The tiger's daughter

"When Tara Banerjee Cartwright, the heroine of this elegant first novel, returns to her native Calcutta for a summer, she finds she must not only become an intermediary between two cultures but also bear witness to the downfall of her own class. Tara is the adored, beautiful, and intellectually gifted daughter of Bengal Tiger Banerjee, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer, who is, in turn, descended from Hari Lal, a poet and physician who once quelled a Hindu-Moslem riot. Tiger Banerjee has sought to broaden his daughter's horizons by sending her to Vassar and to graduate school in America, where she has met her American husband, David Cartwright. Tara's trip home forces her to come to terms with her two worlds--and the growing realization that the Brahmin class to which she was born is about to undergo a siege and possibly suffer ultimate defeat.^

The Banerjees' house on Camac Street, cooled every hour by a spray of scented rose water, symbolizes the elegant, protected atmosphere in which Tara grew up. Outside, in the bustling alleys of Calcutta, starving naked children eat yoghurt and rice off the sidewalks and swarms of hoodlums call for revolution. Tara, who adores her handsome if naive father and her religious mother, is shocked at her own feelings of distaste for aspects of her heritage--the funeral pyres, the teeming life of the slums, and the intensity of the masses' needs. Bharati Mukherjee, who writes with delicate irony and sharp-eyed perception, has painted a memorable portrait of a refined yet aware young woman who is entirely sensible to the anomalies of her position. As Tara strives to recall her husband's liberal ideas, she at the same time views with sympathy the absurdity and vulnerability of her high-caste friends' lives.^ 'While her personal story remains the foreground of the novel, it is the fate of her class and all of India that hangs in the balance. Sensitive to the vibrations, the sounds, and the smells of Indian life, Bharati Mukherjee has giv