ABSTRACT
The present chapter will discuss Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), a non-fictional work written by Bharati Mukherjee in collaboration with her husband Clark Blaise. Written in two parts, each by the two travellers, this travel narrative recounts Mukherjee and her husband’s experiences in her motherland, India, during 1973-1974. Mukherjee’s journey to India occurred at a pivotal moment in the evolution of her national and ethnic identity. Prior to the journey, she straddled two worlds - the outer, official world of the Canadian immigrant and the inner, nostalgic world of an Indian expatriate in exile. Lamenting the loss of her Indian culture and homeland, Mukherjee returned to India to reaffirm her Indian identity. By studying the second part of the narrative, written by Mukherjee, the present chapter will focus on the narrative features of Bharati Mukherjee’s travelogue to examine the construction of identity in the chronotope of her homeland India, to be more precise her hometown Kolkata (then Calcutta). This chapter is an attempt to analyse the cartography of her hybrid identity according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, an aesthetic way of presenting human beings in relation to their temporal and spatial world.
