Dimple-A Diasporic Victim in Bharathi Mukherjee’s Wife

The term ‘Diaspora’ is a synonym to ‘migration’. The term ‘Diaspora’ derived from the Greek word ‘diaspeirein (Speiro= to sow and dia=over) meaning to disperse and scatter.  The immigrant leaves country sometimes by compulsion or contempt for his land. The act of expatriation is a very painful one. Viney Kirpal expresses his views:”….it is the eternal quest of man to seek to put down roots somewhere, to possess some point of space to which he can relate emotionally and psychologically”.(Kirpal 45).

            Bharathi Mukherjee’s Wife examines the relationship between the husband and wife and also portrays the Indians’ life in the alien land. She extracts from her experiences in the foreign nation to voice women. She depicts the orthodoxy marital ideas, the onus of wife and psychological condition of threshold of wife. In ‘Wife’ the protagonist, Dimple Basu experiences the identity crisis and mental trauma. She is grown up in the middle class family of Calcutta. She curses herself often as ‘ugly’ and has inferiority complex about her black complexion. She worries about her flat unblooming breast. She cries in desperation, “No one would marry an ugly girl like her; no one would make her happy or treat her with respect; (Wife 10). She is ignorant that education will give her identity and career. On contrary she expects those through marriage. She thinks marriage will give her freedom to live as she likes. She says, “Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, and fund- raising dinners for noble charities. Marriage- would bring her love” (Wife 3).

            Mr. DasGupta, Dimple’s father seeks bridegroom through newspaper. He never considers her daughter’s consent. He finds an engineer, Amit Basu. She enters the wedlock with Amit and thinks marriage will liberate her from all conventions. Amit’s mother disliked Dimple’s name. So she changed her name as ‘Nandhini’. The act of changing name doesn’t alter anything for Amit but for Dimple it creates frustration, hatred on her personal and nuptial life. She does not find any happiness albeit she is pregnant.  On contrary she wants to abort it. Her pregnancy seems to be a hammer for immigration, so she wantonly abortion by violently skipping rope. Sharma says about her act of abortion as “is a sacrament of liberation from the traditional roles and constraints of womanhood”(15).

            When Dimple lands America, she bewilders to accommodate American culture and fails to assimilate within it. The couple’s thought about life in America getting differs in their expectations. Amit expects economic wealth but Dimple expects liberation from societal conventions, longing for love and self-fulfillment. As days pass by, she realizes that Amit does not love her. She feels depressed, isolated, unsecured and unexpressed. Dimple cannot even express her feelings and emotions,” there were no words she’d ever learned to describe her daily feelings” (Wife 120).

            She finds difficult to cope up with the people who do not understand her rituals, customs, culture and her Indian traditional ideas even about Durga Puja. Dimple gauges her life in Calcutta and New York City. Chowdhury says that:

She is scared of self-service elevators, of policemen, of gadget and appliances. She does not want to wear western clothes as she thinks she would be mistakenly taken for a Puero Rican. She does not want to lose her identity but feels isolated, trapped, alienated, marginalized (84).     

Her hatred, acrimonious and resentful escalates in the U.S. A. she recalls how she was lived in Calcutta and among the people who was kind, and partakes. She is ambivalent how to express her emotions and conditions to Amit.  Amit is failed to understand her situations, her needs and expectations and simply calls her behavior as ‘culture shock’ which is ubiquitous to Indian wives in America. Dimple cannot bear the isolation, unfeeling husband and alienation. She devised a plot to end her life in nine ways. She thought of “………………garbage bag; set fire to Sari made of synthetic fiber; head in oven; nick wrist with broken glass in a sink full of scalding dishwater; starve; face on bread knife while thinking of Japanese samurai revivals”(Wife 154).

            Her disappointment life in America leads to change in behavior as well as in characters and break away from the social taboos. She gets solace from Milt Glasser who satisfies her in all aspects. She feels comfortable and finds identity through him. Amit’s ignorance about her wife’s psychological conflicts, isolation and lusting for love induces her to be violent towards society as well as in family. Amit says , “ He has never thought:’how hard it was for her to keep quiet and smile though she was falling apart like a very old toy that roughly, by children who claimed to love her”(Wife 212).

Kirtee Agrawal comments on Mukherjee’s narration of the Amit’s murder by Dimple as:

“In an intensely surreal language-blurring the boundaries between the fictive and actual particularly suited to the depiction of a splintered sensibility Mukherjee shows how Dimple murders Amit” (Agrawal 68).

Dimple stabs Amit several times violently which shows her temperament, loss of womanliness quality, soft nature and much of that forsaken of her traditional beliefs. Her attitude after blood-strain killing is no emotional, guilty. It is so odd and strange. She just watches her regular T.V. serials after the brutal murder.  The psychological claustrophobia, high expectations in American culture, unbridle love on Amit, unflexible and imbalanced state in the society changes her entire life.

            Dimple in ‘Wife’ fails to make metamorphosis from one country to another, Indian and western culture and tradition and modern. Dimple may be called as rude, weak by her act. But Amit also equally to be blamed for her mental change. She was not rude where she was born and upbringing. Amit’s unfeeling nature, lack of mutual understanding towards his spouse,  lovelessness, devoid of cheer up triggered her to be violent at last drag her to slain husband. She evolves inwardly from a docile, obedient, submissive and typical Indian wife into a dejected, psychotic, sick and furious murderer in order to attain individual freedom.

Works Cited:

Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1975. 10.

Chowdhury, Enaskshi. Images of Women in Bharati Mukerjee’s Novel’s Literary Voice. Ludhiana: Academic Association Trust, 1995. 84.

Agrawal, Kirtee. Female Iconography in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife. Contemporary American Literature: Poetry, Fiction, Drama and Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. 84.

Sharma, MayaManju. The Inner World of Bharati Mukherjee: From Expatriate to Immigrate. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland Publishers, 1993. 15.

Kirpal, Viney. The Third World Novel of Expatriation: A Study of Emerge Fiction of Indian, west African and Caribbean Writers. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt., Ltd. 1989. 45.