Ordeals of Immigrants in Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories

Abstract

The intersection of memory owing to migration, social inequality, emotional suffering, and intergenerational trauma offers a significant area of inquiry within contemporary English literary studies. The research paper endeavours to explore how the leading characters, as well as the immigrants in Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories, compiled in her book, The Middleman and Other Stories, suffer from the distress and trauma of displacement. It mainly analyses two short stories from the anthology, namely, “A Wife’s Story” and “The Middleman”, to note how the immigrants attempt to adapt to the menacing foreign worlds. The research paper takes a textual approach and makes a close reading of the text through the lens of diasporic concepts advocated by post-colonial thinkers, with special reference to the diasporic theorist Robin Cohen. Diaspora, since the 1990s, has been used to describe events of migration that lead to the issues of new identities. The diasporans who endeavour to settle in foreign countries have formed new patterns of life and new communities to get rid of the hybrid identity and culture. The finding is that the central characters of the selected stories, such as Panna Bhatt in “A Wife’s Story”, and Alfie Judah in “The Middlemen,” experience painful awareness in mimicking Western culture and constructing their concrete identity of diasporic dwelling. It is assumed that the paper stands as a reference for the researchers interested in exploring diaspora literature in the future.