T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

their adult lives as hmerican novelists who happened to beJewish.Women have become pastmasters in story telling, thelullaby, songs of love, grief, gossip around the rural well orurban tap, the long chat on the telephone-all approximations ofthe narratlve lmpulse and its normative and sociologicalfunction. confident in culture rootedness, shorn of superficialgender ~~nfli~t, women must learn to storm the heart taken onafter Tolstoy, Dostoyesky and Scheherzade. And BharatiMukheriee has done precisely just that - stormlng the heart ofthe readers !particularly Amerlcans), confidently, minus thegender factor. Wlth wlt and compassion, she has projected heralter-ego In the many characters of her works. She has theabllity to be two things at the same tlme: to be the"dispossessed as well as the drspossessor". With " history-mandated tralnlng", she views the fluld set of identitiesdenled to most of her mainstream American counterparts. Thistraining rn the ethnic and gender fractured world ofcontemporary Amerlcan fiction allows her to "enter" all sortsof llves wlthou:much dlfflculty. And this was what mademainstream R,erlca turn towards Mukher]eels wrltlngs. Americafourld the nat.~vc, flagour of her lmmlgrant characters mix andbl~rld wlth ~ t s OWL c~~lture and llfe. Story after story, theyrellshrd-because lt suited their fancy, taste, and pace. No