, lingUistic-as "a major feature ofpostcolonialliterature ."6 So described, the emergent canon of "postcolonial" writing would certainly absorb Bharati Mukherjee's fiction, which overwhelmingly thematizes the postwar phenomenon of transcontinental migrations from the 286 Indrani Mitra former colonies to the metropolitan centers ofthe West and...