SOURCE: “Place and Displacement in ‘The Tenant’,” in The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium, Prestige Books, 1996, pp. 125-29.

In the following essay, Imtiaz uses Mukherjee's story “The Tenant” to explore themes of exile, displacement, and varieties of multicultural social relationships.

An important concern of the post-colonial literature is related to place and displacement. The concern with identifying a relationship between self and place leads to a crisis of identity. The self may have eroded either because of “dislocation” or “cultural denigration.” “Beyond their historical and cultural differences, place, displacement, and a pervasive concern with the myths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to all post-colonial literatures in English.”¹ Displacement frequently leads to alienation of vision and crisis in self-image.

The theme of place and displacement is not a recurrent pattern exclusive to post-colonial literature. It also marks a contemporary literarity of commonwealth culture. The...