T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

he reaches the United States of AmerlcaBharatl Mukherjee's cholce of subject makes a lot ofsense lf for no other reason than it is virgin territory.Whether it is Alfie Judah in 'The Mlddlemanc, panna hat inWife's Story', Jasmine, the Illegal Carribean immigrant, MayaSanyal, the rootless Indian who 1s a naturallsed cltizen InAmerica - these and the other remarkable characters who peoplethe eleven stories In the ColleCtlOn - wlthout any hesitationor doubt transgress and demand and secure the reader'sattention. She herself 1s one of them and as such she isunlquely placed to write about the new American. Mukher~ee hasexpressed her views In an artlcle In New York Tlmes BookThey have all shed past llves and languages and havetravelled half the world in every direction to comehere and begln again. They're bursting with stories,too many to begin telling. They've llved throughcenturies of history in a single llfe-time--villageborn, colonized, traditionally raised, educated.What they've assimilated in thlrty years has takenthe West ten tlmes that number of years to create.(Quoted In Davldar 1385.5)Though the materlal Mukherjee uses is new, she belongs to theclan of first and second generation immigrant writers like-Tlmothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Russel Banks, who arediscovering that to write about people like themselves makessense. David Davldar 1s of the oplnlon that: