Narrative Self-reflexivity and Parodic Intertexuality in Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World is a story of the Western female Hannah Easton who migrates to India from New England and has her first hand experience of multi-cultural British colonial India in the late-seventeenth and early- eighteenth century. The historical romance, in the pattern of immigrant writing, The Holder of the World is a rewriting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In the fiction, Mukherjee critiques metanarratives of colonialism, religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and liberal humanism in order to give voice to the marginalized, dominated and suffered females in India. The politics of Mukherjee to parody The Scarlet Letter as The Holder of the World is to document British colonial history of India and to expose her fugitivity by nativization of American historical romance. The Holder of the World has metafictional qualities: narrative self-reflexivity, parodic intertexuality, interaction between fact and fiction, circularity of narrative, open-endedness to the story and indeterminacy of truth/meaning. Therefore, The Holder of the World is a postmodern historiographic metafiction.