58
Chapter II
Fusion of Oriental Values with Occidental Ethos in
The Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams
India’s achievement of variety in unity is of world wide
importance.
Indian appreciation of variety is an object lesson of
immense value to the rest of the world.
The perils that beset the
ancient Indian culture are European materialism and the indifference
of Indians to their culture. True happiness in this world is the right
earthly aim of man. It lies in the finding and the maintaining of a
natural harmony of spirit, mind and body which is the basis of Indian
culture.
Culture should serve as the right key to this harmony and
civilization should aid in the manner in which the harmony is brought
out.
A civilization in search of this aim may be materialistic like
western culture or spiritualistic like the culture of India. India’s social
system is built upon dharma -- conscious morality.
India is the
Bharata Shakthi and her fidelity to this spiritual conception has
enabled India in her survival in the human world.
The westernization of the east is a process of cultural exchange
or assimilation.
The cultural change and the cross fertilization of
59
cultures is inevitable. There are a lot of differences between American
and Indian cultures and values. American culture is an amalgam of
different cultures. In the matter of tradition the Americans are in a
fortunate position because they have no ancient culture like the
Indian culture.India, however, has had a long tradition.
Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, a great scholar characterizes the west as
inclined to dogmatism, the scientific method whose domain is limited
to the exploration of the outer world, and a reliance upon
second-hand knowledge (34). India has its own culture and values.
The culture of India is rooted in the ancient Vedic culture of the Indus
Valley civilization. According to Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the east is
dominated
by
openness
to
inner
experience
and
spiritual
experimentation (36).
Dr. S. Radhakrishnan tried to build a bridge between eastern
and western thought showing each to be comprehensible within the
terms of the other.
He introduced western idealism into Indian
philosophy and was the first scholar of importance to produce a
comprehensive
exegesis
of
India’s
religious
and
philosophical
literature to English speaking people. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan has been
held in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the west.
He has been influential in shaping the west’s understanding of
Hinduism, India, and the east.
60
Swami Vivekananda is one of the few stalwarts who brought
about the cultural Renaissance in the nineteenth century India.
His trip to Chicago and the speech at the World Parliament of
Religions proved a landmark in Indian cultural history.
His deep
spiritual insight, fervid eloquence and philanthropic ideas won the
western world. The world began to look upon India in a different light.
In The Foundations of Indian Culture (1992), Sri Aurobindo
examines the Indian civilization and culture (24). Aurobindo brings
out the central motivating tendencies of the Indian culture and
explores how these tendencies are expressed in its religion and
spirituality, its art, literature and politics (47).
Many of the differences between eastern and western cultures
stem from the fact that eastern cultures and values are based on their
religion.
Spirituality has been the essence of one’s life in India.
Hinduism believes in the theory of Karma and Rebirth. It inculcates in
the mind of the Hindus a sense of fear for doing wrong things.
The underlying principles of Hindu religious practices are closely
connected
with
scientific
principles
on
health
and
hygiene.
Smearing of the house, temples and outside with cow dung by the
Hindus keep them away from sickness. Importance is given to early
bath, if possible in the running water.
Hindu practices of Yoga,
Pranayama, Suryanamaskar, and Meditation etc., contribute to the
betterment of body and mind, and in turn to the soul too. The dos
61
and don'ts specified in Hindu culture go a long way in shaping the
mind and body of individuals.
The main difference between the western and eastern cultures
lies in religion, marriage and social interaction. The west is rational
and logical, while the east is predominantly religious and mystical.
The word culture is derived from the French word ‘Cultura’ which
means to cultivate, to till, to grow. Therefore culture is a process of
growth through the means of education, discipline and training.
Western and Indian cultures are diametrically opposed. The reason
for this is that western culture is based on the principles of
materialism, whereas Indian culture is based on the tenets and
principles of spiritualism.
Indian culture has been foregrounded adroitly with negligible
traces of displacement or rootlessness, keeping intact the author’s
Indian sensibility and identity.
The Indian English novel has won
accolades, bringing cultures and interpreting reality from their own
angle of vision.
As early as 1894 in Kamala, a novel which was the first of its
kind, Krupabai Satthianadhan explored the cultural clash suffered by
a Hindu woman with a western education in India.
And the
experience of being caught between two cultures has remained a
prominent theme in the writings by Indian women.
In 1909,
Sarath Kumar Ghose wrote The Prince of Destiny dealing with the
62
inter – cultural theme where the hero, the prince of a native Indian
state, had to choose between the love of an English girl and marriage
with an Indian princess. In the novels written during the Gandhian
era, the dialectics between the east and the west encounter operates
as the conflict between pre-industrial modes of life and mechanization
as in K.S. Venkatramani’s Murugan the Tiller (1927) and in
V.V. Chintamani’s Vedantam, the Clash of Traditions (1928).
Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli (1977) portrays the issues of
traditional
education.
Indian
culture,
particularly
the
debate
on
female
Another example of the western educated female
protagonists’s quest for her cultural roots is Gita Hariharan’s
The Thousand Faces of Night (1992).
The Indian diaspora has witnessed a massive migration of
people of their own volition from the Indian subcontinent to the
metropolitan centres of Europe, America, Canada and Australia.
The diasporic Indians of this group are mostly highly educated
professionals; and because of their professional exigencies, they have
stayed away from their motherland, and in a majority of cases they
have become settlers where once they were only sojourners.
The pace of border-crossing has risen to a new dimension, with
migrants seeking to transfigure cultural boundaries and re-create new
representations of their pasts, their selves, and their new milieus.
Consequently, identities and cultures get delocalized -- but seldom
detached from memories of the past. These diasporic people evoke the
63
past in highly selective modes and build a present that is a hybrid of
multiple cultures and experiences.
All journeys away from home are only journeys towards home.
To some extent the diasporic experience begins with some of our great
freedom fighters, like Jawaharlal Nehru, who also felt that he was an
alien in India and abroad. Writers have often assumed a role in the
development of society by using literature as a platform to invoke
social change.
South Asian diasporic writers have attained official
recognition as part of the American literary tradition.
Some of the
names, which foreground their literary status are Bharathi Mukerjee,
Chitra
Banerjee
Divakaruni,
Meena
Alexander,
Meena
Nair,
Kiran Desai and Jumpa Lahiri. In Diaspora and Multiculturalism
(1998) Ramraj observes that,
Though diasporic writing is about or by peoples who
are linked with common histories of uprooting and
dispersal, it develops different cultural and historical
identities depending on the political and cultural
particularities of the dominant society. (229)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Asian American with her
ancestral roots in Bengal, India. She has transcended boundaries,
negotiating
two
different
worlds
from
various
perspectives.
She attempts to interlace the elements of myth, magic and ancient
culture
alongside
the
contemporary
culture.
The
east-west
64
confrontation, or the clash between tradition and modernity is the
impulse
behind
the
works
of
acclaimed
migrant
writers.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tries to fuse the oriental values with the
occidental ethos.
She often focuses on characters balancing two
worlds, particularly on Indian immigrants’ struggle through life in
America. Most of her works are about the Indian immigrants in the
United States from the author’s native region of Bengal and the stories
are often told by female narrators from the first person point of view.
Living in the United States, Divakaruni becomes more aware of the
differences in culture which urges her to explore it in all its essentials.
Arun
Mukherjee
in
Her
Mother’s
Ashes
(1995)
writes
“people do not leave their histories and cultures behind when they
migrate.
They build on their histories and cultures, taking and
leaving, borrowing and adding on them” (xii). Divakaruni exhibits an
excellent perspective of life between and within the two cultures in her
novels The Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams.
The Mistress of Spices deals with an immigrant woman’s
journey from the established paradigms of the past to an uncharted
future in America. The novel presents the dilemma of negotiating one’s
cultural and biological identity with the drama of alienation and self
transformation in the adopted homeland, America. Queen of Dreams
is another tale of east meeting west.
It talks about the trials,
tribulations and experiences of the Indian American community
through the lives of a Bengali immigrant family. The novel is divided
65
between India and the United States of America, although the entire
story takes place in America.
Divakaruni begins her novel The Mistress of Spices with a
simple, declarative statement, “I am a Mistress of Spices”
(3).
This claim invites the reader to sustain, to find an answer to the
question,
What
is
a
Mistress
of
Spices?.
The
concept
for
The Mistress of Spices grew out of a near-death experience in 1994,
that Divakaruni had after her second pregnancy. Following mishaps
during delivery Divakaruni found herself hospitalized, caught in the
boundary somewhere between life and death for one month. She went
into a meditative state that allowed her to experience a profound
understanding and appreciation for life.
In an interview with Julie Rajan in Dissolving Boundaries
Divakaruni has confessed the truth that, that the art of dissolving
boundaries is what living is about (Aug. 1997). She does not know
how Tilo (Tilotamma) her heroine, the mistress of spices, came to her.
In this novel she has tried to dissolve the divisions between the
realistic world of twentieth-century America and the timeless one of
myth and magic predominant in India. Combining these two worlds,
she is able to create a modern fable.
The protagonist, Tilo, is one who controls and is controlled by a
store filled with Indian spices. The spices are characterized as
“holding magic, even the everyday American spices, but the spices of
66
true power are from the mistress’ birth land” (MS 3). The history of
the protagonist is unique, yet sad. She is born into silence, but can
speak. Her birth is described with bitter remembrance:
They named me Nayan Tara, star of the eye, but my
parents’ faces were heavy with fallen hope at another
girlchild . . . Wrap her in old cloth, lay her face down
on the floor . . . Perhaps that is why the words came
to me so soon . . . Or was it the loneliness, the need
rising angry in a dark girl left to wonder the village
unattended. (MS 8)
Nayan Tara throws herself in, after the investigation of a
magical island of spices. She is one of the lucky few who are accepted
by the Old one, a grand ancient figure who rules over the island.
Nayan Tara, passes through a cleansing, transmogrifying flame,
Shampati’s fire. Then she sets up a haven, a store, from which she
bestows her scholarly yet magical gift of physical and spiritual
healing, through the sale and complimentary distribution of spices.
Before the departure from the island, each apprentice must choose a
new name, one rich in meaning and apt in its appropriateness.
This is not only symbolic of their new identity as mistresses, but in
the case of the protagonist, a new identity in a new world. Nayan Tara
chooses the name Tilotamma.
67
Tilo’s
day
of
departure
is
especially
poignant
for
the
inexperienced mistress who never had a true family. Her background
makes Tilo a perfect, resilient candidate to face life as an outsider in
the twentieth century California.
In creating a setting as this,
Divakaruni constructs a narrative based around the influx of a variety
of characters who translate their plight as immigrants to the
United States to the protagonist.
Tilo’s task is to mollify her
customer’s individual pain and suffering through specifically selected
spices, each noted for their particular power. It is through Tilo’s eyes
and the psychic vision she has for her customers, that it is possible to
learn the life of a subaltern population.
The spices can heal and
comfort, but when used wrongly can also ruin or hold back or even
ghettoize. Divakaruni, in analyzing the role that the spices play in her
novel, describes how they stand for the various aspects of the culture
that the Indian immigrants carry with them.
The mystical power of interpreting dreams and warning the
victims of the impending danger forms an interesting part of
Queen of Dreams.
Our dream world overflows with confused images . . .
streets turning to quicksand, talking fish and so on.
Yet dreams have a remarkable quality of seeming real.
Once
awake,
we
remain
“what did it mean?” (Uma 53)
spellbound,
muttering,
68
It is this gulf between dreams and reality that Divakaruni seeks
to highlight in her fourth novel, Queen of Dreams. Divakaruni often
focuses on characters balancing two worlds, particularly Indian
immigrants struggling through life in America. Is the orient happy in
the west?
Does he or she assimilate the occidental values?
Divakaruni attempts to fuse both the values in her novels.
In Queen of Dreams, she attempts to bridge the gulf between an
American-born
The
mother
daughter
is
gifted
and
with
an
the
Indian
ability
to
immigrant
mother.
interpret
dreams.
The daughter yearns to understand her mother’s behaviour and her
work.
Mrs. Gupta, a first-generation Indian immigrant in America is
the queen of dreams. Her job consists of interpreting other people’s
dreams and warning them about the imminent danger and problems.
Rakhi, her daughter is an American by birth and grows up with a
feeling of belonging to her land of birth. She is a young divorcee and a
struggling artist. She runs a tea shop named The Chai House to earn
a living and provide for her six year old daughter Jona. Her partner in
business and her best friend is Belle, a second-generation Indian
American who provides a sharp contrast to Rakhi in her pro-American
attitude. Although Rakhi is comfortable in her American life, she feels
a strong connection towards her Indianness.
However, her mother
wants to spare her the tale of her strange and painful past in India
and her ability to read dreams. This only arouses her curiosity and
69
she starts craving for all things Indian. She admits, “I hungered for
all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she’d
grown up in -- just as she never spoke of her past” (QD 35).
Rakhi desires intensely for India, and also wishes for closeness
with her own mother, a closeness that has always been denied to her
because of her mother’s profession of being a dream teller.
My mother always slept alone. Until I was eight years
old, I didn’t give it much thought -- My discovery
occurred on an afternoon when I’d gone to play at the
home of my classmates -- Why don’t you sleep with
Dad? I Kept asking . . . Don’t you love us? -- I do love
You -- I don’t sleep with you or your father because my
work is to dream. I can’t do it if someone is in bed
with me. (QD 6-7)
One can also understand Rakhi’s interest in Indian heritage by
her paintings about India and her imagined India as she has never
gone to India. Rakhi longs to inherit her mother’s gift of interpreting
dreams as it is “-- a noble vocation, at once mysterious and helpful to
the world. To be an interpreter of the inner realm seemed so Indian
(QD 35).
In the novels of Divakaruni, the social and psychological
development of the non-western immigrant and the culturally
displaced European transplant are explored. Woven throughout the
70
narrative of The Mistress of Spices, is a tale of oppression, one that
is associated with the theme of familial expectations of Indian women
in America.
This account of rebellion and exclusion is not related
from the point of view of the oppressed female, Geeta. It is told from
her grandfather’s perspective. This inversion in standpoint heightens
the reader’s sensitivity; it creates sympathy for an intelligent Indian
woman caught between love and custom.
Her grandfather says,
“-- mental peace I am not having, not even one iota, since I crossed
the Kalapani and came to this America -- better to have no
granddaughter than one like this Geeta” (MS 87). The grandfather is
angry, not because the girl is obtuse, flippant or defiant, but because,
in coming to America at an impressionable age, she has subsequently
begun to assimilate to its culture. She buys cosmetics and expensive
cars with “the money she should save for her dowry” (MS 89), with
little concern over her future as a wife.
Divakaruni also explains the traditional expectations of Indian
women in their native culture as a daughter, a wife, a daughter-in-law
and a mother.
The traditional value Ahuja maintains and dangles
over his wife in the United States is clearly brought out in the novel
The Mistress of Spices. Ahuja’s wife’s name is Lalita, which suits
her beauty as the name Lalita has three lucid syllables La-li-ta.
Tilo wants to call her by her name but Lalita prefers to be called
Ahuja’s wife.
71
Lalita is an apt example of the oriental culture, where a woman
hides her own identity willingly in order to pacify the male dominance
of the husband, by referring to her as her husband’s wife.
Lalita knows sewing.
She had been to a sewing school in Kanpur.
Lalita wanted to continue to do sewing in America, after her marriage
to Ahuja.
But she has been denied of her desire, because of her
husband’s dominance. He has a firm view that his woman should not
take up any profession.
“Aren’t I man enough man enough man
enough” (MS 16). She remained Ahuja’s wife. These eastern values,
when transmitted to include the value system of a more liberated
society, such as that of America, can remedy and placate in the face of
stereotypes and racism.
Divakaruni’s books are devoted to the study of women of all
races and faiths who share a common female experience.
All her
heroines find themselves within the constraining boundaries of their
cultures and religions. Her female characters struggle in their balance
between family responsibilities and individual happiness.
It is in a
way at the centre of the conflict between the Hindu culture which
always shows the mother as the giver, as the nurturer, and as
sacrificing herself for the good of the family and the western concept of
self-happiness. All through Rakhi’s childhood, her mother is careful
to ensure that her dream work did not disrupt her family’s life. This is
what Rakhi resents: “. . . that her mother, with such meticulous
motherness, kept her out of the place she wanted most to enter.
72
That she denied her her birthright and doomed her to the bland life of
suburban America” (QD 43).
In the western cultures, dream interpretation is a science,
practised by the psychologists. In the Indian culture, dream
interpretation is a gift. This gift is possessed by Mrs. Gupta and she
relishes the gift.
She does not want to share her secrets with her
daughter. Rakhi, natural to her American culture, wants to analyse
her mother’s gift.
-- I wanted to be an interpreter. -- I grew obsessed
with the idea. I saw it as a noble vocation, at once
mysterious and helpful to the world. To be an
interpreter of the inner realm seemed so Indian
(QD 35).
Rakhi also wants to understand the dream interpretations
scientifically.
Rakhi is fully tuned to the American culture. She is shocked to
see her mother’s behaviour as a dream interpreter.
Rakhi is also
happy that she has not learnt the ways of her mother. At one time
Rakhi wants to analyse; at another time she feels happy that she has
not learnt the ways of her mother.
This brings out the insecure
feelings in Rakhi. For a second-generation Indian-American like
Rakhi, the sensation of being in-betweens is particularly accentuated.
Conflicts typically arise from the cultural clash between American
73
individualism and Indian communitarianism. The value system and
culture of the second-generation is unclear.
When Rakhi compares
her stance with that of her mother, she reflects, “Thank God, my
world is simpler. Even my tragedies are simple ones, colored in
commonplace blues” (QD 41).
In The Mistress of Spices, Geeta’s grandfather complains
about Geeta’s behaviour because he is an Indian -- a Bengali in
America. Hence he is not able to acknowledge the American way of
living and Geeta’s employment with foreigners and her returning home
at uncivilised hours.
Geeta has other plans, plans that exclude an
arranged marriage because that will send her back to India.
Her grandfather is of the view that, “from birth a girl’s real home is
with her future husband’s family” (MS 91).
The family becomes a battlefield where modernity clashes with
tradition, where Indian culture clashes with American culture.
Geeta follows modernity. She says, “Can you see me with a veil over
my head sitting in a sweaty kitchen all day, a bunch of house keys
tied to the end of my sari -- it just isn’t for me”
(MS 91-92).
However, Geeta’s family counters this decision with a serious
reproach, for not respecting their culture, while Geeta feels they have
no interest in respecting hers. Her conclusion is to leave home and
move in with her boyfriend, Juan Cordero, a Hispanic.
74
In her search for happiness through love, Geeta, is threatened
by her own reluctance to abandon traditional Indian culture.
This could invite excommunication from her family, the only support
system that she has in America.
Geeta is an acceptor of diverse
consequences. In opting against the ambiguous outcome of arranged
marriage, she distances herself from familial love.
As Divakaruni
observes:
The paradox in cultural assimilation is to find that
balance between change and holding on.
It is very
important to find balance because neither extreme is
healthy. We cannot forget who we were and still are.
Neither can we hold slavishly onto what we were,
because what then is the point of coming to a new
country? I think that’s what the grandfather learns at
the end of Mistress: that what you hold onto are the
deep values of loving and caring for the family and
doing the best for the family; what you give up are the
ways in which you do that. (Kalamaras 6)
Geeta’s silence speaks of a necessity to chart her own life through
cultural experimentation.
The second half of the novel Queen of Dreams concentrates on
the mingling of reality, dreams and nightmares.
Rakhi locates the
dream journals after her mother’s unexpected death. She reads them
75
with the help of her father in order to translate the Bengali words.
This is an attempt to interpret and understand her mother’s life and
Rakhi tries to make sense out of her mother’s death. Rakhi also finds
herself struggling with her business, relationships and the devastating
events relating to 9/11. Rakhi says,
We see clips of firefighters heading into the blaze;
We see the buildings collapsing under the weight of
their own rubble -- We look at them all, then at each
other in disbelief.
How could this have happened --
here, at home, in a time of peace?
In America?
(QD 255)
Rakhi, is not able to come to terms with the division in her
family’s history, between India and the US. She runs an ethnic-style
coffee
shop
in
Berkely,
California
with
her
friend
Belle.
Recently divorced, Rakhi does not discuss the reasons for her divorce.
It is Rakhi’s search for meaning and truth that is at the heart of the
novel. She searches for the meaning of what life is. Rakhi tries to
understand her relationship with her father; her friend Belle;
her husband Sonny and her daughter Jona.
Queen of Dreams is also divided between India and the
United States, although set entirely in America. The conflict of ideas
between Mrs. Gupta and Rakhi illustrates the notion that there is
always an inner battle between a first-generation Indian American and
76
a second-generation Indian American. Mrs. Gupta’s conciousness is a
cross connection between polarisms. The transfer from her homeland
to foreign land shows the adjustments of the inner conflicts, outer
reality and dislocation.
Reading the dream journals of Mrs. Gupta,
Rakhi is faced with many doubts. She thinks: “Did my mother make
the wrong choice in deciding to come to America with my father?”
(QD 211).
After reading the journals, Rakhi begins to see what
Mrs. Gupta hid from them so craftly: “her regret, her longing for
community, her fear of losing her gift” (QD 211).
Rakhi thought of her mother as a serene person.
But after
reading her journals, she understands that her mother refused to
accept
sadness,
which
she
considered
an
useless
emotion.
Mrs. Gupta survived by making herself believing that loneliness was
strength. Rakhi describes her mother as the one who is beautiful and
sad, like a princess from one of the old Bengali tales (QD 200).
In Queen of Dreams, an ethnic coffee outlet, the Chai House,
later renamed as Kurma House, is an embodiment of cultural fusion of
cuisine, music, conversation and myth, assimilating them into the
American mainstream.
On a visit to Chai House, Mrs. Gupta tells,
“This isn’t a real cha-shop -- she pronounces the word in the Bengali
way -- but a mishmash, a westerner’s notion of what’s Indian”
(QD 89). This is a perfect congent of Kakar’s concept of assimilation
in American life:
77
In the process of convergence the impact of minority
cultures on the mainstream can occur when elements
of their culture are absorbed by Anglo-American
community,
thus
creating
a
composite
culture.
(Kakar, 1991: 25)
Tilo is the architect of immigrant dream, lifegiver, restorer of
health and hope in The Mistress of Spices. Here, Divakaruni weaves
compelling stories of adversities, defeats and triumphs in the lives of
the characters that populate Tilo’s store and her novel. Some of the
stories reflect the persistent struggles within the Indian diaspora of
North America, like domestic violence, racism, intergenerational
discord and the endless effort to absorb and be absorbed in a new
environment.
Tilo, the mistress of spices, has many disguises and names that
reveal her multiple identities. Like a chameleon, she keeps changing
throughout the novel, making clear how complex is the problem of
identity crisis that Indians try to cope with in a foreign land.
(NayanTara -- Bhagyavati -- Tilotamma -- Maya). The novel comes to
an end with Tilo renaming herself as Maya, which “can mean many
things. Illusion, spell, enchantment, the power that keeps this
imperfect world going day after day” (MS 338). Tilo chooses a name
that can mean many things, a name that embodies the multiplicity of
her identities, the many consciousnesses that lie within her.
78
Maya is an ancient Sanskrit name. The juxtaposition of a name
representative of a cultural past with Tilo’s present power suggests
that Tilo still lives in between spheres, with contradictory spaces and
times comprising the rather ambiguous landscape of her existence.
In naming herself, Tilo reveals that she is made of multiple
consciousnesses that allow her to exist neither as south Asian nor
American only, but rather as everything in between. Tilo is living a life
that spans the endless boundaries of space and time and in which
identity is filled with the promise of endless possibility and eternal
evolution.
Divakaruni’s inquiry into transculturalism is at once allusive,
subtle and lyrical which cuts through the Indian stereotypes and
presents the reader with powerful allegories of transformation and
change.
For example, “Daksha to whom no one listens so she has
forgetten how to say” (MS 83) is the workhorse in the family hierarchy
of an ageing mother-in-law and a husband who will not help around
the house. Daksha is a nurse in the AIDS Ward.
Tilo ministers
Daksha through her spices:
Daksha here is a seed of black pepper to be boiled
whole and drunk to loosen your throat so you can
learn to say No, that word so hard for Indian women.
No, and Hear me Now. (MS 83)
79
The story of ten and a half year old Jagjit who is traumatized at
school, “Talk English son-of-bitch. Speak up nigger wetback ass hole”
(MS 93) shows the cultural trauma the young boy undergoes.
At school, he is jeered at and physically harassed for wearing a green
turban; at home, he is rebuked by an impatient mother who refuses to
understand her son’s predicament.
Equally poignant is the story of Mohan who is severely beaten
by skinheads while closing his restaurant for the night. Betrayed by
the American justice when the thugs are acquitted, Mohan smashes
everything that he sees and returns to India a broken man.
The Americans who assaulted Mohan are in their teens.
Their
attitude reveals their contempt for Mohan in the following emotional
outburst: “Sonofa-bitch Indian, shoulda stayed in your own goddamn
country” (MS 180). Mohan is terribly hurt. In the hospital he thinks,
But what am I to do with the questions rattling in my
skull-box, will I walk again, how to make a living now,
the right eye, is it totally gone, Veena so young and
pretty left with a crippled scarred husband. And over
and over, Those two haramis, did the police get them,
may they rot in jail. (MS 181)
Mohan is shattered in body and in mind in America.
Neighbours pool together the ticket money to send Mohan and Veena
back home, for nothing is left for them in the United States.
80
Divakaruni succeeds in presenting a balanced picture of the world of
immigrants in America. Not all of them are winners, but not all of
them
are
losers.
Jagjit
and
Mohan
are
examples
of
losers.
Daksha and Geeta succeed in transculturalism.
The element of mystery is an integral part of Divakaruni’s work.
She says that her books are partly based on experience, partly on
social observation.
Divakaruni strives to narrate her observations
with the element of myth, magic and ancient culture alongside
contemporary culture.
“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world” (QD 34) says the
matriarch in Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams.
Indeed, the hidden
world plays an important role in the novel, detailing the story of
Rakhi, a young Indian American woman living in Berkely, California.
Rakhi’s life is spiced with the mystical and the mundane. Her mother
is a dream-teller with a magical ability to foresee the future in her
dreams, a gift that has always mystified and fascinated Rakhi.
Rakhi’s everyday life requires attention to more worldly things
such as bringing up her young daughter, managing her relationship
with her ex-husband and salvaging the business she runs with her
friend Belle. After the death of her mother, Rakhi’s two worlds -- the
mystical and the mundane begin to collide. She must make sense of
the dream journals her mother has left behind with the mysterious
elements of her own life. When the tragic events of 9/11 occur, Rakhi
81
is faced with seeking her late mother’s guidance in coming out of the
confusing and terrifying world.
Queen of Dreams explores the connection between wakefulness
and the subconscious in the backdrop of diasporic life. One morning
when Rakhi is about to step out to the car, she sees a bird in the
maple tree, which she has not seen in that part of the state before.
The bird is “large and gray with bright orange mihinda eyes”
(QD 185).
The bird watches her intently, without any sign of fear.
She runs inside to get her father, but by the time they return, the bird
is gone.
Could it be an omen?
I ask.
What’s an omen?
he says. I sigh. I don’t want an argument between us
today, but I know this; the universe does send us
messages. The trouble is most of us don’t know how
to read them. (QD 185)
Thus the novel is also spiked with mystery, suspense and the
supernatural.
The novel Queen of Dreams contrasts the lives and perceptions
of first-generation immigrants with that of their children born and
raised
in
a
foreign
land.
And
inevitably
it
includes
the
Indian-American experience of grappling with two identities. On 9/11
two white men attack Rakhi and her family outside the Chai House.
Rakhi’s feelings about being treated as a hostile alien are poignantly
82
delineated. “If I am not American,” she asks, “Who am I”? (QD 270)
Divakaruni drives home the idea that maintaining Indian cultural
heritage and at the same time knowing and participating in the
American culture is important for survival in today’s world. This story
of an emotionally distant mother and a daughter trying to find herself
transcends cultural boundaries.
The tale succeeds at two levels.
Divakaruni effectively takes the reader into an immigrant culture and
shows the common ground that lies in an alien land.
Queen of Dreams is an exploration of the relationship between
a mother and daughter.
The novel explores the theme of what it
means to be an American, particularly in the immigrant community.
Divakaruni has been interested in the magical parts of Indian culture,
in folk beliefs and age-old traditions and especially in how they are
incorporated into modern times and settings.
In the case of Rakhi’s mother, Divakaruni explores the practice
of the ancient culture of dream telling in a place far away from the
place where she has learnt it. In India a dream teller will have the
support and encouragement not only of her culture, but also of a
circle of fellow dream tellers. In California, despite the vibrant Indian
community, Mrs. Gupta tells her dreams alone.
Divakaruni has
written some of the dream chapters and has discovered that she has
to bring the daughter’s voice in, as an important way to communicate,
what it means to be an American, especially for people of culture that
is the Orientals.
83
Indian civilization has evolved through centuries of change.
This collective consciousness has been reflected in the expatriate
writings through the rich tradition of myth, social and religious
customs, intermingling with the western ideas and their culture.
Divakaruni has transcended boundaries negotiating two different
worlds drawn from various perspectives. The usual thematic core of
expatriate writing between the native and the alien, the self and the
other seems to have acquired new richness and complexity in the
novelistic vision of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, balancing the various
diversities of being born an Indian, a woman and finally acquiring the
status of an immigrant. Divakaruni has explored the force of tradition
of her native country as well as the challenges faced by the
immigrants in her adopted country.
In The Mistress of Spices, through Tilo she is able to bring
together two diverse worlds of ancient Indian culture and harsh
realities of inner city life in America. It is evident in Tilo’s words when
she says, “I, Tilo architect of the immigrant dream”
(MS 29).
The immigrant who carries dreams of aspiration also carries with him
or her, the native identity. A reluctance to shed the identity makes it
difficult to get assimilated in the new home. The natives too are not
ready to accept the immigrants without any reservation. The harsh
reality, besides causing innumerable problems to the co-migrants,
leads to various tensions in the social fabric.
The illusion and reality of American life is brought out thus:
84
No one told us it would be so hard here in Amreekah,
all day scrubbling greasy floors, lying under engines
that drip black oil, driving the belching monster trucks
that coat our lungs with tar. Standing behind counters
of dim motels where we must smile as we hand keys to
whores.
Yes.
always smile, even when people say,
“Bastard foreigner taking over the country stealing our
jobs”. Even when cops pull us over because we’re in
the wrong part the rich part of town. We thought we’d
be back home by now in Trichy, in Kharagpur, in
Bareilly. Under the sweet whirr of a ceiling fan in a
mosaic room with a sea green floor, leaning back on
satin pillows, and the servant bringing the ice-cold
lassi with rose petals floating on it. (MS 65)
Each character tries to accomplish their goals or else they meet
with failures. The rich Indians send lists to Tilo’s shop because they
are busy with their business which will bring them wealth.
Their status does not permit them to spend time in the shop.
They feel that they are richer and hence avoid visiting the shop.
Still others have forgetten their nationality and eat caviar only. For all
of them Tilo burns Tulsi, basil which is the plant of humility, curber of
ego (MS 79), the Basil sacred to Sri Ram, which slakes the craving for
power, which turns the thoughts inward, away from worldliness.
85
Each character portrayed in this novel tries to negotiate with the
newly found American culture. Every character is caught up in a web
and is helped by Tilo and her spices. Haroun, a Kashmiri works as a
driver. He is stabbed and Tilo comes to his rescue. She gives a lotus
root that will make Haroun and Hameeda the widow, love each other.
Geeta’s
family
wants
to
live
as
Bengalis
in
America.
Geeta’s grandfather is ready to undergo anything to make Geeta live
as an Indian girl. Ahuja’s wife Lalita undergoes physical and mental
torture. She says “Who shall I ask to bless me? Ram, who banished
poor pregnant Sita to the forest because of what people might say?
Even our gods are cruel to their wives” (MS 289). Lalita lands up in a
shelter for women. Jagjit, a ten-year-old boy has to wear a turban to
school. As he grows up, he becomes just like an American teenager
with an earring on single ear.
Tilo gives him money, to make him
start life anew for which Jagjit says, “Tell her I’m going to give it my
best shot” (MS 109). He is going to use power and not be used by it.
Daksha, who is the nurse has come home to make hot chapattis
for a mother-in-law and a husband who feels “--after all isn’t the
kitchen the woman’s place” (MS 83). Tilo gives Daksha black pepper
to loosen her throat so that she can learn to say No, a word so hard
for an Indian woman. The bougainvillea girls are the Indians of the
upper strata who have turned and who use their Indianness as a sort
of curio. They look out for cardamom and want help “-- because we
don’t know what it looks like”
(MS 272).
They are provoked to
86
laughter when they are asked about simple things like the spices
which are not new to Indians in general.
Tilo
the
protagonist
is
forced
to
choose
between
the
supernatural life of an immortal and the modern life of an ordinary
mortal. She is a woman with magical powers; she is portrayed as a
living, breathing reality, one of the finest creations by Divakaruni.
She is the structural and magical pivot of the novel, and serves as the
link in the novel. She holds together the various characters and the
events in the novel.
She is the uniting and harmonizing force who
feels the needs of everyone who visit her store. The immigrants are
self-willed and self-centered and some of them are eccentrics.
It is
nothing but with magic that Tilo weaves them into an adhesive whole.
She has sympathy and consideration for the transplanted Indians in
America. Tilo is thus a symbol of the female principle in life.
The Mistress of Spices may be taken as the anti-thesis of Tilo’s
emotional cycle; the anti-thesis is evoked as her mood soon modulates
into one of grim recognition of the inevitable facts of love and desire
and she gradually descends from her state of triumphant abstraction,
from the fret, the hurry and the stir by seizing upon the web of love
from a different perspective. As a mistress she is restricted to enter
the domain of love and earthly life. Inspite of all the restrictions, she
chooses to go away with Raven.
87
Tilo has to decide which part of her heritage she will keep and
which part she will choose to abandon. Tilo’s magical powers begin to
crumble; when she is drawn to the mysterious Raven, the lonely
American, who walks into her store. Raven feels that she is an
“authentic-real Indian”
(MS 273).
Tilo is unable to penetrate his
psyche and must break all her vows to taste the forbidden fruit.
While the first mother may represent a mythical pull for the security
of one’s cultural and emotional ties to India, the land of birth, the
lonely American becomes the call to explore and forge new identity in
America’s vast multicultural landscape.
The Mistress of Spices reveals the predicament of the
immigrant Indians in America with a very Indian spicy touch.
The chapters are titled as Tilo, Turmeric, Cinnamon, Fenugreek,
Asafoetida, Fennel, Ginger, Peppercorn, Kalojire, Neem, Red chilli, Lotus
root, Sesame and Maya.
The chapters begin with Tilo- short for
Tilotama that she had coined for herself and ends with Maya, given by
Raven “One that spans my land and yours, India and America, for I
belong to both now” (MS 337). Tilo concludes by saying, “In the old
language it can mean many things, illusion, spell, enchantment, the
power that keeps this imperfect world going day after day. I need a
name like that I who now have only myself to hold me up” (MS 338).
Divakaruni blends both the metaphysical with the tangible
physical world. The novel Queen of Dreams juxtaposes Mrs. Gupta’s
88
numinous world of dreams with the everyday concerns of her
daughter’s life. As Rakhi observes:
To give my mother credit, she never tried to pressure
me into staying with Sonny once I’d decided to leave.
Even though I could never bring myself to tell her why.
-- One more way in which I’m different from my
mother, -- this is why she dreams and I paint. (QD 31)
Dreams look to the future whereas paintings try to preserve the past.
The dream journals render an aura of exoticism. The dreams
themselves take on a poetic feel filled with symbolisms that reveal an
image of exoticised India with its cultural beliefs, the myths and
legends.
If you dream of a closed door, you will ultimately be
successful in gaining what you desire, but it will take
much effort. -- In your dream if someone presents you
with sugar, beware.
Such a person is not to be
trusted. (QD 76)
The element of mystery is maintained till the very end with the
recurrent appearance of the snake and a mysterious man in white.
Mrs. Gupta wants her daughter not to hanker for her imagined
India. For Rakhi, India is a place which she wants to visit. As she is
89
not able to understand her mother’s nature, she wishes that she will
be able to understand her mother if she comes to India. Hence she
has an assumed picture of India. She tries to exhibit her imagination
in her paintings.
Rakhi borrows from the South Asian library, a tape with songs
about the Bengal monsoons.
“how the skies grow into the color of
polished steel, how the clouds advance like black armies, or spill
across the horizon like the unwound hair of beautiful maidens”
(QD 81). She day-dreams about the storm-whipped palm trees, the
red-breasted bulbuls taking shelter among the hanging roots of the
banyan. She recalls: “The lightening was silver combs decorating the
rain maiden’s hair. The rain was warm, like human tears. One of the
singers had compared her heart to a dancing peacock” (QD 82).
Rakhi wonders as to whether there was any truth in that, or
was it merely a poetic trope? When she confronted her mother by a
direct question, her mother grudgingly admitted that there were
peacocks and that from time to time they did dance.
Her father
informed her, with “gruesome glee” (QD 82) that Calcutta flooded with
heavy torrential down pours of rains and also people died of cholera.
But Rakhi was not satisfied with her parents’ answers. She thought
that they were hiding ‘beautiful, mysterious, important things’
(QD 82) from her as they always had.
Belle had told her that her
parents and the parents of other desis she knew, loved to go on and
on about India, “which in their opinion was as close to paradise as
90
you could get”
(QD 82).
Rakhi desperately remarks, “Still, I think
that before I die I would like to go to India- if only to lay to rest the
ghosts that dance in my head like will-o’-the-wisps over a rippling sea”
(QD 83).
Mrs. Gupta wishes her daughter to get accustomed to her
American way of life and to line in between two nations. She holds
Rakhi responsible for her failing business in the Chai House.
She says:
The reason you don’t have enough power to fight that
woman there is that she knows exactly who she is, and
you don’t. This isn’t a real cha shop but a mismash, a
westerner’s notion of what’s Indian. Maybe that’s the
problem.
May be if you can make it into something
authentic, you’ll survive. (QD 89)
Rakhi retorts her mother telling that her haunting silence about
her country and her own past accounts for her “warped sense of
what’s Indian?” (QD 89). Mrs. Gupta admits her fault and offers a
valid explanation for her act thus:
You’re right. It is my fault. I see now that I brought
you up wrong. I thought it would protect you if I didn’t
talk about the past. That way you wouldn’t be
constantly looking back, hankering, like so many
91
immigrants do.
I didn’t want to be like those other
members spitting you between here and there, between
your life right now and that which can never be.
But by not telling you about India as it really was,
I made it into something far bigger. It crowded other
things out of your mind. It pressed upon your brain
like a tumour (QD 89).
Divakaruni tries to blend the orient and the occident through
the character of Rakhi. Rakhi, feeling too American and seeking out a
more authentic Indian identity, is a manifestation of her love and
loyalty torn between her imagined homeland and the country of her
birth.
Small Indian immigrant audiences who visit the shop regularly
demanding Mr. Gupta to sing songs from some old Hindi movies
underline their constant effort to build the lost boundaries in the host
space, America.
It also helps them to preserve their cultural
hangovers which have been often dwindled by the dominant culture.
In an attempt to overcome the identity crisis with all its complexities,
they feel, as Kateryna Arthur writes in Aboriginal and Immigrant
Writing (1985), “The necessity to construct a new self and world, not
in a vaccum, but against and in contradiction to constructions already
imposed by the dominant culture”. (123)
92
Queen of Dreams is a tale of east-west encounter. It is a story
of how a woman touches those around her during her life and into
death. The focus is on family, relationships, pride in one’s heritage,
and how one may not truly understand another as well as one thinks.
The funeral of Mrs. Gupta was held at the Valley View Funeral Home,
a squat beige building of a freeway.
When Rakhi looks at the
gathering, she wants to say something to them; something consoling
and meaningful, for they are her mother’s true family, her mother’s
orphans. Rakhi says,
-- What could I tell them? They knew her better than
I did; they knew her in her essence. Until now I’d held
on to the hope that someday I would know her, -I
realized
that
it
was
never
going
to
happen.
My mother’s secret self was lost to me forever.
(QD 114)
Things change when Mrs.Gupta dies in the tragic automobile
accident.
The dynamics of some of Rakhi’s important relationships
change forever. She notices her father for the first time, and he is not
the same indifferent man as he used to be. Earlier she felt, “I cannot
remember a single instance in my life when I felt close to him”
(QD 115). After Mrs. Gupta’s death it is only through her father that
Rakhi learns about her parent’s past. Her father helps her in her chai
business. Together they read her mother’s journal. This is an act that
93
changes both of them forever.
She also finds in her a maturing
relationship with Sonny, while she herself is changing and growing
too.
Rakhi invites Sonny and cooks for him -- something she had
vowed she would never do again. But she feels warmth in cooking in
her small kitchen, Jona and Sonny and herself crowded around the
countertop, chopping green onions and sautéing chicken with ginger.
One night she finds herself thanking Sonny for saving her life.
The novel speaks about the possibility of salvaging relationships, if
one chooses to forgive and move on -- as Rakhi does with her father
and ex-husband. To forgive and to forget is again an Indian way of
life.
In a tragic way the aftermath of 9/11 pushes Rakhi into
maturity and a new vision for herself. India becomes little more than
a myth after the terrorist attack on America. She and her family love
India and yet it is also the key to their past and present lives.
“There would always be mysteries about the people -- enigmas central
to their lives -- Love worked its slanted way along other paths”
(QD 290-291).
Rakhi understands the ways of life.
father’s
affection;
Sonny’s
love
and
She has understood her
her
daughter’s
affection.
Her daughter Jona, has inducted the characteristics of both her
grandmother, Mrs. Gupta and that of her mother, Rakhi; She can
94
dream
and
also
paint.
Jona
is
an
enigmatic
character.
and
mother
Rakhi observes:
With
her
grandmother
dead
her
overwhelmed, painting must have given her stability.
A way to express her emotions. I observe the care with
which she delineates details. The windows of the tall
building
gleam
in
the
light
from
the
flames.
-- The sky, too, is full of fire. It’s hard to wrench my
eyes from the strangely magnetic quality of the
painting. (QD 212)
The experiences of migration and living in diaspora have been
beautifully portrayed in Queen of Dreams. In Rakhi, Divakaruni has
combined the feelings of an immigrant who has an oriental past and
tries to live up to the occidental ethos.
The character grows from
questioning many aspects of what is happening around her to a state
where she is ready to accept the reason behind all happenings.
Rakhi raises her voice against mental trauma, cultural alienation and
identity crisis of the dislocated people from their homeland India.
The act of acculturation usually involves a conscious erasure of
one’s identity in order to merge with the mainstream. The process of
acculturation is successful only when it follows the painful erasure of
the cultural hangovers. In talking about her mother, Rakhi creates a
new identity. Tilo, on the other hand possesses many identities at one
95
time, yet she seems comfortable with her changing personalities which
allows her the freedom to assimilate while at the same time retain the
aspects of Indian culture that she wishes to preserve. The multiplicity
can be viewed as a form of Americanization; but it more aptly
describes the new form of assimilation.
Rakhi’s terrible sense of alienation and homelessness create the
impetus that forces Rakhi into the necessary changes to get her life
back on track.
She attempts to acculturate to the alien country.
This results in the erasure of the painful, unpleasant incidents with
her husband and her family from the mind. Towards the end, Rakhi
begins to question her most basic assumptions and motives, the true
nature of love and the capacity to forgive, to re-kindle her love for her
husband and her family, and eventually her own community.
The dynamics of some of Rakhi’s important relationships are changed
in
the
phase
between
her
identity
crisis
and
acculturation.
Divakaruni has yoked together beautifully the diasporic reality with
myths from the ancient culture (India) within a woman-centered social
environment in America.
The characters in these two novels are in search of their true
image, torn between the traditional values they have absorbed from
childhood and the new values which they have been introduced due to
their immigration. This is a confrontation with the occidental ethos in
order to discover one’s own self. In the novel The Mistress of Spices,
Tilo’s quest for her personal destiny is a result of the impact of the
96
west on her. Renunciation is an Indian way of life. It is a distinctly
difficult condition, attainable only by a very few. Tilo renounces all
her happiness, in order to help the immigrants in America, and wishes
to cure both their physical and mental illness. When Tilo chooses to
go away with Raven, she renounces renunciation. Thus the novelist
has succeeded in the portrayal of the spiritual east encountering the
materialistic west.
Much of immigrant fiction deals with the phantom umbilical
cord tying one to desh, the dual sense of home -- desh, the homeland
and
bari,
the
place
of
residence.
In
Divakaruni’s
novel
Queen of Dreams all the main characters are Bengalis; their desh is
America.
Divakaruni’s
characters
settle
down
in
America.
Queen of Dreams is a novel about three generations -- Rakhi, a single
mother in Berkely who has grown up in the United States, her
immigrant mother and her unquestionably American daughter, Jona.
Expatriate writing occupies a significant position between
cultures and countries. There is a need to realize the significance of
the cultural encounter which takes place in diasporic writing, the
bi-cultural pulls and the creation of a new culture which finally
emerges. In the novels taken up for study Divakaruni has portrayed
the fusion of the oriental and occidental cultures. The desh-pardesh
syndrome, so typical of all diasporic writers, finds a different
exposition in the works of Divakaruni, who has managed to find a
bridge between the two cultures.
Though Divakaruni lives in the
97
United States, her work is imbued with Indian culture and
sensibilities.
The novels The Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams are
good examples of Divakaruni’s blending of the oriental values with the
occidental ethos.
The very idea of diasporic literature conveys two
dimensions of relationships: One, the relationship to its motherland,
which gives rise to nostalgia and reminiscences; second, the forged
relationship with the new land and its people, which give rise to
conflicts and split personalities. Dislocations are a natural offshoot of
diasporic conditions, which have to be dealt with by way of embedding
and assimilation.
In contemporary society, diasporic status is an
inherent reality which is dealt with artistically by Divakaruni.
In an interview with the Nirali magazine, Divakaruni has said,
“my hope is that the books will bridge the cultures”. Her characters
are the inheritors of the Indian-American hyphenated community, a
new identity to accommodate and assimilate.
Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni is firmly rooted to her culture and by her continuing
existence in the American soil, she assimilates the new cultural life
style -- i.e. -- the fusion of both the cultures.
The search for identity and a sense of emotional completion is
not confined to small corners of the world. It is a dilemma that all
human beings can understand.
Divakaruni effectively takes the
reader into an immigrant culture in the two novels, The Mistress of
98
Spices and Queen of Dreams; she also shows the common ground
which lies in a world that is alien. Confrontation with the west for the
discovery of one’s own self is evident through the characters of Tilo
and Rakhi. This search constitutes a quest for a satisfactory attitude
towards the west, and for a realistic image of the east. The fusion of
the western and eastern cultures is beautifully brought out by the
novelist.
Apart from the melting of the two cultures, Divakaruni succeeds
in presenting the complex consciousness of the South Asian diasporic
women and the process of identity formation. In the novels Sister of
My Heart and The Vine of Desire, Divakaruni tries to explore the
psyche of the characters, Anju and Sudha. In the following chapter
Divakaruni, presents to the readers the struggle, tribulations and
subordination faced by two Indian born girls and how they find their
independence and empowerment.