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ThesisItem Open Access AN ASSESSMENT OF WOMEN CHARACTERS AND THEIR ROLES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NUANCED THEMATIC PATTERNS IN THE NOVELS OF BHARATI MUKHERJEE(Department of English and Foreign Languages Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology & Sciences (Formerly Allahabad Agricultural Institute) (Deemed to be University) Allahabad-211 007, India, 2016) DATTA, NABASREE; Verma, Shivani S.Liberty and censure became an integral part of the lives of Indian women who refused to buckle themselves under the pressure and succeeded in changing their own lives and lives of those who were dependent on them. In literature, it was being portrayed by majority of writers, among them, Bharati Mukherjee, became the live example of a free woman who through her novels, portrayed the struggles of immigrant women for achieving their identity. Bharati Mukherjee provides readers to take the challenge boldly against the traditional frame work of the society and to turn her way towards a new consciousness of her own worth and place in the society. Bharati Mukherjee is an Indian-born American novelist who started her writing career only at the age of three. Mukherjee achieved her fame with the novels like, The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, Leave It to Me, Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride and Miss New India. This famous novelist achieved many prestigious awards during her splendid creative and professional career. At the age of globalization, immigration becomes a burning issue for most of the immigrant writers where the world is shrinking in to a global village, the differences melt into similarities. Culture and groups outside the dominant ideology try to find out ways to put forward their Page 8 diversity. In the earlier times, the main purpose of immigration of the third world people was only depending on their vocational problem. But in the present time vocational problem mingles with the desire of avocation for the purpose of crossing the boundaries of native land. But in the cases where cultural dissimilarities are much sharper in terms of racial, linguistic and religion, the predicaments get hopelessly complex for immigrant to cope with the new circumstances. The adjustment problems of the immigrant women in an alien society and their phobic mental condition due to political, gender and racial biasness become vital issues in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee. The women characters of her novels are very familiar and the novelist has very successfully portrayed them in the pre-existing context which really inspired the researcher to do her research with the purpose that the study would be a modern work in the field of literature and would render into helping hands for the researcher to do their research in this area.ThesisItem Open Access An assessment of women characters and their roles in the development of nuanced thematic patterns in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee(Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology & Sciences (SHIATS), 2016) DATTA, NABASREE; Verma, Dr. Shivani S.Liberty and censure became an integral part of the lives of Indian women who refused to buckle themselves under the pressure and succeeded in changing their own lives and lives of those who were dependent on them. In literature, it was being portrayed by majority of writers, among them, Bharati Mukherjee, became the live example of a free woman who through her novels, portrayed the struggles of immigrant women for achieving their identity. Bharati Mukherjee provides readers to take the challenge boldly against the traditional frame work of the society and to turn her way towards a new consciousness of her own worth and place in the society. Bharati Mukherjee is an Indian-born American novelist who started her writing career only at the age of three. Mukherjee achieved her fame with the novels like, The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, Leave It to Me, Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride and Miss New India. This famous novelist achieved many prestigious awards during her splendid creative and professional career. At the age of globalization, immigration becomes a burning issue for most of the immigrant writers where the world is shrinking in to a global village, the differences melt into similarities. Culture and groups outside the dominant ideology try to find out ways to put forward their Page 8 diversity. In the earlier times, the main purpose of immigration of the third world people was only depending on their vocational problem. But in the present time vocational problem mingles with the desire of avocation for the purpose of crossing the boundaries of native land. But in the cases where cultural dissimilarities are much sharper in terms of racial, linguistic and religion, the predicaments get hopelessly complex for immigrant to cope with the new circumstances. The adjustment problems of the immigrant women in an alien society and their phobic mental condition due to political, gender and racial biasness become vital issues in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee. The women characters of her novels are very familiar and the novelist has very successfully portrayed them in the pre-existing context which really inspired the researcher to do her research with the purpose that the study would be a modern work in the field of literature and would render into helping hands for the researcher to do their research in this area. Therefore, this study is significant in the context of age of globalization and immigration. The major objectives of the research are as follows: 1. To find the thematic patterns in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee. 2. To study the influence of oriental and occidental culture on the women characters in her novels. 3. To explore the role of female characters in the development of the story. In order to obtain the objectives, researcher considered first seven novels of Bharati Mukherjee, and methodically explored thematic patterns, considering both the major and minor themes. Moreover, the influence of cross cultural conflicts in the immigrants‘ life and their sense of identity crisis were critically analyzed, and finally, role of women characters in the development of nuanced thematic patterns were explored in the research work. The thesis is arranged in five chapters where the first chapter introduces the novelist, Bharati Mukherjee, emphasizing her family back ground, academic and professional carrier and literary canon, back ground of the research topic, the major objectives and very brief outline of the context and plot of each of the novels. The second chapter is oriented to find the brief story line, the themes and thematic patterns in the novels. The third chapter is based on the influence of native culture in the lives women protagonists who settled in foreign land and illustrates the conflicts of Oriental and Occidental cultures that provide the altered shapes of the women characters in her novels. The fourth chapter is dedicated to explore the role of female characters in the development of each of the story. The fifth chapter is about conclusion that displays the major findings of the study. Mukherjee in her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter, expressed her own expatriate consciousness through the experiences of her heroine Tara Banerjee. In Jasmine, the female protagonist travelled several divergent geographical locations like neonomads and passed through many transformations showing the protagonist‘s sense of rootlessness and continuous search of identity. The Holder of the World, immigrant fiction, is based on the issue of immigration and identity crisis which was based on personal observations, autobiographical details and oral histories. In Leave It to Me, the protagonist being haunted by the crisis of her own genetic identity in the society she left her foster parents to find out her biological parents. Desirable Daughters discusses the burning issues of immigrant life, quest for identity and the difficulties of cultural assimilation. The Tree Bride attempted to find out the source of a woman consciousness and the making of an identity that transgresses boundaries in order to give it a new route. Mukherjee depicted different aspects of the cultural, political, psychological, gender and racial discriminations, problems and sufferings of Asian immigrant women. The novelist magically expressed her own experiences through short stories and fictional works and delicately depicted problems of immigrants and racism as an important feature of her writings. Most of Mukherjee's characters are Indian women who are the victims of racism and sexism, often driven to desperate acts of violence after realizing that they can neither be fit into the culture of the West nor in the Indian society they left behind. She specially sympathized on women giving illustrations of the predicament in the contemporary society and the distorted psyche of those immigrants who have been surviving in the conflict of traditional values. The women characters of her novels are very familiar and the novelist successfully portrayed them in the pre-existing context and they played the major role in development of the nuanced thematic patterns in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee.