ABSTRACT
Bharati Mukherjee's early novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, explore the conditions of being an Indian expatriate and being an American immigrant. The years between The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, and Darkness mark a change in the inner world of Bharati Mukherjee and her consciousness. The stories in Darkness are a celebration of change from "aloofness of expatriation" to the "exuberance of immigration". The dynamic of this growth is present in The Tiger's Daughter and Wife. In both these novels the author's voice is omniscient and irony her strategy. However, they are not written to imply, as Jasbir Jain says, "total rejection or a ruthless questioning of tradition or a love-hate relationship with the native heritage". Mukherjee's Indian critics are continually excoriating her for her "expatriate sensibility", a phrase first used against V. S. Naipaul, and her "incomplete decolonization". Bharati Mukherjee, in refusing to state what it is, invites a reader response in decoding the vision.
