Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati ...

After moving from her native Calcutta (for the second time) to the United States to earn an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in comparative literature, she then moved to Canada and forged a career in writing short stories and novels as well as in teaching as a professor of literature. Explicitly added to the mix of her Indian heritage and her new adopted identities as citizen of both Canada and the United States is an important questioning of the place of gender in the post-colonial situation and at the core of identity politics. In much of her writing, Mukherjee filters her relationship to her identity (an identity that is dislocated and disrupted by her exile) through the further prism of gender—a prism that both further disrupts static notions of identity and can also be seen as a means of bridging the different ethnic poles of that identity, bringing into close contact cultures previously considered completely separated.

In her earlier works, particularly Wife (1975) and the short stories in Darkness (1985), Mukherjee’s central theme was an investigation of the damaging effects that ethnic and gender violence can have on those who express an identity of difference in a society that will accept no such individuality. To some extent, this certainly must have grown from her experience of living in Canada when, even as a professor, she felt an overt racist and sexist prejudice working against her. The outlook of Wife and Darkness is markedly different from that of her two later novels, Jasmine (1989) and The Holder of the World (1993). While in no way mitigating the violence that is so often directed at female immigrants (such as that depicted in Jasmine, where the narrator, who has recently arrived in the United States, is brutally raped), these later novels no longer embody the immigrant figure as primarily the victimized character. They instead present a version of the exile’s ability to intervene, create agency, and take positive action. In Jasmine and The Holder of the World, the difference that the characters represent is not only the reason why the world is violent toward them; it is also the very thing that allows those characters to change their situations and the worlds they live in. Mukherjee shows the ability of the exiles to shape the worlds they encounter in a positive and nonviolent manner, seizing and using the very tools of their oppression.