ABSTRACT
The notion of escaping from one’s homeland and finding oneself estranged in the adopted land – are central to diasporic discourse. These issues are explored by the renowned author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in most of her fiction. This paper would engage with the novels Before We Visit The Goddess and The Vine Of Desire as an attempt to explore how the characters are seduced by different dreams when they decide to step outside the comfort zone of their homelands but nevertheless are unable to liberate themselves from the invisible geographical as well as personal shackles. and as a result face estrangement in their adopted land. These novels highlight the fortunes and adversities faced by these characters and vividly describe their plight as they are caught between the imaginary past and runaway future.
Keywords: estrangement, escapism, diasporic discourse, and dreams
Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we are fascinated by the steadfastness of the stars ? (Divakaruni, Goddess 68)
Labelled by The Economic Times (2016) as one among “the twenty most influential global Indian women”, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni states in an interview given to The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center that most of her contemporary work is based on “moving back and forth between India and America, exploring both of the cultures, and the ways in which they are both changing”.
Most of her characters seem to be getting lured to migrate to greener pastures in the hope of a better life but ultimately find themselves in a conundrum of estrangement and severance. This paper professes to look into how this movement towards advancement and modernity in the long run does more harm than good and extracts a very high cost from the migrant community.
Divakaruni’s much acclaimed novel Before We Visit the Goddess is an intergenerational saga about love and longing that traverses across continents giving us a slice-of-life experience from rural Bengal to the urban elitist families. The novel-in-stories that focuses on three generations of Bengali mothers and daughters who are headstrong, passionate, courageous and mysterious takes us on a journey from a famous sweet shop in Calcutta to a retirement facility in Houston. It begins with Sabitri’s epistolary plea to her US based granddaughter Tara, whom she has never met to pay heed to her advice and take the right decisions in her life. Through the letter the readers get an insight into Sabitri’s own life –her over vaulting ambitions, her shattered dreams, her doomed love affair, her guts and indomitable spirit. When Sabitri leaves her mother and village to study and reside in the Mitrs mansion, she feels that she is headed towards the realization of her academic goals and when she embarks on an affair with the rich and handsome and much-above-her station Mitr heir, she succumbs to the temptation of believing that she’s meant for higher things. When she incurs the wrath of the wealthy family and gets her hands burnt due to class divisions, she learns her first lesson – that without education or a strong family support system, a lone woman’s position in society is very precarious. But as she gets married to a reasonably well off young man, she again falls prey to a different kind of temptation, namely to help her not-so-ambitious husband Bijan get promoted to the highest post he was capable of in order to later show him off as a trophy husband to the Mitr family. She confesses to Tara in the letter, “Once again I had been seduced by a different dream” (Divakaruni, Goddess 23). Her inner dilemma when she realises that she is going to take advantage of his gullibility is depicted quite elaborately as she confesses to Tara, “I lifted my face to him and smiled my prettiest, saddest, falsest smile.” (Divakaruni, Goddess 21)
This pattern of uprooting oneself from one’s comfort zone and escaping from love and familial bonds to seek the unknown promised land is repeated in Bela as well as Tara’s life. Bela also is seduced by a dream and so drops out of college, leaves behind her mother, her motherland and arrives in the US with forged papers in hand to start a new life with her husband-to-be Sanjay. Initially she is happy at experiencing anonymity and is enticed by the modern culture as she expresses her joy at the airport, “ She threw her arms around him the way she never could have done in Kolkata and kissed him on the mouth. No one catcalled. No one harassed them or took umbrage or even noticed.” (Divakaruni, Goddess 92)
Later, when the euphoria subsides she realizes that the quality of life that they could have easily afforded back home in India were not available to them in this part of the world. One day, she almost has a nervous breakdown as she admits to herself, “ She was stuck in a dingy apartment, stuck in a dead-end job she hated, stuck under a load of unpaid loans so heavy that she’d probably never be able to squirm out from under them and go back to college.” (Divakaruni, Goddess 107)
When she had uprooted herself to pursue a better life in a better country she had no idea that her escape would turn into an estrangement from her beloved mother as well as from her roots. The theme of rootlessness and loss of identity is further explored through the character of Tara. Although born and bred in the US, tara is neither fully Americanized nor has she benefitted from any traditional Indian upbringing and values. Estranged from both her divorced parents, dropping out of college, switching boyfriends and jumping from one job to another she seems to be floating around like a rudderless ship, a personality devoid of any core, stable beliefs. It is rightly mentioned by the writer, “She was a puzzle, with her Indian features and Texan boots, her defiant piercings, the skin stretched thin across her cheekbones and crumpled under the eyes. And that spiky hair, now fallen limp as a child’s over her forehead. he had read somewhere that it was style that lesbians affected. What kind of Indian family, even in America, would produce such a hybrid?” (Divakaruni, Goddess 107)
Appiah’s statement regarding rooted cosmopolitanism is notes, “The cosmopolitan patriot can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural peculiarities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people.” (Appiah 120).
Tara, however has no such attachment to her own ‘home’ or ‘homeland’ and is totally clueless about any traditions, customs and rituals related to the Indian culture. Sandra Ponzanesi, in her book Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora states that because of the “separation from tradition and obligations,[immigration ] is not a process devoid of pain and alienation”.
Unbeknownst to herself, Tara actually yearns for a supporting elderly father figure in her life whom she can turn to for guidance and lean on during distress. As is clear in the bonding she develops with Mr. Venkatachalapati, the man she drove around for a few hours with and Mrs. Mehta, the woman whom she is supposed to be house-sitting. But as her father Sanjay ensured that she had a completely Wetsernized upbringing, she grows up being clueless about the rich Indian heritage and cultural background. Her father was so against idol worship that her mother “had to fight him just to set up an altar in the kitchen , where a tiny ten-armed goddess statue shared space with her spices.” Stuart Hall in Cultural Identity and Diaspora, states, “The inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If silences are not resisted, they produce, in Franz fanon’s vivid phrase, ‘individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless – a race of angels’.
Whether it is Sabitri, Bela, Tara from Before We Visit The Goddess or Sudha and Anju from The Vine of Desire, Divakaruni’s women characters are not-so-perfect realistic, strong interesting women. As the author states in an interview to Scroll in 2018, “They don’t have to be good women to be the hero of a story: she just has to be an interesting woman dealing with complex issues.”
Later she stresses that it is important to know our mothers’ and grandmothers’ histories and learn from them, “Because if we don’t learn their histories, sometimes we are doomed to repeat them. That’s why throughout the book there’s this gap in Tara’s life. Part of her problem is she doesn’t have that history.”
In The Vine of Desire, we see the re-kindling of the friendship of the two girls Sudha and Anju. Although they have both escaped from the narrow minded patriarchal set up in their homeland and are now in America, the land of the free and the independent, such independence comes at a cost. Back home in India, Anju’s life used to revolve round her ideas of independent women like the characters of many female novelists but Sudha was the traditional submissive Indian girl. Later Sudha undergoes a traumatic divorce with Ramesh in India and Anju is on the verge of depression due to her recent miscarriage. To seek a better life for herself and her daughter and also to help Anju regain her lost strength and zest for life, Sudha decides to go to the United States. The soul sisters rekindle their friendship and the deep-seated love they feel for each other provides the support each of them needs. In Sudha and her daughter Dayitya’s company, Anju slowly but surely gets over her depressive state of mind, while for Sudha America opens new doors and becomes the modern liberal land of opportunities as she says, “Live for yourself”…“I’m not sure what it means. I’m not sure I know how to do it and still be a good person. And I want to, you know. I still want to be a good person, even if I’ve failed at being a good wife…Yet I know I can’t go back to the old way, living for others.” (Vine 77)
Though Sudha is enamoured by the open approach at first, she does find it difficult to reconcile it with the traditional Indian cultural values and beliefs. On Anju’s behest to watch T.V in order to understand the Americans better, she is quite scandalized when a woman contestant on one of the shows spontaneously kisses the show host when her name is announced as the winner. As she confides to her daughter Dayitya, this was not appropriate behaviour for a “self-respecting female”. Also as with most of Divakaruni’s characters, Sudha also depicts this dilemma, this yearning to escape from the patriarchal customs and at the same time inability to fully embrace the open American value system. Narrating the famous incident from the epic Ramayana where the goddess Sita steps out of the boundary laid down by her husband Lord Ram thereby unleashing a series of misfortunes onto themselves, Sudha says to her baby girl, “Each of our lives has a magic circle drawn around it, one must not cross. Chaos waits on the other side of the drawn line.” (Vine 80)
Her own awareness of the intense physical attraction between herself and Anju’s husband Sunil makes her estranged in her own sister’s home and finally she decides to run away from home and start afresh. Thus in trying to escape from the shackles of the male dominance and regressive society that threatened to engulf her in India, she finds herself further estranged from all things familiar into unknown territories. Avtar Brah talks about the complexities across these invisible borders and territories, “territories to be patrolled against whom they construct us as outsiders, aliens and the Others; forms of demarcation where the very cut of prohibition inscribes transgression; zones where the fear of the other is the fear of itself, places where claims to ownership, claims to ‘mine’, ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’ – are stated out, contested, defended and fought over.” (Brah 198)
The feeling of estrangement, in the diasporic, their intense longing to be accepted as one with the natives, their amorphous homes mark the beginning of the endless journey of disillusionment and displacement. Divakruni through the story of various characters, indirectly explores the manifest and invisible borders – of class, geography and culture and the dejection that they face while trying to reconcile the past with the runaway future.
Works Cited