Digital Object Identifier
Outward migration has been studied at length in the Indian Diaspora, but the journey of return has not been covered in detail. It remains undertheorised. The present paper explores two distinct modes of repatriation to Bengal: Moni in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain and Tara in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters. The two novels feature female characters from contrasting social backgrounds, a pairing chosen for methodological reasons. It allows analysing the impact of class by comparing two people of the same gender. It therefore meets the main objection: when class and gender differ, no reading can identify which particular process is at work behind the outcome. The circumstances surrounding the returns are different. Moni buys her ticket on her husband’s credit card; her own limit is insufficient to pay for the ticket. The novel’s ending highlights that her repatriation is a bitter sense of failure. Tara’s elite capital carries her to the homeland without friction. She recovers the female ancestral line, along with the Bengali word that comes back with the memory. One return recuperates; the other liberates in aspiration and delivers a hollow homecoming. This paper reads the difference as the work of a single structure, not of two separable forces, drawing on Safran, Hall, Mishra and Brah for the diaspora frame and on Crenshaw and on Anthias and Yuval-Davis in a supporting role. Neither novel has been read in this way, and neither appears in the field’s fullest comparative study.
Mr. Lokdeshwar G More, Dr. Satyawan Hanegave. “Two Journeys Home: Gender, Class and Repatriation in Gupta’s Memories of Rain and Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 1211-1229. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.75.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com