Bangalore beckons in Miss New India

Cover of Miss New India

Anjali Bose has a dazzling smile, nearfluency in American-accented English, and a gnawing hunger for life outside her rural Indian town of Gauripur, where the dilapidated Pinky Mahal bears witness to stalled progress and her stolidly middle- class parents are forcing her into an arranged marriage.

Bharati Mukherjee

Her expatriate English teacher, Peter Champion recognizes her ambitious nature and encourages her to dream big beyond the almost predestined arranged marriage on the cards for her. From time to time he boosts her self-esteem and stimulates the desire in her to write her own destiny rather than watching her destiny being written silently without her consent. But finally it takes one disastrous experience in the marriage market - a brutal encounter with a sadistic potential suitor – to push the 19-year-old Anjali out of her smalltown cocoon and into the dizzying, often mystifying, sometimes dangerous, streets of Bangalore.

Anjali sets her feet on the new promising land with Peter Champion's money and his introductions to a couple of contacts of powerful people who could help her in forming small footholds initially. She finds herself in a huge crowd of aspirants to be call-center service agents who are given American names, taught to speak like Americans, familiarized with America's geography - in short, trained to comfortably put up the garb of a regular American for specified working hours.

Anjali, who prefers to call herself by the more modern Angie, is torn between a life conscribed by traditional rituals and a life of independence in the gleaming metropolis of Bangalore. One future offers the possibility of a handsome husband found through online matchmaking services; the other promises a place where young women like herself work as call-center service agents and sip coffee at Starbucks. In Miss New India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Indian-born author Bharati Mukherjee portrays a country where old customs co-exist and often clash with new social mores; a country where Anjali tumbles loose from the limitations of caste and class, even as her father remains trapped by old structures and superstitions.

In this India, some girls endure elaborate beauty routines and pose for heavily retouched marriage portraits, all in pursuit of the perfect mate. Others - like Anjali - flock to the city where they throw off the shackles of convention, rename themselves Millie or Suzie, and enjoy the once-forbidden freedoms of single life.

"I have seen more and learned more in Bangalore than I have from twenty years in Gauripur. Here I feel I can do anything. I feel I can change my life if that's what I want!" declares a newly emboldened Anjali. Bu sadly her Bangalore tryst turns out to be a huge roller coaster ride where - she is seduced into the freedom and modernity that the city has to offer to its inhabitants, the trickery of one of the co-residents pushes her into troubled waters and the gloomy side of independent life does not remain alien to her. The novel grew out of Mukherjee's fascination with India-based call centers and the dual identities of the workers, who often assume fully fleshed-out American personas. Indeed, the descriptions of the call-center world, with its "accent enhancement" and "accent neutralization" classes and lessons in American pop culture, are mesmerizing. In those scenes, twentysomething Indians, who often have never set foot in the U.S., rattle off references to Brad-and-Jen-and-Angelina, Seinfeld, Carrie Bradshaw and Hannibal Lecter. "Miss New India" is at its strongest in its examination of a nation caught between past and future, and the struggle of young people straddling the nexus of the two extremes. But, at its core, the novel functions as a bildungsroman - the coming-of-age story of Anjali Bose.

And, unfortunately, that is also where Miss New India is at its weakest.

Even though Anjali is often described as a magnetic girl with a luminous smile and a seductive quality that draws strangers to her rescue, she is a strangely passive character who stumbles onto society-changing events and influential people. She doesn't so much change her own life as wait for her life to be changed.

In a moment of epiphany, Anjali realizes that her "crime was that of constant, heedless wanting; wanting too much; wanting more of everything." As a reader, I just wanted more from Anjali. Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee, winner of a National Book Critic's Circle Award, Mukherjee is the author of seven novels, two story collections, and the coauthor of two books of nonfiction. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940 to wealthy parents, Sudhir Lal and Bina Mukherjee in Calcutta, India. She learned how to read and write by the age of three. In 1947, she moved to Britain with her family at the age of eight and lived in Europe for about three and a half years. By the age of ten, Mukherjee knew that she wanted to become a writer, and had written numerous short stories.

After getting her B.A from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961, she came to the United States of America. Winning a scholarship from the University of Iowa, earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1969. While studying at the University of Iowa, she met and married a Canadian student from Harvard, Clark Blaise, on September 19, 1963. The two writers met and, after a brief courtship, married within two weeks. Together they have produced two books in addition to other independent works. Mukherjee is by career a professor and her marriage to Blaise Clark has given her opportunities to teach all over the United States and Canada. Currently she is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (inputs by Gauri Kumar)

-[ BY MONICA RHOR ]