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Encounters between the East and the West in Bharati Mukherjee’s the Middleman and Other Stories

By

Dr. Elangbam Hemanta Singh

Department of English

Ideal Girls’ College, Imphal, Manipur University (India)

E-Mail: dr.ehemanta@yahoo.com

(M) 09856253448

Postal Address:

Dr. Elangbam Hemanta Singh

Nagamapal Lamabam Leikai,

Near: Sangai Hotel / Vision IAS Study Circle

Imphal-West: 795004

Manipur, India

E-Mail: dr.ehemanta@yahoo.com

(M) 09856253448

Abstract:

The present paper attempts to explore how Bharati Mukherjee acts as a “middleman” between the East (India) and the West (America), the minority and the mainstream? Her works focus on the phenomenon of migration, the status of new immigrants, and the feeling of alienation as well as on Indian women and their struggle. Although an award-winning Indian born American writer, she is affiliating herself with the America because she sees herself as being primarily influenced by the tradition of Euro-American writers. In this paper, I have chosen “A Wife’s Story” to analyse her exploration of the bicultural alternation and the solution she chooses—to break free of the double consciousness and reconcile these conflicting halves in order to become a single, unified self.

Key words : “A Wife’s Story,” double consciousness, middleman, women’s role and bicultural alternation.

The present paper attempts to explore how Bharati Mukherjee acts as a “middleman” between the East (India) and the West (America), the minority and the mainstream? Her works focus on the phenomenon of migration, the status of new immigrants, and the feeling of alienation as well as on Indian women and their struggle. Although an award-winning Indian born American writer, she is affiliating herself with the America and not a South Asian American writer because she sees herself as being primarily influenced by the tradition of Euro-American writers. In this regard, she commented in a televised interview with Bill Moyers: “I feel very American... I knew the moment I landed as a student in 1961...that this is where I belonged. It was an instant kind of love” (Moyers, 1990). In the light of Mukherjee’s vision of America, Peter Nazareth said that Mukherjee wants to be identified herself with the “America that embraces all the peoples of the world both because America is involved with the whole world and because the whole world is in America’’ (Nazareth, 1986: 185). In the 1989 interview with Amanda Meer, Mukherjee said:

"I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America” (Meer, 1989).

And that element one can notice in most of the works by Bharati Mukherjee. I have chosen one of the stories entitled “A Wife’s Story” from The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) for this paper to analyse her exploration of the bicultural alternation and the solution she chooses—to break free of the double consciousness and reconcile these conflicting halves in order to become a single, unified self. As far as encounters between cultures are concerned, one can find in her earlier works namely, Tiger’s Daughter (1971), Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), and her later work, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) . These conflicts are between women and men either of different root cultures or from the same root culture. The stories from this collection explore the meeting of East and West through immigrant experiences in America and Canada along with the ideas of the great melting pot of culture in the United States. According to Fakrul Alam’s view about Bharati Mukherjee, these immigrants “are seen to be emerging from shadowy or marginal lives and putting out feelers to root themselves in a brave new world” (15). Therefore, the theme of the “middleman” is significant both in terms of Mukherjee’s concern with the voice of immigrant in America and in terms of her cultural identity.

As far as bicultural alternation is concerned, one can notice in Mukherjee’s first person narratives. These activities are presented to the reader from the perspective of one character in the story, for instance, Panna is in “A Wife’s Story.” Her main concern with immigrant Americans struggling is to make feel a sense of self and a sense of cultural identity within their new environment. In “A Wife’s Story,” Mukherjee develops the idea of mixing the East and West with a story of a young Hindu woman, Panna Bhatt, who leaves India for a PhD in Education in America. Unlike Jasmine (1989) where the unity between the East and the West is shown in the treatment of women as subordinate in both countries—this story focuses on Panna as an immigrant woman and her freedom from marital relationships to become an individual. Then, how does Mukherjee act as a ‘middleman’ between the third world and the first world, and so on? To give these answers the analysis of “A Wife’s Story” will focus on her exploration of this bicultural alternation and the solution she chooses. The crafting of the story as a literary work in the tradition of American literature keeping in mind the concepts of racism and multiculturalism Mukherjee comments on the concepts of encounters between women and men.

As the story begins, Panna Bhatt, the woman narrator, has left India to “get a PhD in special ed” (29) in Manhattan where she, as soon as, comes into contact with she develops a process of adopting the cultural persona or social patterns of the American group. However, her double consciousness is seen throughout the story. She, on the one hand, wants to belong to the New Yorkers and, on the other hand, be distinct from them. Interestingly, she respects Indian traditions and highlights ridiculousness of New York society but, at the same time she is also appreciative of the openness of American society. In addition, she wants to “pretend that nothing has changed” (40), although the cultural gap between her and her estranged husband widens more and more. Apart from this, ambivalent themes such as submissive vs. rebellious woman, traditional roles and the desire for self development due to education and other aspects interlink each other. In spite of Panna as a newcomer to America, comes from a rigid Indian society and struggles with cultural transformation, she manages successfully in the end.

The story also contains some of the echoes—the memory and nostalgia for the landscape of places and people of Mukherjee’s childhood is often juxtaposed with the excitement and challenge of Panna’s new life and her unfamiliar landscape of the people and places of America. It is interesting to investigate how Mukherjee uses these two strands in this story bringing one or the other—memory or the excitement of uniqueness—into the centre to present her characters and to build the spherical, winding pattern of her story. Past and present stories intermingle in Panna’s story by mixing their culturally different threads to get a new, culturally balanced carpet, on which she can walk confidently and self-reliantly:

In the back of the cab, without even trying, I feel light, almost free. Memories of Indian destitutes mix with the hordes of New York street people, and they float free, like astronauts, inside my head. I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life… (28-29).

The story begins with Panna watching a play by David Mamet with the Hungarian Imre, insulting Indian men and women. The play, Glengarry Glen Ross, features Patel-jokes: “They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room, stash their savings under futons in Queens, and before you know it they own half of Hoboken” (25). Although the stereotypes slightly offend the narrator, her ultimate decision to break the silence is inspired by the sexualised insult on Indian femininity, “ Seen their women? ... They look like they’ve just been fucked by a dead cat” (25-26). Then, she directly fires her subtle anger at the man sitting next to her. Laughing at the joke, the man has nudged her elbow off their shared armrest: “‘Excuse me,’ I say. My voice has the effortless meanness of well-bred displaced Third World women, though my rhetoric has been learned elsewhere. “You’re exploiting my space...”” (27); in the same night, she has another moment of audacity: “I’ll write Mamet tonight. I feel strong, reckless. Maybe I’ll write Steven Spielberg too; tell them that Indians don’t eat monkey brains’’ (29). The thought-chain leading to her sense of entitlement to dignity involves drawing parallels to frontiers where the East meets the West; while she blames postcolonialism for making her their refugee. She knows how “both sides feel…postcolonialism has made me their referee” (27). However, in a detached manner, she blames the situation, not herself, for the ‘trouble’ of understanding both sides. At this point, one may feel the notion of double consciousness. It is defined as a process of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. To do that, one has to be aware of oneself as well as how others perceive that self. Having these two halves is problematic because the person is forced to persistently see one through the eyes of others. Panna, at the beginning of the theatre play is aware of her Indianness, a feature that cannot pass invisible:

“The theatre isn’t so dark that they can’t see me. In my red silk sari I’m conspicuous…we’re sitting in the front row, but at the edge, and we see things we shouldn’t be seeing” (25).

The double consciousness is, thus, on the one hand, an internal struggle to reconcile a mental split between one’s identity—East vs. West as being both Indian and American. The goal is, on the other hand, to break free of the double consciousness and reconcile these conflicting halves, once again becoming a single, unified self. On another occasion, as Panna, the narrator engages in reflections between her identity as an Indian woman and ethnic stereotypes she encounters in America. When her husband calls, her name is mispronounced by the operator as ‘Mrs. Butt’, a target of jokes. She spells her name, letter by letter, trying to correct the operator with references to India: “‘Bhatt,’ I insist. ‘B’ for Bombay, H for Haryana, A for Ahmadabad, doubles T for Tamil Nadu. It’s a litany” (31).

The story ends with Panna waiting for her husband, who is leaving back for India the next morning without her, to make love to her: “The water is running in the bathroom. In the ten days he has been here he has learned American rites: deodorants, fragrances (40).” Earlier, she has described his longing for her as she would approach him with the perfume of sandalwood soap on her body and flowers in her hair. Now she is prepared to “… make up to him for [her] years away (40).”

As Panna ends her narrative with “I am free, afloat, watching somebody else (40).” One hears echoes of Mukherjee’s statement about America being a place where one can become a ‘new person’ and invent a whole new history for oneself. Panna rejoices in her beautiful body and her freedom, while we are haunted by the questions of the price and texture of her freedom. For instances, has she repelled the insults of the first part of the story towards her husband or towards a deeply buried area within herself? In playing the tourist guide to her husband has she forgotten the insult or accepted the explanation that insults are America’s way of accepting the other, the alien? Anyway, one can find the story’s ending as Panna performing a version of her old identity, while enjoying her new sense of erotic autonomy. The ambivalence of the story comes from the fact that while promoting the utopian narrative of America as a site of liberation, it resists the closure of romance and shows the underside of America by the racism experienced by the protagonist. The epiphany with Panna’s erotic autonomy is counter-hegemonic in the sense that it resists the dominant narratives of nation; Panna refuses to be colonized by the patriarchal system.

“A Wife’s Story,” like many of other stories by Mukherjee, leaves the narrative unresolved and open for discussion: “I long, at times, for clear-cut answers (26).” It also raises important questions about the forging of cultural, national, and sexual alliances in America that glorifies individual freedom and urges the loss of a racial and ethnic minority that is not Eurocentric. Mukherjee faces difficulty to tell between her own identity, which imposed certain cultural standards and her socially constructed self. She acts as a ‘middleman’, an intermediary between the two cultures; in her role of a facilitator, the most frequent words she uses are to train (old) and to adapt (new); “I’ve been trained to adapt” (36) clearly indicates her successful blending of the East and the West.

Apart from this, because of various direct and indirect references to the notion of the American Dream of the second half of the twentieth century, “A Wife’s Story” presents an in-depth discussion of the ideology, which has been often ascribed to the American system of social and personal values. The ideology of the American Dream involves different issues related to American history, the development of the American society and national and personal identity. The discussion and analysis of the American Dream includes different approaches. The historical approach analyzed by Frederic I. Carpenter associates the beginning of the ideology with an essence of a dream and its localization: “the discovery of the new world [America] gave substance to the old myth, and suggested the realization of it on actual earth” (Carpenter, 1955: 5). As the new continent offered the fulfillment of hopes, the definition of a dream has been attached to various issues: from freedom in the colonial America to the prosperity and personal achievement nowadays. This phenomenon, existing through the periods of the American civilization, in 1931, as Carpenter “was described specifically as ‘the American Dream’ - that dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank” (Carpenter, 1955: 1). Thus, the United States of America became associated with the vision of fulfilling one’s hopes and ideas and this concept existed in different nations worldwide.

At this juncture, Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story” serves as an autobiographical projection of her dream representing the ideology known as the American Dream. The track of developing Panna’s self reliance is visible along the story. To this we can add Panna, the narrator, self-reliant, independent, acculturated wife who has the freedom to go out, roam around and decide her future in a new world:

I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life. I’ve left home, my husband to get a Ph.D. in special ed. I have a multiple-entry visa and a small scholarship for two years. After that, we’ll see (29)

I can’t go back (39)

...the degree I’ll never use in India...pretend with him that nothing has changed...I am free, afloat (40).

Until Mukherjee married Clark Blaise, an American of Canadian origin, she saw herself as an Indian foreign student who intended to return to India to live. Before that, she was immersed in her Indian history and culture. She had no identity before starting her struggle with identity, for cultural assimilation and acceptance as a South Asian. Reconciling her contemporary Western social values with her traditional Indian beliefs required a familiar environment which rejects her taxation of marginalization and otherization suggested by the use of hyphenation when discussing her origin. That is why she chooses to describe herself as American rather than as an Asian- American. However, the essay called “The American Dreamer (1997)” by Mukherjee describing her dream is not only American, but bicultural, i.e. Asian American. She is aware of the Japanese American Dream, maybe that is one of the reasons she resents David Mamet’s play about the American Dream: “It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me. First, you don’t exist. Then, you’re invisible. Then you’re funny. Then you’re disgusting” (26). She knows that “Insult … is a kind of acceptance” (26). Yet, she seems to accept the situation and adapt to it, as long as it provides her with “more privacy than [she] ever had in India” (33). Her ‘acceptance’, however, has ‘dignity’ in it which makes her feel “strong, reckless” (29), which results in the mild irony she uses whenever she compares the two cultures: “No instant dignity here… Offer me instant dignity, today, and I’ll take it” (26); “tell him that Indians don’t eat monkey brains” (29).

Thus, we cannot speak about a conflict between the minority and the mainstream. America is simply the chance offered to both Panna and her husband to make full use of both cultures—the Third World (India) and the First World (America). This biculturalism refuses marginalization. Therefore, she belongs to both the minority and the mainstream. But, this biculturalism has also a different effect on husband and wife. While Panna’s husband superficially compares the benefits offered by the Western World such as, microwave, Western-executive glasses, Perdue hens, etc, or does things—shopping, waters the pavement, etc which he has never done in India—which do not lead to his transformation, Panna fills herself with the new American tradition; she wants to be part of it, but only on condition she adds it to her Indian tradition. In the same way, we can say that Panna’s name according to Buddhist philosophy meaning “wisdom,” i.e. new, acculturation adds to her family name Bhatt (a last name that is common in many ethnicities in India, meaning “priest”, i.e. rules, tradition, enculturation). Bharati, just like Panna, her narrative voice, a “transient with conflicting loyalties to two very different cultures” echoes her resolution to the conflict in her famous essay “The American Dreamer” (1997):

But America’s complexion is changing and Americans are beginning to see it for themselves. And what is really wonderful is that this is a two-way transformation … As a writer, my literary agenda begins my acknowledging that America has transformed me but it does not end until I show that I (along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute transforming America. That is how this two-way process: it affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity (Mukherjee, 1997).

The solution Mukherjee chooses to this bicultural alternation—the East (India) and the West (America) is given in the same article “The American Dreamer” where she speaks about her ‘new immigrant’ literature as a gain, and not a loss: “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss, the loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as gain” (Ibid).

In conclusion, one can observe that the story discusses the redefinition of identity and desired attributes of femininity in several ways. Like Mukherjee, Panna the protagonist has come to New York on her own. Seeking an education and independent existence abroad are decisions which uproot her “inherited notions of marital duty” (32) from a fixed identity of a traditional Hindu wife. It also establishes in the story the distinction between free love and arranged marriage, but the opposition is also questioned: “This has to be love, I think. Charity, Eric, Phil: they may be experts on sex. My husband doesn’t chase me around the sofa, but he pushes me down on Charity’s battered cushions...” (35). At the end of the story, her husband has to return to India to solve the problem at his factory while Panna celebrates her transformation / new identity by watching at the mirror, “I am free, afloat, watching somebody else” (40).

Works Cited:

Alam, Fakrul. 1996. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Carpenter, F. I. 1955. American Literature and the Dream. New York: Philosophical Library. Available: http://www.questia.com/library/literature/literary-themes-and topics/american-dream-in-literature.jsp [Accessed 26/11/2014; 12:14pm].

Meer, Amanda. 1989. http://bombsite.com/issues/29/articles/1264 [Accessed 21/11/2014; 2:19 PM].

Moyers, Bill. 1990. Bill Moyers: a World of Ideas II. New York: Doubleday [Online]. Available:college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/contemporary/mukherjee_bh.html [Accessed 26/11/2014].

Mukherjee, Bharati. 1988. The Middleman and Other Stories. Grove Press: New York.

Mukherjee, Bharati. 1997. http:// www.motherjones.com/politics/1997/01/american-dreamer [Accessed 22/11/2014; 12:44 PM].

Nazareth, Peter. 1986. “Total Vision” in Canadian Literature 110 (1986): 184-91.