Tradition, Modernity, and Cultural Negotiation in Selected Novels of Bharati Mukherjee and Manju Kapur

Abstract

Tradition and modernity don’t sit quietly in the corners of Bharati Mukherjee and Manju Kapur’s fiction; they collide, flirt, bargain, and sometimes straight-up brawl, and out of that messy contact zone their heroines carve precarious, improvised lives. Mukherjee’s diasporic protagonists— Jasmine, Tara, Virmati’s “twin” in Desirable Daughters, the new-India call-centre girl in Miss New India—move through spaces of “unhousement” and “rehousement,” negotiating between inherited Indian norms and the seductive, often brutal promises of Western modernity, recasting diaspora not as pure loss but as a site of hybrid gains. Kapur’s women, by contrast, mostly start inside Indian social milieus—Lahore and Amritsar in Difficult Daughters, joint-family Delhi in Home, small- town to Canadian dislocation in The Immigrant—and work their way outward or sideways, contesting patriarchy, marriage, sexuality and middle-class respectability from within the “domestic” sphere. This article explores how both writers stage tradition/modernity not as a simple binary but as a field of cultural negotiation, where gender, class, nation, and diaspora intersect, and where every choice—love marriage, divorce, immigration, education, career, sexual autonomy— comes at the cost of new forms of alienation. Drawing on critical work on diaspora, hybridity and multiculturalism in Mukherjee and feminist readings of Kapur, the discussion tracks key narrative strategies (shifting names and identities, intergenerational conflict, transnational mobility, and domestic rebellion) that dramatise this ongoing negotiation. Two comparative tables map major thematic and formal convergences and divergences between selected novels such as Jasmine, Desirable Daughters, Miss New India, Difficult Daughters, Home, and The Immigrant. The tone keeps drifting between formal and slightly conversational, with long sentences and minor rough edges, to echo the way these novels themselves refuse neat closures or tidy binaries