Themes

Gender Roles and Cultural Tradition

The crash of Air India Flight 182 brings radical changes to its victims’ families’ lives. In “The Management of Grief” Mukherjee focuses on its effects on women. Women are confronted with the problem of mourning; do they need to observe the self-sacrificing mourning rituals and decorum of “proper” Indian widows, even in the “new world” of Canada? Shaila and Kusum are opposing models of behavior; Kusum succumbs to her culture’s expectation that she will dedicate her life to her dead husband (by not remarrying and living a life of asceticism) while Shaila struggles with these oppressive cultural demands, finally rejecting them.

Shaila imagines that she hears Vikram and her sons crying out to her: “Mommy, Shaila.” Their cries are telling: Shaila’s main roles are that of mother and wife. The patriarchal conventions of the majority of the world (women stay home, cook and tend the children etc.) are compounded by the specific “regulations” of Indian culture. For instance, Shaila has never called her husband by his first name or told him that she loved him, as is proper of an upper-class Indian woman. The emotions wrought by the crash lead Shaila to call into question her blind obedience, up until now, to Hindu female decorum. The tragedy of the crash makes the unseen but ubiquitous veil of female oppression palpable, challenging the affected women to break free.

As Indian wife and mother, Shaila is expected to follow mourning traditions. The Hindu widow cannot remarry, is prohibited from wearing certain hair decorations and jewelry, and is restricted in her choice of dress. In short, she is meant to spend the rest of her life despairing over the loss of her husband, denying her own social and sexual needs, and even doing penance as if somehow responsible for her husband’s death. Shaila’s grandmother has always been an example of such self-sacrifice: she shaves her head, thereby obliterating any trace of vanity or sexual appeal, and lives in self-imposed seclusion. She is so devoted to mourning that she forsakes her infant daughter, passing on her upbringing to an “indifferent uncle.” Growing up in such a somber atmosphere, Shaila’s mother has learned to be “progressive” and “rational,” rejecting her mother’s “mindless mortification” and urging Shaila to do the same. To encourage Shaila to “get on with her life,” her parents remember

Vikram by his casual westernized name, “Vik,” and tell her that he “wouldn’t have wanted you [Shaila] to give up things.”

Shaila’s parents want her to stay in India so that they can pamper her with luxuries and travel. As “progressive” as they are, they do not see that Shaila needs to return to Canada to “finish” what she and Vikram started. In deciding to return, Shaila resists binding ideas about both gender and culture. She is not just “Indian” any more, but Indian Canadian, and must return home (Canada) to foster and develop her complex, hybrid identity. Kusum, on the other hand, returns to India and in a sense becomes more “Indian” than before, pursuing a life of ascetic piety and travel to holy sites. Shaila views this as a regression into traditional culture and gender roles, accusing Kusum of “running away” and “withdrawing from the world.” Like Shaila’s grandmother, Kusum also forgets about her living daughter to succumb to the “mindless mortification” expected of Hindu widows.

Shaila articulates the change she is going through when Kusum is detained at the airport on suspicion of smuggling contraband in her husband’s coffin. Surprising herself, Shaila explodes and calls the customs officer a “bastard.” She reflects on her transformation: “Once upon a time we were well-brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet.” This is the clearest indicator that the trauma has unmoored traditional, upper-class Indian women like Shaila from the safety of their patriarchally imposed decorum. But even though, unlike Kusum, Shaila breaks free from these limits, the process is quite a struggle. After selling her and Vikram’s house and moving into a small apartment in downtown Toronto, Shaila lives a mechanical, joyless life. For a long time, she is haunted by visions of her lost ones. In this way, Shaila has also fallen prey to a kind of “mindless mortification,” repressed by her memories and her longing for the past. Like Kusum, she is living in a kind of paralyzing self-denial and has not made the brave venture into self-fulfillment. Only at the end of the story, interestingly at the behest of her “family’s” voices, does Shaila finally break free, symbolically discard the package, and treat herself to a life of her own. Ironically, the tragedy is the agent of productive transformation, forcing Shaila to reexamine her patriarchally bound life.

Collective Identity Versus Personal Identity

The tragedy of Flight 182 forges a new bond between Indian Canadians. As Shaila says of the afflicted, “We’ve been melted down and cast as a new tribe.” While providing much needed comfort, this new community bond has its pitfalls, especially when it is stretched beyond its effective limits. This is most apparent in Judith Templeton’s uneducated perception that all “Indians” are the same. Based on this misunderstanding, she enlists Shaila to give the “right human touch” to her government mandated visits to victims’ relatives. But as Shaila explains, all Indians are not the same: the elderly Sikh couple might be uncomfortable with Shaila because she is Hindu (the religious affiliations are often marked by surnames). Judith takes no heed, thinking that “Indian-ness” is a sufficient and common enough bond. Though Shaila and the couple do manage to communicate, Mukherjee makes it clear that they communicate on the basis of their mutual loss, not their mutual “Indian-ness.”

As a result of Indian Canadians being lumped together as a group, individuals lose their personal identity. They are considered as part or representative of a group rather than as unique individuals with diverse needs. Collective identity is substituted for personal identity. Members of one’s own ethnic groups also perpetuate this notion. The story opens up with a group of Indian Canadians gathered at Shaila’s house. As she narrates, there are “a lot of women I don’t know.” The group has gathered under the assumption that their common ethnicity not only brings them together in a support network but is itself a source of comfort. This is not the case for Shaila, who feels alienated and “ready to scream.” Even though they are of the same ethnicity, the strangers in her kitchen do not attend to her individual needs.

Although the story portrays the Irish as warm and sympathetic, it also highlights their assumption that all Indians are alike. Because Dr. Ranganathan has stolen roses from somebody’s garden, an Irish newspaper urges: “When you see an Indian person . . . please give them flowers.” While this gesture strikes Shaila as deeply compassionate, there is some criticism of the Irish conception that Indian Canadians are a generic group with a strong liking for flowers. As the reader knows, Dr. Ranganathan’s floating of the pink roses has nothing to do with his “Indian-ness” but is a memorial to a very personal and unique ritual he shared with his wife.

“melting Pot” Versus “mosaic”: Assimilation Versus Multiculturalism

“The Management of Grief” supports a vision of assimilation. Although the word “assimilation” in today’s parlance has negative connotations, Mukherjee’s conception as expressed in this story is progressive and productive. In particular, it is positioned against the idea of “multiculturalism,” Canada’s official cultural policy. In interviews and other writings, Mukherjee has criticized Canada’s vision of its country as a “mosaic,” preferring the “melting pot” model of America. Canada’s Ministry of Multiculturalism recognizes and protects immigrants’ rights to preserve their ethnic customs. While this sounds generous in theory, the real-life result is the emergence of divided ethnic communities that are reluctant to communicate with each other. Mukherjee and others have characterized these communities as “ethnic ghettoes” that discourage new immigrants from creatively adapting to a strange land or even just learning English. While providing important networks and mutual comfort, these mono-ethnic communities separate new immigrants from mainstream life and severely limit their life choices.

The criticism of these ethnic ghettoes is most evident in the description of the elderly Sikh couple’s neighborhood. Even Shaila, an Indian Canadian who has close contacts with the Indian Canadian community, is taken aback by the unmistakably “Indian” smell of the apartment building: “[E]ven I wince from the ferocity of onion fumes, the distinctive and immediate Indian-ness of frying ghee.” She is equally astonished by the women waiting for buses in saris and boys playing cricket (a British sport popular in Britain’s former colonies) in the parking lot. In other words, she is struck by the distilled Indian-ness of this small bit of Canada. The non-English speaking elderly couple, with their fear of Canadian documents and the white people who bear them, are representative of the fear and limits under which immigrants restricted to ethnic communities live.

The so-called recognition and support of diverse communities engenders an attitude of separatism. For example, the mainstream Euro-Canadians who run the government may be hesitant to get involved in the Chinese Canadian or Caribbean Canadian community, perceiving their “issues” to be culturally specific and best handled among “themselves.” Mukherjee argues in The Sorrow and the Terror that the Canadian government’s lackadaisical response to the crash was the result of this kind of separatist perception of the incident as an “Indian” matter. As Shaila’s house guests strain to find radio and TV news about the crash, Shaila “want[s] to tell [them] we’re [Indian Canadians] not that important.” She realizes that as an “Indian” matter, the tragedy does not warrant the full dedication of national resources.

As the sympathetic protagonist, Shaila offers a more productive model of Indian Canadian living. She resists falling into the trap of tradition like Kusum, who becomes more Indian than an Indian. She also rejects her parents’ implicit desire that she stay in India and be comforted by the familiarities of “home.” Shaila has accepted Canada as her new home and, as Vikram exhorts, must finish there what they started together. Her dropping of the package also signals her release from being stuck in mind-numbing mourning and its associations with oppressive “Indian-ness.” She says “A wife and mother begins her life in a new country, and that life is cut short.” Rather than figure out how to be that same Indian wife and mother, she ventures out into a new direction.

Topics for Further Study

• Throughout her work and personal search for identity, Mukherjee has drawn a line between the “immigrant” and “expatriate.” In her introduction to Darkness (1985), she rejects the “aloofness of expatriation” for the “exuberance of immigration.” What is the difference between immigrants and expatriates? What are their attitudes towards their new country? Select a story or a section of a novel from Mukherjee’s work and discuss whether the characters fulfill Mukherjee’s (or your own) conception of immigrant and expatriate.
• “The Management of Grief” offers a glimpse of the mourning rituals of Hindu women. Research in fuller detail the mourning rituals of Indian cultures (e.g. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh). Are these rituals different for men and women? Examine your own culture’s mourning rituals. Do they have varying expectations according to gender?
• In The Sorrow and The Terror, Mukherjee and Blaise carefully differentiate radical Khalistani groups from Sikhs in general. They emphasize that it is erroneous to blame the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on Sikhs when only a small, violent group of Khalistanis were responsible. They also bemoan the media stereotype of Indians as terrorists. Research the Khalistani movement, paying attention to the work of non-violent groups. How has the media contributed to their stereotyping as violent terrorists?
• Mukherjee has been both criticized and praised for being an assimilationist. What is assimilation? Research this concept using history, literature, or current events and discuss its pros and cons.
• Mukherjee has praised America’s “melting-pot” mentality. Yet across the nation, more and more “ethnic-towns” are emerging. In this way, the American landscape is beginning to resemble Canada’s “mosaic.” Discuss how contemporary America fits or does not fit into Mukherjee’s image of the melting-pot. In your opinion, which model is better, the mosaic or the melting pot? Use specific examples from literature, history or current events to substantiate your argument.
• Mukherjee and several other writers do not support “hyphenated” status. That is, they do not consider themselves Indian American or Chinese American, but simply American. What is your opinion of this “hyphenated” status? Does the hyphen devalue the immigrant’s claim to this country, or does it duly honor her ancestor’s culture? Use excerpts from literature, history and current events to support your argument.