Word: holderness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Holder of the World...
Touted as the extraordinary tale of a Puritan American woman who, after following her husband to India, falls in love with a Hindu raja, The Holder of the World surely will be remembered as Bharati Mukherjee's finest rendering of a woman's story yet. There is no question that Mukherjee's creative use of a historical tableau--Puritan New England, Mother England, Mughal India--in her new novel demands a more intense reading than was needed for her previous stories of Indian women and their immigrant experiences in a contemporary North American context, but Mukherjee is doing much more...
Mukherjee's true achievement in The Holder of the World, setting it apart from previous works, is her use of the character of Hannah Easton as a vehicle by which moments of public rather than private history are explored. So when Hannah is whisked away to England by a one-eyed adventurer--a man who quickly turns into an absentee husband--Mukherjee seizes an opportunity to illuminate the nebulous relationship between New England and Old England...
...Holder of the World is rife with literary allusions and parentage, a new approach to literary technique for Mukherjee, whose earlier works have not been self-referential as literary texts. The described narrative structure is nearly identical to that of Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; in this novel, an Englishwoman goes to India to uncover the past of her step-grandmother (same obscure relationship), a woman who left her British Civil Servant husband for an Indian nawab. Mukherjee blatantly refers to The Great game of Kipling's Kim. Hannah's cosmic relationship with history seems suspiciously similar...
...Holder of the World deserves to be read not just as the inverted formula of Mukherjee's previous works--the white woman traveling East instead of the Indian woman traveling West--because the novel attempts to do much more, and succeeds...