Mukherjee Explores Private Lives and Public Histories

The Holder of the World

by Bharati Mukherjee

Knopf

$22.00

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 than transporting the woman and her place in a cultural encounter back three centuries. Mukherjee's The Holder of the World should be remembered for its carefully researched and full-bodied descriptions of the worlds that Hannah Easton inhabits.

The narrator is an obscure descendant of Hannah Easton, a woman named Beigh Masters who has spent eleven years trying to reconstruct Hannah's life, going to obscure museums in Massachusetts and retracing Hannah's trip to India. Beigh also has an Indian lover named Venn, a computer scientist who spends his life attempting to make 'virtual reality' possible. When Beigh has gathered enough information about Hannah's life, Venn will be able to program the computer to create a simulation of Hannah's life. It is unfortunate that this compelling historical novel must be filtered through this ostensibly post-modern narrative voice, one that is simply unworkable, intrusive, and weird. Mukherjee's attempt to encapsulate the essence of a contemporary American context fails and indeed takes away from her mastery over the other historical contexts with which she is working.

A woman "undreamed of in Puritan society," Hannah Easton is born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1670. She inherits her unconventional boldness of spirit from her mother who escapes a bloody Nipmuc insurrection by running into the night with her Nipmuc Indian lover. Hannah's foster family tries to inculcate her with the Puritan values of hard work and subdued deportment, but Hannah's legacy, resisting suppression, emerges in her lurid poetry and needle-work.

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.

Eighty years before America was to break with England, patriots, expatriates and repatriates found themselves on either side of the Atlantic; it was a complicated mess that not many writers would dare to make sense of The relentless Mukherjee approaches this situation through the eyes of Hannah, "an ideal correspondent, the perfect reporter," who keeps a diary during her stay in England. Hannah tells the story of a `desponder' (a term she ascribed to those who would go to America to make quick money and a quick name), Dr. Aubrey, who sets up a practice in Boston and charges three times the rate of "physicians trained in unsavoury local colleges like Harvard."

Mukherjee most successfully navigates the complex historical situation in the description of the early years of the East India Company on the eastern Coromandel coast of India; little has been written, in any form, on the men who laid the foundations for the British Empire in India, who began as competitors to entrenched Portugese, French, and Dutch trade interests. Hannah has followed her husband to India where he has employed himself with the Honorable East India company.

Mukherjee tells how strange and random circumstances would determine the establishment of a trading center: Fort St. Sebastian was founded by an Englishman who wanted to be in close proximity to his object of desire, a fisherman's five-year-old daughter. Or the Mukherjee discusses the Englishwoman's discreet turning-of-head when her husband finds a bibi, a native concubine. The desire for riches and adventure that drove men to India, "jilted by primogeniture," and the insatiable lust that eventually drove them crazy are narrated with a sensitive eye for detail, a fluency of prose, and, most importantly, a surprising detachment from Hannah's personal story.

The story finally reaches its much vaunted affair between Hannah and her Hindu raja, two-thirds of the way through the novel--and gets disappointing quickly. This is the most unsubtle part of the story: Hannah discovers a sexuality she never knew with her white husband. And in developing this romance, Mukherjee leaves the story vulnerable to the familiar interpretation of the East as a hotbed of lust and desire.

The 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 to Saleem's--the narrator of Midnight's Children-- linkage to Indian history. Mukherjee evens claims The Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson as an ancestor to Hannah's tryst with the natives. It works, then, when Mukherjee suggests that Nathanial Hawthorne was influenced by Hannah's tale in his writing of The Scarlet Letter. Nothing seems lifted or cheap. Indeed, Mukherjee pays homage tastefully and respectfully. The interplay of literary history works well with Mukherjee's serious historical approach.

The 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.