Mapping Out the ‘Time Zones’ of Diaspora in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

Although Bharati Mukherjee is famous, or rather infamous, for her shameless embrace of America and its melting-pot ideology, in Desirable Daughters India, the homeland, is unexpectedly made to re-enter the stage of immigrant identity construction. In many respects it would seem that it has now become untenable to represent immigrant identity in terms of a one-directional movement from “India” to “America.”
In Desirable Daughters the rise of India, the accelerated time/space compression of late capitalism, the post-90s paradigm shift in matters of transnational migration, the emphasis on return migrations and the emergence of a new global interaction indeed dramatically outflank Mukherjee’s previous narrative of American “exceptionalism” – which suddenly seems dated by comparison. By portraying the complex transnational network of connections operating between RIs (Resident Indians) and NRIs (Non Resident Indians), Mukherjee’s book gestures towards the “de-spatialization” of immigrant identity construction and its consequent “re-metaphorization” in terms of “time zones.” What is more, the increasingly compelling influence of contemporary India on the Indo-American diasporic subjectivity marks a “back to the future” return of the repressed which temporally repositions migrant identity between a ghostly time of repetition and a “hauntology” of new becomings.
What Mukherjee suggests, I will contend, is that immigrant agency and self-fashioning cannot be associated anymore with the “pioneering spirit” of forward-looking characters that discard their “Indianness” upon (geographical) entry into the West. In my reading of Desirable Daughters the protagonist’s zigzagging path to self-transformation will be emphasized, so that it will become apparent that time has become the fourth space through which new spaces for diasporic identity can be renegotiated.