Transnational Empire and Its Exuberant (Dis)Contents: Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World

Abstract

Through its erudite excavation of numerous primary sources that show the rich economic and cultural ties between Puritan Massachusetts through the revolutionary era and pre-colonial India, Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World (1993) also underscores the fact that America has been implicated in a global economy from its inception. With her historically deep look at these fertile connections, Mukherjee extends Michelle Cliff’s focus on the United States’ emergence as a nation-state in a global context to its transnational conditions as a colony nearly two centuries earlier. Like Free Enterprise, Holder of the World takes a long historical view of an America engaged in transnational crosscurrents and attempts to recover a sense of women overlooked by early American histories; it is thus that Mukherjee, in her own words, “extends the American mainstream” (“A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman” 34). And, with the other novels in this study, Holder excavates and envisions a national antinationalist history. Against the traditional grain of an insular Puritan city on a hill, Holder ’s history turns on a colonial-era woman from the “cosmopolitan” port town of Salem, Massachusetts, who defines the American character and helps shape the nascent republic (Holder 40).