ABSTRACT
Days and Nights in Calcutta is created at the intersection of cultures, of postcolonial and "free" worlds, of "tradition" and "modernity", of East and West. Unlike the confessional mode of traditional autobiography, Days and Nights occupies the indeterminate area between self-portraiture and journalistic reportage, between autobiography and ethnography, between self-writing and cultural anamnesis. Curiously, however, while Days and Nights derives its power by allowing the collective voices of Calcutta women to take over the narrative, it is its very selectivity noticeably marked with the absence of the tradition of Shakti (female power) that denies the reader a complete picture of Indian women's experiences. The shifting center of Mukherjee's narrative among the myriad characters provides an apt locus for her material, which is the shifting cultural values regarding the woman's subject position in Indian society. Indian women's experiences, as Mukherjee perceives them, seem to adhere to the ambiguous nature of Hinduism.
