T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

Asrans and Westerners. Her writings show her aa a perceptiveand compassionate narrator of expatriate experience. RoshniRustomji-Kerns feels "Bharati Mukherjee can take her placeamong the best South-Asian and American writers of today. Herwork ranges from very good to dazzling" (1988,659). Carefullyconstructed places of residence, houses, hotels, hostels andashrams; places which are alive wlth busy families, placeswhlch have fallen In ruin or places whlch are in the process ofbelng built, flgure prominently In the works of these womenwrlters. Apart from belng backdrops for thelr narratives, theyare lntegral parts of the South-Asian protagonists' llves asthey seek refuge from the assaults by different cultures. Theseplay thelr part In the struggle to understand their culturaldilemmas.Bharati Mukherjee 1s even considered as a descendant ofSantha Rama Rao as both women came from an economicallyprlvlleged class. Although both of them often speak aboutHlndulsm and the complexities of Indian culture, theirdiscussions tend to have the aura of Intellectual exercises.Muhherlee is ambivalent about her North Amerlcan experience.Outraged by raclsm In Canada where she lived with ClarkBlaise, her Cancdlan husband, she flnds Amerlca a 'havenf.Stlll she wants tc, be seen "as an Amerlcan writer in thetradition of other hmerlcan wrlters whose parents or grand