Women in Transition: Negotiating Cultural Conflict and Identity Crisis in Kavita Daswani’s the Village Bride of Beverly Hills and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart

Abstract

This paper examines the negotiation of cultural conflict and identity crisis in two stories of feminine transition - Kavita Daswani's The Village Bride of Beverly Hills (2004) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Sister of My Heart (1999) - which take place within the problematically negotiated space of tradition and modernity, homeland and diaspora, compliance and agency. The theoretical framework of this study is based on postcolonial feminisms and combined with certain aspects of Homi K. Bhabha's conception of the third space, Stuart Hall's theorization of diasporic identity, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's critique of gendered subjectivity, where this study proposes that both writers structured their protagonists as female liminal subjects with both heritages, but neither of them completely submitted. Daswani and Divakaruni discuss how these are achieved via narration techniques, namely, interior monologue, epistolary narration, and dual narration, which result in psychological disruptions generated by the cultural uprooting and the performative nature of femaleness. Daswani emphasizes the conflicts that occur in the first-generation immigrant bride, one who perpetually oscillates between home and America while simultaneously clinging and deviating from Indian patriarchy; Divakaruni discusses identity construction in the affectual bonds of women, both as a point of inspiration and a point of complication to the protagonists' struggle to construct themselves. These texts together give a picture of the contemporary South Asian women's novel not just as a cultural representation but as a discursive space which allows for the re-imagining of feminine subjectivity in the space between assimilation and resistance. The study contributes to the body of work dedicated to studying the fiction of the South Asian diaspora and transnational feminist studies, as well as postcolonial women's writing.