Cultural Hybridity and Adjustment Problem in The Tree Bride

Abstract

This research work makes an attempt to denote the "cultural hybridity and adjustment problem" in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride. Mukherjee being a diaspora author from Bengali community in America presents similar diasporic personality named Tara Chatterjee who after divorce with husband feels rootless in American society and trails back to West Bengal in search of the ancestry and cultural roots. She is neither a completely American nor a typical Indian. Rather she is in third space of cultural identity as the cultural hybridity what most of the diaspora people face. She in West Bengal reveals her past cultural heritage which was too developed through the similar cultural hybridity due to being a contact zone among British and Bengali during colonization. The clash of cultures even makes the Bengali bilingual which too plays the vital role to create the cultural hybridity. Analyzing these various factors this research concludes that diaspora and cultural in-betweenness are the integral part of colonization what the diasporic authors like Mukherjee try to represent in their literature in the phase of post-colonialism.