Analysis Of Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem

Indian-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami has penned a few widely praised books managing the complexities of Indian family life and the cultural gap that rises when Indians move toward the west. A nostalgic mother-daughter story told by two women from the Moorthy family, Badami's Tamarind Mem is a novel about the energy of memory and narrating. The Washington post surveys the novel as being “splendidly evocative.... as much a book about the universal habit of storytelling as it is about the misunderstandings that arise between a mother and daughter.” Lisa Singh calls her reading experience of Tamarind Mem as being “bittersweet…. with often stunning, poetic prose, [Badami] gives us an intimate character study of two women” (Star Tribune).

Badami's

is very important because it suggests the hints of violence in the novel. A pained Nimmo, one of the female characters of the novel, reviews the ghost story of a four-winged night bird whose tune influenced individuals to go mad and at last die. In his work The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luce Nancy expresses that “violence always makes an image of itself …. [and] this image is of the order of the monster” which “warns of a divine threat” (20-22). Here the picture of the four-winged flying creature also proposes something unnatural and unusual. An experience with something monstrous can be understood as a vicious

Harjot Singh is a character who, attributable to his inability to enhance his financial status, introjects violence; his failed aspirations comprehend reason throughout everyday life. It is his family, in any case, which needs to pay the cost for his liberality in pointless brutality as his vanishing leaves the three women of the family in critical straits. The silent predicament of Kanwar, who over and over endures the worst part of dismissal from men of marriageable age, is an occasion of destructive patriarchal style in view of which a lady is estimated exclusively based on her looks, her "femininity" and her societal position. Eligible bachelors discover Kanwar need in all these angles and she is, eventually, compelled to marry a widower and remain in India just to be mercilessly killed amid the public mobs that happen amid the Partition of India. Sharanjeet, then again, relocates to Canada where she establishes a niche for herself and satisfies the desire that her father had harboured years ago. She turns into an effective woman and can manage the cost of the luxuries of life. Yet, even as she settles her life in Canada, she is never ready to suppress her nostalgia for her home land. The recollections of her past make her a victim to the emergency of having a place and most of the choices that