T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

with the new. And this means absorbing whole-hearted theessence of his or her new country. n~ like to say that"observes MukherjeeI'm re-inventing the American Landscape and I'm repossessingthe American language, making it my owninstead of slavishly copying it. I write aboutstates of feelings or moral dilemmas that strike avery clear chord in me. They are not me, they arenot autobiographical but, like Flaubert inthey are alternate selves of mine. Middlemanfor example, is set in a ranch in Costa Rica where Ispent several months. So I'm writing not necessarilyabout real people but about those ghettos and thatgeography that I feel a real part of. (Quoted inPate1 1989,291In Darkness, Mukherjee drew her characters from many sub-continental classes and religions. There is a Pakistani Muslimengineer and his wife, a Maharaja, illegal restaurant workersfrom God knows where. In ThP Middleman, she goes even further,gathering protagonists from all over the globe; sometimes sheleaves out the Indlans altogether. Her wrlting has a newtoughness generated by compasslon-the violence both moreexplicit and more to the point. It's a departure, and a measureof her confidence.Mukherjee's latest novel Jasmine reinforces her own viewson cultural sublimation from expatriate to lmmigrant. WithMiddleman and Jasmine Mukherjee has stuck to the Eurocentricghetto of American mlnorlty literature. The exotica of theIndian llngo has just graduated into the American experience.