Mukherjee’s Diasporic Vision

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee is a foundational figure in Indian diasporic writing, articulating a specific trajectory of change—immigrant longing breaking open into engaged assimilation. Her novels follow the fluid selves of women negotiating to make sense out of the ambivalences of migration, cultural displacement, and gendered dislocation. This section discusses Mukherjee's diasporic imagination along five axes: her own emigrant history and its impact upon her fiction; the ideology of shift from mourning to rediscovery; her position in Indian-American and feminist discourse; the political and aesthetic tactics which locate her as a literary resister; and lastly, thematic description of her chosen novels—Jasmine, Desirable Daughters, and The Tree Bride. Together, these components illustrate Mukherjee's subtle construction of postcolonial identity, where diasporic life is not loss of home but a site of revolutionary redefinition.