The Tiger’s Daughter by Bharti Mukherjee | Chracters, Summary, Analysis

Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Bharti Mukherjee was an Indian-born American-Canadian writer who was born on July 27 1940 into a Hindu-Bengali Brahmin family of Calcutta. Her father was a businessman during the British Raj. During her childhood, she visited Europe for a tour with her family and after completing her graduation from the University of Calcutta, she went to the U.S. for higher studies at the University of Iowa. Her first novel was The Tiger’s Daughter which though is a fictional story, resembles much of her own life story. The Tiger’s Daughter was published in 1971. In 1977, Bharti Mukherjee and her husband Clark Blaise published an autobiographical memoir titled “Days and Nights in Calcutta” in which Bharti mentioned her issues and problems as an expatriate Indian who returned to India after many years in Canada and the U.S. In that memoir, Bharti explained why her life in the U.S. is much better and how she now doesn’t like the Indian society and culture which she used to love and miss during her days in America. During her one-year sabbatical leave in 1973 that she spent in India with her husband, Bharti realized that India is infested with a denuded tradition of poverty, squalor, and turbulence. She noticed her issues with the patriarchial family system in her own house and ultimately, she decided to return to the U.S. for her own good.

Similar is the storyline of The Tiger’s Daughter. The main theme of the novel is how an Indian immigrant finds him or herself divided between their native cultural roots and the new cultural ties and habits they have developed in their new world. Bharti Mukherjee asserts that the immigrants who move to America come with the belief that they will have a fair chance to better their lives, as there are ample opportunities if one is willing to work hard. 

Characters of The Tiger’s Daughter:

Tara Banerjee Cartwright is the main character of the novel. Tara is an Indian girl who was born into a wealthy Bengali Brahmin Family. Her great-grandfather was Harilal Banerjee who was a successful entrepreneur during the British Raj and made a vast fortune. Her father is known as the Bengal Tiger because of his temperament. He owns the famous Banerjee and Thomas (Tobacco) Co. Ltd. Though Tara was born in British India, she got the finest education in a convent school, and she spent her holidays in Europe. At 15, Tara is sent to America for higher studies. In the U.S. she faces difficulties because of racism but her experiences with the Belgian nuns of her convent school help her in adjusting to the new circumstances to a certain extent. In the U.S., Tara accidentally meets David Cartwright and falls in love with him. The two get married and start living together. However, Tara still misses her childhood days in India and despite being married to a native white man and being in love with him, she feels alien in the U.S. After seven years of their marriage, she decides to go back to India. However, she finds that her relatives in India find her too much ‘Westernized.’ She fails to assimilate with her own family members who are still traditional and decides to go back to her husband in the U.S. as she discovers that she is no more an Indian but a naturalized American.

Summary of The Tiger’s Daughter:

Tara Banerjee is a young Indian girl belonging to an upper-rich class Bengali Brahmin family. She is the only girl in her home and thus, she is being pampered by her parents. Her father is a well-known rich and successful businessman in the city of Calcutta whom people often call the Bengal Tiger. Tara enjoys all perks of being rich and is admitted to a posh convent school where she learns the Western culture and ways with the help of the Belgian nuns of her school. The Belgian nuns had taught her to inject the correct quantity of venom into words like ‘common’ and ‘vulgar.’ For Tara –the daughter of affluent, Bengali Brahmin parents,  the ‘foreignness’ began to a great degree with her privileged Catholic education at St Blaise’s, with Belgian nuns in ‘long black habits’ who taught from a point of racial and moral pre-eminence and with teaching resources from the West.

Being a young child, susceptible to impersonation, Tara starts liking the Western ideas and ways while criticizing the Indian culture and ethos. Yet, her mother is a traditional Hindu housewife who regularly performs Puja and rituals at her home and Tara is learning that too. At the tender age of fifteen, her father sends Tara to the U.S. for higher studies. Tara is not comfortable in her University hostel room in the U.S. She feels alone and alienated when nobody is like her. She faces racial discrimination and within a week, she wants to return home but that is not possible and thus, she tries to adjust to the demands of a different world. Her convent education and the teachings of the Belgian nuns at St. Blaise School in Calcutta helps her during this process. However, she roots in her Indianness and experience and to cherish it, she vehemently takes out all her red silk scarves and hangs them around to give the apartment a more Indian look. She tries to create a Hindu temple in her apartment and starts worshipping Maa Kali every day for strength so that she would not break down before the Americans. Time passes, and despite all the discrimination and alienation she faces in America, she develops some friendly relationships at her University. Gradually her thinking and psyche start accepting American ways.

One day, during an educational tour, she visits the Greyhound bus station (at Madison), and in her anxiety to find a cab, she almost knocked down a young man. This young man is David Cartwright. They develop a rapport and gradually they start loving each other. Tara decides to marry the man and becomes his wife. She informs her family after her marriage. For some months, Tara enjoys her new life as the wife of an American man. She feels she is not alienated anymore and she is a naturalized American. Still, her Indianness keeps reminding her of the good old days of her childhood. To preserve her nativeness she continues to retain her maiden surname after her marriage. Her husband too asks her about her life and family in India and she finds it difficult to explain her cultural roots to him. Gradually, it becomes a burden to her and she decides to return to India.

After seven years, Tara returns to India and is received by her relatives. They greet her by her childhood nickname Tultul to which she gets offended. She now perceives every Indian thing with the eyes of an American. The railway station looks like a hospital with so many sick and deformed men sitting on the bundles and trunks. In the compartment, she finds it difficult to travel with a Marwari and a Nepali. Now she considers America a dreamland. When surrounded by her relatives and vendors at the Howrah railway station Tara feels uncomfortable. She likely hates everyone and everything in India where she was born, brought up and taught many values, all because of her acculturation in America. At her home too, she feels the same alienation that she used to feel during her early days in America. Her mother still continues to follow her daily spiritual rituals. Tara tries to assimilate with her family by entering the house temple and participating in the rituals. Tara feels that she has forgotten many of her Hindu rituals of worshipping icons she had seen her mother performing since her childhood. She is convinced of her alienation when she forgets the next steps of the ritual after the sandalwood paste had been grounded “It was not a simple loss, Tara feared, this forgetting of prescribed actions; it was a little death, a hardening of the heart, a cracking of axis and center.” Her mother is also offended by the fact that Tara married without her family’s consent to an American whom Tara’s mother and all her relatives call Mlechcha. Tara had willfully abandoned her caste by marrying a foreigner. Perhaps her mother was offended that she, no longer a real Brahmin, nor a Hindu, was constantly in and out of this sacred room, dipping like a crow and polluting it. Her relatives follow their general Indian ways and Tara would find ills in them and will voice her opinions. This started offending her relatives too who felt that Americanization has made Tara arrogant. Tara suffers alienation too much and decides to go and stay at a hotel with her friends. However, she gets embroiled in a local riot. The riotous and destructive mob outside the Catelli-Continental hotel is merciless. Jittery, shivery, and encased within a car surrounded by ruthless humanity, Tara feels the vulnerability of mortals. In those nervous moments, she realizes that her reconciliation and assimilation with her Indian roots are meaningless. She finds nothing loveable and appreciable in India which is marred with poverty, diseases, hunger, patriarchal oppression, and communal riots. Thus, she decides to return back to David, her husband in America.

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