Judie Newman

Spaces in between: Hester Prynne as the Salem Bibi in Bharati Mukherjee's the holder of the World

Summary In Its frame tale, Bharati Mukherjees The Holder of the World (1993) excavates links between seventeenth‐century Massachusetts and pre‐colonial Mughal India through the quest of a 1990s asset hunter for a lost diamond, the Emperors Tear. In the inset tale, Indians (Native Americans) are replaced by Indians (from the subcontinent) as the heroine (based on Hawthornes Hester Prynne) moves from New England to the Coro‐mandel Coast and the court of the Moghul emperor Aurengzeb. Transactions between cultures are at the heart of the novel, which draws upon research into the trade between Colonial America and the East, reversing the direction of exploration and discovery. Mukherjee moves beyond the boundaries of the conventional historical novel, marrying The Scarlet Letter with virtual reality techniques, creating a fictional space which corresponds to her conception of transnational identity. In the frame tale a researcher is engaged with the problem of constructing an interactive model of historical...