Days and Nights in Calcutta is a memoir that Bharati Mukherjee and her Canadian husband Clark Blaise collaborated on, giving their day to day account of Calcutta during 1973. Bharati as she visits Calcutta after a gap of fourteen years, having spent a considerable length of time in Canada with her husband Clark Blaise, socialises with her childhood friends, especially women who attended the same school with her, with a hope to revive her relationship with the land of her birth and upbringing. Blaise, though an outsider, in the privileged position of Bharati’s husband which accords him affection and respect from her family members, is able to have a peep into the cultural of India from close quarters. Days and Nights makes a departure from
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The single authorial controlling voice is replaced with the play of multiple voices and this elasticity helps one uncover and explore meaning from different perspectives. This way text connects with the social reality of the world in which it is produced in a better way. In his famous essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ Bakhtin posits:
The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogised heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual accent. (278)
With the two different positions of Bharati and Blaise that of the insider and the outsider the entire account becomes very engaging opening the memoir to fresh perspectives and interpretations. The encounter with the Indian reality that Bharati and Blaise deal with in their respective ways opens up a dialogue between two view points. Their observation and analysis of the same situation from different angles provides the reader with the critical insight with which they can peel off the layers of reality in order to have deeper …show more content…
He looks it over, then up at the beaming face of the man. “Urdu? You’re giving me a book in Urdu? Take it back. There is a country-why don’t you step across the border? It’s spelled P-A-K¬--(148) The 1995 edition of Days and Nights Blaise has an introduction and two epilogues by Blaise and Bharati each. As they look back on their days and nights in Calcutta they have to come up with some more observations and insights. While Bharati returns to reassure herself of the decision to leave India and settle in a new country, she is now convinced she cannot build home out of memory as she says:
In writing this accidental autobiography, I completed the painful, risky journey from exile to settler and claimant. I could finally acknowledge to myself that not only was it no longer possible for me to go back to India to live, but that I did not want to. (302)
As for Blaise, as an observer in India but back home in Canada forced to leave his country and settle in America because of the racial discriminations that his wife had to suffer, he cannot free himself from a sense of nostalgia that Bharati claimed to have
The single authorial controlling voice is replaced with the play of multiple voices and this elasticity helps one uncover and explore meaning from different perspectives. This way text connects with the social reality of the world in which it is produced in a better way. In his famous essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ Bakhtin posits:
The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogised heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual accent. (278)
With the two different positions of Bharati and Blaise that of the insider and the outsider the entire account becomes very engaging opening the memoir to fresh perspectives and interpretations. The encounter with the Indian reality that Bharati and Blaise deal with in their respective ways opens up a dialogue between two view points. Their observation and analysis of the same situation from different angles provides the reader with the critical insight with which they can peel off the layers of reality in order to have deeper …show more content…
He looks it over, then up at the beaming face of the man. “Urdu? You’re giving me a book in Urdu? Take it back. There is a country-why don’t you step across the border? It’s spelled P-A-K¬--(148) The 1995 edition of Days and Nights Blaise has an introduction and two epilogues by Blaise and Bharati each. As they look back on their days and nights in Calcutta they have to come up with some more observations and insights. While Bharati returns to reassure herself of the decision to leave India and settle in a new country, she is now convinced she cannot build home out of memory as she says:
In writing this accidental autobiography, I completed the painful, risky journey from exile to settler and claimant. I could finally acknowledge to myself that not only was it no longer possible for me to go back to India to live, but that I did not want to. (302)
As for Blaise, as an observer in India but back home in Canada forced to leave his country and settle in America because of the racial discriminations that his wife had to suffer, he cannot free himself from a sense of nostalgia that Bharati claimed to have