ABSTRACT
Bharati Mukherjee explores the predicament of immigrants revisiting their places of origin most vividly in the novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, and in her nonfictional work co-authored with Clark Blaise, Days and Nights in Calcutta. This chapter depicts how in both Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Tiger’s Daughter, revisiting Calcutta shatters Mukherjee’s and her protagonist Tara’s illusion of a paradisal homeland and drives both of them to embrace the Western society and culture in the absence of a valid option. In India, both Mukherjee and Tara find it challenging to adjust to their friends and family and their native culture. Ironically, despite their affinities for India, both Mukherjee’s and Tara’s acquired American-self recoils from the poverty and squalor they see all around in their hometown Calcutta. Tara is particularly outraged by the social disorder that has overtaken Calcutta in the grip of a Naxalite uprising. Whereas in The Tiger’s Daughter, Tara wakes up to the reality that the city’s culture and history are vanishing, thanks to the frequent riots, curfew calls, and bonfires of effigies, buses, and trams, in Days and Nights in Calcutta, Mukherjee presents Calcutta as a decaying city owing to class conflicts, political violence, economic stagnation, disease, and overpopulation.
