Exploring Female Characters in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart

Abstract

Arranged Marriage is an anthology of short stories published in 1995 by Chitra Banerjee Divakarun, and it contains ten stories. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an immigrant writer whose stories deal with the life of Indian immigrants in America, especially women immigrants in America. As orthodox Indian women, they are unable to adapt themselves to the American culture, which they think has no value. Her fundamental preoccupation revealed in her novel Sister of My Heart is to create a female universe out of not outside of the conventional male world, the male universe is not altogether shut out. There is the obvious effort to bridge the two. But there is a definite attempt at defining them as distinctive domains. The protagonists of the novel Sudha and Anju live in a female universe. This paper aims at show when an Indian immigrant woman faces a big dilemma that is to adapt to the new culture and life and remain attached to her own traditional roots. When she faces encounter in America, she is shaken mentally and cultural conflict crops up in her resulting in a quandary in which she remains indecisive. Some women refuse to adapt and they suffer, and return to India or accept their destiny.