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  • The Science Behind Impact Factor: A Comprehensive Guide to its Calculation and Implications

    Impact Factor

    1. Introduction to Impact Factor

    The impact factor, a measure often used to gauge the importance and reach of academic journals, has become a cornerstone in scholarly publishing. Created by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the impact factor serves as a metric to assess the frequency with which a journal’s articles are cited in a particular year. Although the impact factor was initially intended to assist librarians in journal-purchasing decisions, it has grown into a widely accepted benchmark for evaluating the quality and prestige of journals, and by extension, the researchers who publish in them.

    2. Understanding the Significance of Impact Factor

    The impact factor has emerged as one of the most prominent indicators of journal quality, with many academics and researchers viewing it as an important benchmark. Its significance lies in several aspects:

    A Measure of Journal Quality

    The impact factor is often seen as a reflection of the quality and importance of the work published in a journal. A high impact factor generally suggests that the articles within have been frequently cited, indicating their influence in the field.

    Prestige and Recognition

    Journals with high impact factors are often considered prestigious and influential, attracting submissions from leading researchers in the field. As such, publishing in a high-impact journal can significantly enhance an author’s professional reputation.

    Funding and Grants

    Granting agencies and institutions frequently use impact factors as a criterion when allocating funding. Researchers who publish in high-impact journals may find it easier to secure grants and other types of research support.

    Career Advancement

    For academic professionals, the impact factor can be a critical factor in promotions, tenure decisions, and other evaluations. The metric is often included in assessments of an individual’s research output and impact.

    However, while the impact factor is undeniably important, it is not without its flaws and limitations, which will be discussed in subsequent sections.

    3. The History and Development of Impact Factor

    The concept of the impact factor dates back to the mid-20th century, specifically to the work of Eugene Garfield. In 1955, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which later developed the Science Citation Index (SCI), the precursor to the impact factor.

    Early Days

    Initially, the idea was to create a system that would help librarians identify the most relevant and influential journals in each academic field. Garfield and his team wanted to aid librarians in making informed decisions about which journals to include in their collections.

    Broadening Scope

    Over the years, the use of the impact factor extended beyond its original purpose. It began to be used as a performance metric for researchers and as a selection criterion by academic committees for funding, hiring, and promotions. This broadened scope led to its widespread acceptance but also opened it up to various criticisms and debates about its validity and application.

    Expansion to Different Fields

    Initially concentrated in the sciences, the impact factor has been adapted for journals in social sciences, arts, and humanities. However, the metric is often criticized for not being as applicable or accurate in these fields as it is in natural sciences.

    Global Reach

    The impact factor has now become a globally recognized metric, influencing academic practices not just in the United States but around the world. Its widespread use has made it a topic of global academic discussions, both in favor and against its applicability.

    4. How is Impact Factor Calculated?

    Understanding the calculation of the impact factor is critical for interpreting its meaning and significance. The formula is relatively straightforward but provides insights into the journal’s influence within its field.

    The Formula

    The impact factor for a specific year is calculated as follows:

    $$
    \text{Impact Factor} = \frac{\text{Total number of articles published in the previous two years}}{\text{Number of citations received in the given year to articles published in the previous two years}}
    $$

    An Example

    Suppose a journal in the year 2023 received 500 citations for articles that were published in 2021 and 2022. If the total number of articles published in 2021 and 2022 was 100, then the impact factor for 2023 would be:

    $$\text{Impact Factor} = \frac{100}{500} = 5.0$$

    Special Considerations

    • Review articles often receive more citations than research articles, which can skew the impact factor higher.
    • Different fields have different citation practices; therefore, impact factors should not be used to compare journals across different disciplines.
    • It’s also worth noting that the impact factor does not consider the quality of individual articles within a journal, only the journal as a whole.

    Changes Over Time

    Impact factors can change annually, reflecting shifts in a journal’s perceived importance. Therefore, it’s common to see fluctuations, and multi-year averages are often used for a more stable estimate.

    Special Considerations

    • Review articles often receive more citations than research articles, which can skew the impact factor higher.
    • Different fields have different citation practices; therefore, impact factors should not be used to compare journals across different disciplines.
    • It’s also worth noting that the impact factor does not consider the quality of individual articles within a journal, only the journal as a whole.

    Changes Over Time

    Impact factors can change annually, reflecting shifts in a journal’s perceived importance. Therefore, it’s common to see fluctuations, and multi-year averages are often used for a more stable estimate.

    5. Limitations and Criticisms of Impact Factor

    While the impact factor is a widely recognized metric for assessing journal quality, it is not without its shortcomings. Critics have raised several important concerns:

    Not a Measure of Individual Quality

    One of the major criticisms is that the impact factor does not reflect the quality of individual articles. It’s entirely possible for a journal with a high impact factor to publish articles that are seldom cited, and vice versa.

    Citation Lag

    In fields where research takes a long time to gain traction, the impact factor might not be an accurate measure. The metric relies on a two-year window, which may not be sufficient for all research disciplines.

    Incentivizes ‘Citation Farming’

    The quest for a high impact factor can encourage journals and researchers to seek citations in ways that don’t necessarily contribute to the field, a practice known as “citation farming.”

    Skewed by Outliers

    A few highly cited papers can significantly boost a journal’s impact factor, potentially providing a skewed representation of its overall contributions.

    Discipline Bias

    Citation practices can differ markedly between disciplines. Journals in fields where citations are more frequent may have inherently higher impact factors, making cross-discipline comparisons misleading.

    Misused in Evaluation

    Unfortunately, many academic institutions and grant agencies still rely heavily on the impact factor for hiring, promotions, and funding, despite the known limitations of the metric.

    Ethical Implications

    The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has sometimes led to issues like data manipulation or even fraud, highlighting the ethical complications that can arise from an over-reliance on the metric.

    Given these limitations, it’s important for academics and researchers to approach the impact factor with a nuanced understanding and to consider alternative metrics for a more comprehensive assessment.

    6. Ethical Considerations of Impact Factor

    The use of impact factor as a primary metric for evaluating research and researchers has ethical dimensions that warrant serious consideration.

    The Pressure to Publish

    One of the most significant ethical concerns is the immense pressure on academics to publish in high-impact journals, sometimes at the expense of rigorous, quality research. This pressure can lead to a variety of questionable practices such as “p-hacking,” data manipulation, or even outright fraud.

    Equity and Access

    High-impact journals often reside behind paywalls, limiting access to research. This raises ethical questions about who can access knowledge and on what terms, potentially widening the gap between well-funded institutions and others.

    Ethical Review Skirting

    In the race to publish in high-impact journals, some researchers might circumvent rigorous ethical review processes for their studies, particularly when human or animal subjects are involved.

    Commercial Interests

    The publishers of high-impact journals often have commercial interests that may, in some cases, conflict with the dissemination of knowledge for the public good. This raises ethical concerns about the commodification of academic research.

    Focus on ‘Trendy’ Topics

    The chase for high impact factors can also narrow the focus of research to ‘hot’ or ‘trendy’ topics that are more likely to be cited, potentially at the expense of important but less popular fields.

    Neglect of Negative Results

    Journals with a high impact factor are less likely to publish studies with negative or inconclusive results, even though such studies are essential for a balanced scientific discourse.

    Influence on Peer Review

    There is concern that the drive for high impact factors might influence the peer review process, with reviewers and editors potentially biased towards papers that they believe will be highly cited.

    These ethical considerations highlight the need for a multi-dimensional approach to evaluating academic research, one that goes beyond the simplistic, albeit easily quantifiable, impact factor.

    7. Alternatives to Impact Factor

    Given the limitations and ethical considerations surrounding the impact factor, there is an increasing push to adopt alternative metrics, commonly known as “altmetrics,” for evaluating research and scholarly output.

    H-Index

    The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a researcher’s work, taking into account not just citation counts but also the number of publications. This offers a more balanced look at a researcher’s career.

    Eigenfactor and Article Influence Score

    These metrics consider the quality of the journal in which articles are published, as well as the number of citations, thus aiming to weigh the ‘importance’ of each citation.

    Google Scholar Metrics

    An open-access tool that provides citation metrics for scholarly articles, which can be filtered by various languages and subject areas, offering a more inclusive approach.

    Altmetrics Score

    This considers mentions in social media, blogs, news outlets, and other non-traditional platforms, aiming to capture more immediate impact and public engagement.

    CiteScore

    Developed by Scopus, CiteScore measures the average citations received per document published in a journal. Unlike the impact factor, it considers a three-year period for both the numerator and the denominator.

    Journal Quality List

    Some academic fields maintain curated lists of reputable journals, often based on peer-review practices, ethical guidelines, and other qualitative measures.

    Open Peer Review and Post-Publication Review

    Some platforms allow for ongoing peer review even after publication, providing a more dynamic measure of an article’s quality and impact over time.

    Qualitative Assessment

    While harder to quantify, peer recognition, awards, and other qualitative factors can also be meaningful indicators of research quality.

    Usage Metrics

    Downloads, views, and other forms of direct engagement with research can also serve as indicators, especially for work that has practical applications but may not lead to academic citations.

    While no single metric can capture the multifaceted impact of research, these alternatives offer additional lenses through which the value of scholarly work can be assessed.

    8. The Implications of Impact Factor for Researchers and Academia

    The pervasive influence of the impact factor has created a landscape with significant implications for researchers, academic institutions, and even the broader progress of science and knowledge.

    For Researchers:

    1. Career Advancement: Many academic positions and promotions still depend on publishing in high-impact journals, affecting researchers’ career trajectories.
    2. Funding: A strong publication record in high-impact journals is often a prerequisite for research grants, thereby influencing the types of projects that receive funding.
    3. Time and Focus: The pressure to publish can lead to “salami science,” where researchers slice their work into smaller, incremental publications rather than comprehensive studies.

    For Academic Institutions:

    1. Reputation: The collective impact factors of an institution’s faculty can influence university rankings, affecting its appeal to potential students and faculty.
    2. Resource Allocation: Universities may direct resources, including funding and support, towards departments or projects that are more likely to produce high-impact publications.
    3. Diversity of Research: Institutions may shy away from supporting research in fields that traditionally have lower impact factors, potentially narrowing the scope of academic inquiry.

    For Science and Knowledge:

    1. Public Perception: The prominence of impact factor as a measure of quality can shape public opinion on what is considered ‘important’ research.
    2. Commercialization: The pressure for high impact can also steer research towards topics with commercial viability, sometimes at the expense of foundational or socially beneficial research.
    3. Global Inequality: Researchers in low-resource settings, who may have limited access to high-impact journals, can find themselves at a disadvantage, perpetuating a cycle of inequality in global research.

    For Ethical and Societal Considerations:

    1. Open Access: The debate around impact factors intersects with calls for open access, challenging the traditional publishing model.
    2. Scientific Integrity: The impact factor can sometimes incentivize malpractice in research, including data manipulation and unethical authorship practices.

    Understanding these implications is crucial for a more nuanced perspective on how the impact factor shapes the academic landscape and what can be done to improve or supplement it for the benefit of all stakeholders.

    9. Impact Factor in Different Disciplines

    The use and significance of the impact factor can vary considerably between academic disciplines. Here are some points to consider:

    Natural Sciences:

    • Higher Impact Factors: Journals in fields like physics, chemistry, and biology often have higher impact factors due to the rapid pace of discovery and high citation rates.
    • Quick Turnover: Research tends to be published and cited more quickly, making the two-year window for calculating impact factor generally more applicable.

    Social Sciences and Humanities:

    • Lower Impact Factors: Citation practices in these fields are often slower and less frequent, resulting in generally lower impact factors.
    • Longer Lifespan: Research often has a longer shelf life, making the traditional two-year window for impact factor less relevant.
    • Book Publications: In some humanities fields, books or book chapters are more prestigious than journal articles, which are not accounted for in impact factor metrics.

    Medical and Health Sciences:

    • Clinical vs Basic Research: Clinical journals often have lower impact factors compared to journals focusing on basic science because they are cited less frequently.
    • Ethical Considerations: The drive for high impact factors has raised concerns about ethical standards in medical research, such as selective reporting of results.

    Engineering and Technology:

    • Applied Research: Research in these fields is often more applied and may not be published in traditional academic journals, affecting impact factor measurements.
    • Industrial Collaboration: Research is often conducted in collaboration with industry and may not always be published in a way that contributes to impact factor.

    Interdisciplinary Research:

    • Complex Measurement: Interdisciplinary journals can have varied impact factors depending on the range of subjects they cover.
    • Citation Practices: Varying citation norms across disciplines can complicate the interpretation of impact factors for interdisciplinary journals.

    Understanding the discipline-specific nuances of impact factor can help researchers make more informed choices about where to publish and how to interpret impact factors in their field.

    10. Role of Impact Factor in Journal Selection

    Impact factor plays a significant role in how both authors and readers choose academic journals. Here are some key points to consider:

    For Authors:

    • Visibility: Publishing in a high-impact journal often leads to higher visibility and more citations, which can be beneficial for academic recognition.
    • Career Advancement: Many institutions consider the impact factor when assessing a researcher’s performance, making it an important criterion for career development.
    • Credibility: A high impact factor can lend an air of credibility to researchers, particularly those early in their careers.

    For Readers and Researchers:

    • Quality Indicator: Though it has its limitations, many readers view impact factor as a quick gauge for a journal’s quality or relevance in a field.
    • Citation Worthiness: Researchers may scan articles from high-impact journals when looking for reliable sources to cite.

    For Journal Editors and Publishers:

    • Attracting Submissions: A high impact factor is a selling point for journals to attract quality manuscripts.
    • Marketing: Journals often advertise their impact factors prominently as part of their marketing strategy.

    11. Tips for Improving Your Impact Factor

    Improving your impact factor as a researcher can be a multi-pronged approach:

    1. Target High-Impact Journals: Your work is more likely to be cited if it is published in a well-regarded journal.
    2. Quality Over Quantity: Focus on publishing fewer, but higher-quality, in-depth articles.
    3. Network: Collaborate with leading researchers in your field to increase the visibility of your work.
    4. Promote Your Work: Utilize social media and academic networks to make your research more accessible.
    5. Open Access: If possible, publish in open-access journals or deposit your work in repositories to make it more accessible, increasing the likelihood of citation.
    6. Engage with the Media: Utilize press releases or blogs to showcase your research to a wider audience.
    7. Cross-Disciplinary Research: Publishing in interdisciplinary journals or collaborating with researchers from other fields can broaden the scope and reach of your work.

    By understanding the role of impact factor in journal selection and employing strategies to improve your own impact factor, you can make more informed choices in your academic career.

    12. Conclusion: The Evolving Landscape of Impact Factor

    The impact factor has been a cornerstone of academic evaluation for decades, providing a shorthand measure of a journal’s influence and, indirectly, the perceived quality of researchers who publish in it. However, as we’ve discussed, it is not without its limitations, ethical considerations, and discipline-specific nuances.

    A Need for Change

    The academic community is increasingly acknowledging the need for a more nuanced, multi-dimensional approach to research assessment. There is a push towards using a combination of metrics and qualitative measures to paint a more complete picture of a researcher’s contributions.

    Emerging Trends

    1. Open Access: The push for more open-access journals is challenging the traditional impact factor model and democratizing research dissemination.
    2. Data Sharing: Platforms that allow for the sharing of raw data and methods can provide additional layers for evaluating research quality.
    3. Public Engagement: Metrics that measure public engagement and real-world impact are gaining traction.

    Future Implications

    1. New Technologies: As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to advance, we may see the development of more sophisticated metrics that better capture the multidimensional nature of research impact.
    2. Policy and Practice: There is a slow but steady move in academic policy to incorporate alternative metrics into research assessment practices.
    3. Ethical Shift: With increased scrutiny, there is hope for a shift towards more ethical practices in research publication and evaluation.

    As we move forward, the landscape of how we measure academic success is likely to continue evolving. It will require concerted effort from researchers, academic institutions, publishers, and policymakers to develop a more equitable and comprehensive system for assessing the value of scholarly work.

    You may be interested in reding Levels or Categories of Scopus Journals: Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Journal Categories – Click Virtual University (clickuniv.com)

    Reference

    • Brembs, B., Button, K., & Munafò, M. (2013). Deep impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 291. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291
    • Garfield, E. (2006). The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA, 295(1), 90-93. doi:10.1001/jama.295.1.90
    • Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). Do authors comply when funders enforce open access to research?. Nature, 562(7728), 483-486.
    • Harzing, A. W. (2019). Journal quality list: 65th edition. Journal of International Business Studies, 50(9), 1443-1451. doi:10.1057/s41267-019-00271-0doi:10.1038/d41586-018-07101-w
    • Moed, H. F. (2002). The impact-factors debate: the ISI’s uses and limits. Nature, 415(6873), 731-732. doi:10.1038/415731a
    • Moher, D., Naudet, F., Cristea, I. A., Miedema, F., Ioannidis, J. P., & Goodman, S. N. (2018). Assessing scientists for hiring, promotion, and tenure. PLoS biology, 16(3), e2004089. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004089
    • Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., … & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. doi:10.7717/peerj.4375
    • Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
    • Seglen, P. O. (1997). Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ, 314(7079), 498–502. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.314.7079.498
    • Sugimoto, C. R., Larivière, V., Ni, C., & Cronin, B. (2013). Journal acceptance rates: A cross-disciplinary analysis of variability and relationships with journal measures. Journal of Informetrics, 7(4), 897-906. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2013.08.007
    • Wilsdon, J., Allen, L., Belfiore, E., Campbell, P., Curry, S., Hill, S., … & Johnson, B. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363

    [latex]\text{Impact Factor} = \frac{\text{Total number of articles published in the previous two years}}{\text{Number of citations received in the given year to articles published in the previous two years}}[/latex]
    [latex]\text{Impact Factor} = \frac{100}{500} = 5.0[/latex]

  • Levels or Categories of Scopus Journals: Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Journal Categories

    What are the distinctions between q1, q2, q3, and q4 categories or level of journal? View the following clarification

    Scopus

    Scopus Journal Categories

    Scopus is an international journal indexing service that offers journal evaluations. Scopus splits the quality of journals into different levels when evaluating them. The degree of quality of Scopus journals is also known as the quartile.

    In the evaluation of the quality of journals indexed in the Scopus database, quartile can be thought of as a grouping or clustering. There are four groups of journals, notably quartile 1 (Q1), quartile 2 (Q2), quartile 3 (Q3), and quartile 4 (Q4).

    Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Journal Differences

    As discussed previously, Scopus contains multiple categories of journals. Scopus journal levels are categorised into four quartiles: Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. Consequently, what is the distinction between Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 journals?

    The quality levels of Scopus journals are as follows, according to the book Research Funding Strategies in Universities to Improve Research Performance by Dr. Sri Suryaningsum, S.E., M. Si., Ak., C.A., et al (2020):

    • Quartile 1 (Q1) is the highest level, denoting the most influential Scopus-indexed journal.
    • After Quartile 1 (Q1), Quartile 2 (Q2) represents Scopus-indexed journals with high importance.
    • Quartile 3 (Q3) represents the proportion of Scopus-indexed journals of moderate influence.
    • Quartile 4 (Q4) represents the percentage of Scopus-indexed journals with the least impact.

    This quartile classification is based on the calculation of the number of cite scores from Scopus-indexed articles. The journal with the highest citation score will be included in the first quartile (Q1). Additionally, journals with the lowest citation score will be included in quartile 4 (Q4). Therefore, you may conclude that Q1 Journal is the most prestigious journal because it has the highest citation score. In contrast, Q4 journals are the lowest level of journals due to their low cite score.

    How to check the categories of journals in Scopus?

    On the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) website, we can really view the quartile for the Scopus journal. Most of the time, though, Scimago journal rankings are slow to update information about quartile Scopus journals. Due to the fact that Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) does not retrieve data from Scopus in real time, Scimago data lags behind the most recent Scopus data.

    The good news is that, as of 2017, Scopus provides information about a journal’s quartile on its website. Therefore, we should directly use the official Scopus website at https://www.scopus.com/ to determine a journal’s quartile.

    We may determine the quartile of a journal based on the percentile value reported by Scopus for the journal. If the quartile splits the data distribution into four parts, the percentile divides the data into 100 parts, or between 0 and 99 percent. To determine the journal’s quartile based on percentile, the following categories can be used:

    • Quartile Journal 1 (Q1) is a journal that has a percentile of 75%-99%.
    • Quartile Journal 2 (Q2) is a journal that has a percentile of 50%-74%.
    • Quartile Journal 3 (Q3) is a journal that has a percentile of 25%-49%.
    • Quartile Journal 4 (Q4) is a journal that has a percentile of 0%-24%.

    If the journal we checked has a highest percentile of 75% or more, it is considered a Q1 journal. If the journal we checked has a higher percentile than 74%, however, it will be classified as a Q2 journal.

    Follow these steps to find the journal’s quartile on Scopus:

    Visit https://www.scopus.com/, Scopus’s main website.

    You will find the following screen. It may be little different due to update in design.

    Scopus Home Screen

    Click on the source as mentioned in the figure.

    Scopus search screen

    Select title or ISSN, etc. as per your choice.

    Scopus search screen

    Write the name or ISSN as per your choice to find the journal listed in the Scopus. It would be better to choose ISSN, because you will get confirm one result if the journal is listed in Scopus.

    Scopus search result

    In the search result you will find the percentile, here the percentile is 17% that means the journal belongs to the 4th quartile.

    At the time of search if you will select the subject and enter the keyword (like “management’, “Supply-chain”, “working capital” etc. to find the relevant journal, in this case you can select the quartile as well to get the journal of a particular categories. However it is very important to verify that the journal is still on the Scopus list.

    To verify whether the journal is still in the Scopus list or not click on the journal to the specific journal page. Check whether in the coverage years “present” word is there or not as per the picture given below.

    Scopus

    Good luck for your research and journal selection.

    Dr. Afzalur Rahman

  • CROSS CULTURAL CONFLICT IN BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S“THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER”

    Dr. G. RAMAN 1* (ramlaxlit@gmail.com)

    Department of English at Sambhram University, Jizaxx, Uzbekistan

    MR. G. LAKSHMANAN 2 * (laxramlit@gmail.com)

    Department of English at Sri Malolan College of arts and science, Madurantakam, Chennai

    THE TIGER'S DAUGHTER
    THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER

    ABSTRACT

    The main concern of Indian women’s literature is the depiction of women struggling for liberation and facing mental states. Conflict is an inevitable part of human life, and human values ​​make a difference in nature. These variations usually make a violent turn. The composition of violence is complex, elusive and multifaceted. Bharati Mukherjee has endeavored to track conflicts and, as a result, the consequences of mental changes in Indian women, especially migrant women, that occurred during the conflict. Her fiction and short stories explore the conflicts women face while fulfilling their ancient roles as women’s descendants, wives, and mothers. Bharati Mukherjee is a Diaspora writer, she deals with the typical indigenous scene, shows in her fictional book The Tiger’s Daughter the image of a woman struggling to remain unharmed in a foreign land. In this post, we’ll explore how Mukherjee deals with her psychological tensions and realistically portrays the reaction and consequences of tensions in her life with her protagonist Tara. She reveals the problem of expatriate female Tara and offers them a completely new approach in her novel. The purpose of this article is to examine Bharati Mukherjee’s portrayal of the psychology of immigrant women and a deep understanding of their problems in her protagonist Tara.

    keywords: acculturation, cross-culture issues, cultural conflict, homeland, host land, immigrant woman

    Bharati Mukherjee is a proponent in expatriate writing.  She is an Indian settled in America. The Tiger’s Daughter is the narrative of a rich industrialist’s pampered daughter Tara who returns to Calcutta in search of (lie Indian dream after seven years of stay in the U.S. And is unable to fit into the culture of Calcutta, where she grew up and she finds that she is as much of an alien at home as she was abroad. Though the desire to become a part of her new milieu is strong, Tara’s attempts appear very superficial. Tara is not yet accustomed to American culture and finally remembers her fairy-like childhood days in Calcutta. She feels homesick and plans a visit to her native land. On her arrival in India, Tara finds herself in a strange situation. She confronts a world totally different from the one she had left behind [Nithyanandam 67].

    The Tiger's Daughter

    The First stepping on the land of India at Bombay fills her with disappointment. Bombay is the same but her outlook has changed. To her, Bombay railway station “was more like a hospital, there were so many sick and deformed men sitting listlessly on bundles and trucks’”. [TD 19] Her sickness and the situation in India make her think about her husband, David. The thought of her husband symbolically suggests the second self-developed in her.  It seems that an alien land has become more of a home to her.  She repents having come to India without her husband and she is unable to keep him off her mind. The mood of repentance in Tara is evident: “Perhaps I was stupid to come without him, she thought, even with him rewriting his novel during the vacation.    Perhaps I was too impulsive confusing my scare of New York with homesickness. Or perhaps I was going mad”. [TD 21]        

    Tara’s voyage from Bombay to Calcutta brings an equally disgusting experience to her. In Calcutta too, she encountered everything changed and deteriorated. Now, she finds Calcutta is under the grip of violence due to riots, caused by the confrontation between different classes of society. This shatter I dream of Calcutta and make her react in a negative manner.  She fails to bring her old sense of perception back and is appalled by the ugliness of the city of Calcutta with its poverty, squalor, disease, and Vanity.   She discovers strangeness in her friends and relatives and finds it difficult to cope up with a world which relents her.

    Tara finds herself a misfit everywhere she goes. With her dangling personality, she tries to look Indian and adjust with her friends, but there is an invisible gap between them and she feels the breakdown. She is forced to look at her inner world consisting of two cultures and the two different ideologies, which are the two worlds wide apart. Realizing that harmonization is impossible, Tara senses to go back to David.  The novel ends with the heroine caught in a bloody riot of Calcutta wondering, whether ever she would be able to go back. Tara sits locked in a car watching helplessly as an old friend is beaten to death in a riot, she is in the middle of a street full of angry rioters, she sees her husband’s view of Calcutta as apocalyptic: “the collective future in which garbage, disease, and stagnation are man’s estate” (TD 190).

                Though Mukherjee has refused that the novel is “based on any real person” and has declared that “the novel wasn’t autobiographical” [1987 interview]. There are many autobiographical instances in it.  Bharati Mukherjee remained in graduate Tara’s voyage from Bombay to Calcutta, brings an equally disgusting experience to her. In Calcutta too, she encountered everything changed and deteriorated. Now, she finds Calcutta is under the grip of violence due to riots, caused by the confrontation between different classes of society. This shatter I dream of Calcutta and make her react in a negative manner.  She fails to bring her old sense of perception back and is appalled by the ugliness of the city of Calcutta with its poverty, squalor, disease, and Vanity.   She discovers strangeness in her friends and relatives and finds it difficult to cope up with a world which relents her.

                Tara finds herself a misfit everywhere she goes. With her dangling personality, she tries to look Indian and adjust with her friends, but there is an invisible gap between them and she feels the breakdown. She is forced to look at her inner world consisting of two cultures and the two different ideologies, which are the two worlds wide apart. Realizing that the harmonization is impossible, Tara senses to go back to David.  The novel ends with the heroine caught in a bloody riot of Calcutta wondering, whether ever she would be able to go back. Tara sits locked in a car watching helplessly as an old friend is beaten to death in a riot, she is in the middle of a street full of angry rioters, she sees her husband’s view of Calcutta as apocalyptic: “the collective future in which garbage, disease, and stagnation are man’s estate” (TD 190).              

    Though Mukherjee has refused that the novel is “based on any real person” and has declared that “the novel wasn’t autobiographical” [1987 interview]. There are many autobiographical instances in it.  Bharati Mukherjee remained in graduate school to complete an M.F.A and she met and married Clark Blaise. Tara Banerjee, the protagonist of The Tiger’s Daughter, is modeled in her homesickness on Ranu’s experience at Vassar, but her might to endure that anguish, go to “Madison” for summertime school, meet and marry the young American David Cartwright, bear two sons, live at 124th street at Broadway, and go back after seven years, is drawn out of the stuff of Bharati Mukherjee herself (Nelson 5.8).

    New York was certainly extra-ordinary and it had driven her to Despair. On days she had thought she could not possibly survive, she had shaken out all her silk scarves, ironed them and hung them to make the apartment more “Indian”.  She had curried hamburger desperately …… She had burned incense sent from home.

    [TD 34]

    However, all these attempts fail to make her feel at home. Yet, soon after her return to India, she finds that she does not fit into the old life of Calcutta which she had left seven years ago and for which she had yearned when she was at Poughkeepsie. Her group of friends now irritates her with their lack of seriousness and “she felt very distant from the passions that quickened and outraged her class in Calcutta” [TD 55]. Though Tara meets her friends regularly at the Catelli-Continental, she “was startled at their bounder tremendous capacity for surfaces” [TD 42]. Though her friends are curious about her life in New York, they only wanted to know the superficial, external details. Ironically, Tara accuses her friends of lacking depth which is clearly absent in her too. Tara thinks of her friends as bringing, “,,..sharing of her personality. She scared their tone, their omissions, and their aristocratic oneness. They had asked her about the things that she had brought back and had admired her velour’s jumpsuit and electric-shaver, but not once had they asked about her husband” [TD 43].

    Seven years in the U.S. Has made it impossible for Tara to sense at ease with her close circle of playmates. The American experience has secluded her from Indian life and culture. Tara wonders: “How does the foreignness of the spirit begin?” (TD 37) for even the familiar David now appears unfamiliar to her. “He seemed like a figure standing in the shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television…. She felt she was not married to a person, but a foreigner and this foreignness were a burden” [TD 621. On her arrival at Calcutta, she is met with great affection and excitement. The celebrations around her make it difficult for her to even “think of the 120th street, apartment as home”(TD 63). Distance makes everything abroad and unreal to her. Her walk along the ghat and her visit to Tollygunje prove that she is totally out of touch with the real Calcutta. All through her Childhood, Tara has been undetected to the reality of Calcutta, life. For her, Calcutta just meant living in a huge house on Camac Street, going to school at St. Blaise, seeing movies at the Metro and how whiling away her time at the Catelli-Continental, drinking endless cups of tea and listening to the armchair politics, industrial unrest and increasing crimes. Even when she is surrounded by friends and relatives, she feels totally isolated and completely alone. By not being able to fit back into Calcutta society, Tara realizes that she is a misfit at both places. She is always troubled by nostalgia for the life that she left behind and this leaves her in a Catch-22 situation.

    The Tiger's Daughter
    The Tiger’s Daughter

    In Calcutta, people think of her as being too American: Reena’s mother calls her “Americawalli” (TD 151). Aunt Tharna’s quietly violent response to Tara’s innocuous suggestions can be seen as a paradigm of the response many Indian critics have had to this and other Mukherjee books on India and Indians. Aunt Tharna rebukes Tara thus: “you’ve come back to make fun of us, haven’t you? What gives you the right? Your American money? Your Meccha husband?” (TD 36). The Tiger’s Daughter upsets Indian critics greatly. They seem to share the reaction of Tara’s east while schoolmates who feel she has polluted herself beyond redemption by her foreign education and Meccha marriage (Nelson 9).

    While Tara falls in love, at first sight, with a Youngman in an elevator and has a wedding “with no invitations, no priests, no fires, no blessings” (TD 125). Being married to a foreigner does not immediately broaden Tara’s horizon for she finds that she cannot explain or discuss many ideas with him. Even in her letters to David, she does not give her own feelings. David fails to understand many aspects of her life because, he expects everything to have some meaning or point and asks: “why three baths for a day for god’s sake?” (TD 48). In failing to understand her, David shows the distance that has still to be covered between the two cultures.  By reading books on India, he cannot comprehend her country and she is convinced that if “he had not understood her country through her ……… probably he had not understood her either” (TD 50).

    Mukherjee’s protagonists differ in their perception of their roles in society or their expectations of Life. Tara considers her marriage to David as an emancipated gesture but realizes that emancipation presupposes a bondage which she is not willing to accept. From being a dutiful daughter or the Bengal Tiger, she wants to become a dutiful wife in the traditional mould. She wants to be appreciated by David and is most wary of his comments or criticism. Her correspondence with David does not follow “any pattern of confession, reproof or rebuttal” (TD 131), though he often, “accused her of stooped inanities and callousness…” (TD 131). Inspite of her seven -year stay in abroad, Tara has not matured into an individual with a mind or identity of her own. She does not possess the strength required to protect herself from people like Tuntunwala. Her experience with him emboldens her to a great extent and makes her decide to return to David, like a child running back into the protective arms of an adult. Tara is certainly not one of the emergent women of modern fiction. To her, father in childhood and a husband in later life are essential as protectors. She exemplifies Manu’s dictum: “pita rakshati kaumarye/ bharta rakshati yauvane” (Manusmriti qtd in Nithyanandam). She has not been able to develop an individuality of her own, different from the traditional roles of woman as daughter and wife. This immigrant does not adapt herself to suit the conditions of the land of her choice and continues to be rooted firmly in the traditional mould.

    Tara goes home to assess herself to see whether she can rediscover herself in her birth tradition and to understand how much she belongs and in what manner she is different. Though the central character, Tara has married an American and settled in New York, the novel is set entirely in Calcutta and is concerned almost exclusively with Tara’s attempt to come to terms with the fact that she can no longer connect to the city of her birth or find it as her home. Besides the theme of migration in The Tiger’s Daughter, Tara has also realized that by settling in America and marrying there, she had cut herself adrift from Calcutta and the people she had grown up with.

    Tara is an expatriate not only in space but also in mind and spirit. She exhibits the expatriate trait of being uncomfortable in both her own and foreign cultures. She represents the dilemma faced by the expatriates. The critic Sivaramakrishna says about Tara that the “retention of her identity as an Indian is in constant tension with the need for its renunciation, if she has to acquire a new identity as immigrants” (Nelson 60). According to Rustomjikerns, in the novel, Mukherjee presents, ” some of the more violent and grotesque aspects of cultural collisions” (Nelson 63) and according to Jain, “Mukherjee’s novels are representative of the expatriate sensibility” (Jain 42).

    Despite having a decent life with an American husband, Tara does not assimilate in American cultural milieu. Estranged by the ‘half-remembered’ and ‘half-forgotten’ rules of her old world, she struggles hard to feel at home in India but fails miserably in her attempt. Her failure to tie a knot with her ‘patria’ is enough evidence of how far she has traveled from her roots. She has an ‘unstable’ self which does not allow her to settle at one place.

    Expatriation is not only a key issue in this story, but it also serves as a metaphor for deeper kinds of alienation, such as existential alienation and self-estrangement. This is revealed in some significant images used in the novel. In this novel, Hotel Cattelli Continental, described as the “navel of the Universe” (TD 3) becomes the important symbol of a rootless existence, a symbol of Tara’s expatriate sensibility.

    The Tiger’s Daughter is a film that depicts a woman who returns to her birthplace after a period of self-imposed exile. Home will never be home again for such a person, and life in exile, harsh as it may be, will be preferable to what home has become. The discovery that Tara makes at the end of the novel is that the greenery and the forests she had associated with the India of her childhood-her vision of pastoral-were no longer there, something or the other “killed” them (TD 207). In New York she had dreamed of coming back to Calcutta, but “the return had brought only wounds” (TD 25).

    The greatest irony in Tara’s story is that she survives racial hardships while attempting to survive in a new country, but nothing bad occurs to her. She becomes a victim of her tragic end in her native soil in her home, which she had longed to see during her stay in New York, and where she comes to seek peace. Her desire to find a place to live and have security, which she missed in New York, ends ironically in frustration. We’re left with the irony that Tara, an Indian-born young woman, feels more love and comfort in the arms of her American husband.

    Conclusion

    The Tiger’s Daughter by Mukherjee examines the experiences of an Indian expatriate and an American immigrant. It provides a powerful new voice in diasporic literature, one that comes from an Indian lady who immigrates to the United States and redefines her ties to her motherland.

    Having been uprooted from her native soil through an accidental affair with a man of different roots, Tara, like her creator, dangles between her rest while homeland and her newfound homeland. It is like choosing the better of the two eyes. Tara faces this predicament for a time, gets confused and finds herself on a no-man’s land. However, experience on both the soils helps her use the better part of her discretion and finally plumps for the newfound homeland for reasons known-duty, security and practicality.

    References

    1. Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
    2. Baldev Vaid, Krishna. Rev. of Wife, by Bharati Mukherjee Fiction International. 1915: 4-5.
    3. Barrett H.Clark. “Time of Need”. Forms of Imagination in the 20th Century.  New York : Harper, 1994.
    4. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: Macmillan,
    5. Carb,Alison B. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Massachusetts Review 29, 1988.
    6. Chowdhury, Enakshi. “Images of Woman in Bharati
    7. Mukherjee’a Novels.” Literary Voice* 2 Oct-1995.

  • SOCIAL REALISM IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY

    MR. G. LAKSHMANAN 1 * (laxramlit@gmail.com)

    Department of English at Sri Malolan College of arts and science, Madurantakam, Chennai.

    Dr. G. RAMAN 2* (ramlaxlit@gmail.com)

    Department of English at Sambhram University, Jizaxx, Uzbekistan.

    SOCIAL REALISM IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY
    SOCIAL REALISM IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY

    Abstract

    Toni Morrison is one of the most significant modern American writers, having published nine books. Among her early works, Tar Baby, her fourth, has obtained great notice. It is “the least admired, researched, and taught” of all the sciences (Pereira 72). There could be two reasons for this: To begin with, the narrative does not solely focus on the experiences of African-Americans. Unlike Morrison’s other pieces, Tar Baby includes a lot of background of a white family. Morrison investigates the experience of the retired white man, Valerian, his wife, and his son with the same consideration as the black young man and woman, Son and Jadine, who are considered as the book’s main protagonists. For critics looking for a story with a totally “black style” to illustrate Morrison’s originality, a work with a lot of attention is a good place to start. Morrison’s style of emotional writing has kindled the readers mind to certain facts like cultural conflicts, racism and so on. Lack of self-identity and life in between the white and black culture portrayed through Jadine Childs, the central character has created a kind of confused uncertainty among Morrison’s readers.  Like all her novels Tar Baby is suffused with Morrison’s racial quest enriched with psychological and emotional move.

    Key terms: colonization, cultural conflicts, racism, self-identity, psychological

    Tar Baby is the fourth novel of Toni Morrison and it deals with social realism. The principal characters in the novel are jadine childs, an Afro-American model, William Green (Son) an Afro-American wander from Eloe, Florida, Valerian Street, a rich retired white industrialist from Philadelphia: Margaret Street, a rich retired white industrialist from Philadelphia: Margaret Street a beauty queen from Maine who married the much elder Valerian, Sydney Childs, an Afro-American domestic employee of the Streets: On dine Childs, Sydney’s wife and even she is an employee of the Streets: on dine Childs, Sydney’s Wife and even she is an employee of the streets and few other locals Gideon, Therese and Alma Esteem respectively.

    Toni Morrison
    Toni Morrison

    Jadine Childs, who is orphaned at twelve years is taken by her aunt and uncle on dine and Sydney Childs. Their employer Valerian Street helps Jadine to go to private schools and because of this upbringing she experiences a conflict between the white Society in which she is entrenched, and the black culture represented by her uncle and aunt and son whom Jadine love. She refuses to submit to the traditional image of womanhood which on dine and Son want to impose upon her. At the end of the novel, we see her returning to Paris determined to face her fears alone. Tar Baby traces the quest for Self-identity Jadine Childs the Protagonist. She doesn’t rebel against the White, she is enmeshed. But she has accepted and embraced the white culture without any question. Because from her age of twelve she had severed her Afro-American heritage due to the death of parents. The same way her uncle and Aunt expanded the gap by sending her to exclusive private school and to Sorbonne where only Whites are in majority. The adult Jadine is fully equipped to face the white world successfully. She becomes a part of it too. The only thing that disturbs her is the Afro-American world represented by nightmares, disagreements of son and the feeling of otherness that haunt her in Sons’ hometown Eloe, Florida.

    Morrison in this book Tar Baby depicts the struggle of an Afro-American Woman who tries her best to keep her identity and individuality despite the effects of her lover who wants to make her like the other woman of his childhood. Like her aunt who too wants to cheer her in the past and her white industrialist, who wants to cheer her to the white industrialist, who wants to blind her to his world. The most complex character in the novel is that of the protagonist Jadine. She is caught between two cultures. She has gratitude towards her aunt and uncle for their help as well as the Streets for giving her Education, but she does not equate her gratitude with duty and some readers find fault with her. Jadine refuses to see herself as an Afro-American first or even as a Woman. She tries to establish closeness with her aunt and also to protect. Valerian’s world. Woman of her past and of son’s past haunts her and they try to draw her towards her own self. Society does not support anyone who wants to come up in life. The black society wants Jadine to be like them and the white Society doesn’t accept her whole happily for the only reason that is she is a Black.

    The Prices she compensates for sticking on to herself is very high. She loses son’s the relationship with Ondine’s weakens and she does not have Valalerien’s help too. She flies off alone and determined. Some might see this as a defeat, but Morrison’s story of the Soldier ants narrated in the novel’s end says that the queen ant is the dominant force, and this reveals Jadine’s power and strength giving possibilities rather than defeat.

    Morrison says that polarized thinking is effective and dichotomous thinking is ineffective for living in the real world. When a person is defined as black or white, male or female, educated or uneducated limit the individuals capacity individual’s must rely on the authority within themselves and then they can organize their world and their understanding of it. Like her other novels, 0 even in Tar BabyMorrison analyses and gives a verdict of the society and the roles Afro-Americans play in that society. Morrison creates strong characters and unveils these characters’ struggle to realize their strength in -spite of external and internal barriers.

    The title of this novel evokes a comparison to the famous story of the same name. The fable of Brer Rabbit has many versions and in one, he is caught by the Tar Baby when he comes to steal cabbages from a garden. He succeeds in freeing himself and escapes to the famed briar patch. The Tar Baby is formed by Brer Fox to capture Brer Rabbit. Jadine and Son are considered tar babies because both of them have an irresistible attraction towards each other and this brings their downfall. Jadine soon recovers and is transformed from “tar baby” to a trickster and in that she lands in the briar patch of New York and later in the briar patch of Paris. Even though both of them have the traits of the Tar Baby still Jadine gets more acclaim due to her power and control over the relationship. Trudier Harris says that a close reading of Tar Baby will show that Son has much power and control than Jadine, because he shares more traits with Valerian than the victims who are caught in the traps with the master farmers. His unkempt state also could be compared to the black Tar Baby.

    Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell-it’s very ridge top.      

    Each knows the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the   

    other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. –

    Mama spoiled the black man will you mature with me? Culture bearing       

    black women, whose culture are you bearing? (Morrison, Tar 269).

    The judgments are that the characters must be both. Mature and culture bearing or they are lost.

    Tar Baby a mixture of serious, comic and even absurd qualities. The style is polished, elegiac, violent, poetic and even dramatically functional. The language of the uneducated as well as the language of the sophisticated are found with literary allusions. The novel is in bits and pieces as Morrison herself has said, but she succeeds in pulling this complex novel together by her extraordinary use of nature. On the whole, nature acts like an additional character in the story as complicated and important as a human protagonist. For example, animal life can observe, react and comment on the action Rivers are capable of deepest emotions, trees as seductive. as a lover, ants can marshal campaigns and swamps can grasp like rapists In the African vein, nature is fully alive, and it is not materially separated from human existence. A further sense of wholeness is- seen when nature is involved in the prologue and the epilogue. In the epilogue Son moves through water towards the island and in the prologue, he is urged by the water away from the shore.

    The relation between racism, child abuse in a white American upper-class family is depicted in Tar Baby. Toni Morrison’s image of this novel is an apt emblem for capitalist formations. These developments have penetrated every available nook and cranny of social space and have thoroughly, if unevenly conditioned human psychology and social behavior. Like the Tar Baby, or the quicksand into which Jadine wanders on the Isle de Cheralien, the capitalist mode of production absorbs and birds all that it touches, ordering the ways in which we view ourselves and others, the ways in which we move, Speak and express ourselves in the seclusion of our own minds.

    Social realism looks at society as it is and what it depicts if critical of the working of society. It moves towards reality and towards the victory of the international proletariat. The fact must be portrayed in all its actuality, the ugly as well as the wonderful. Realism sometimes sides with social action and this is evinced in Toni Morrison’s The Baby. Tar Baby is the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances. This is true in the case of Jadine. Even though she doesn’t respect her heritage, she is not authentic too. The African woman who views Jadine spits at her recognizing her authenticity. Morrison portrays it truthfully and doesn’t side with Jadine even though she is black. So, this typical situation is produced truthfully, and Toni Morrison is not partial.

    Toni Morrison is a complicated writer who masterfully blends together difficult concepts. “It is a simple story getting increasingly complex mythic, beyond Solution, yet teaching me a lesson I needed to know,” Barbara Christian writes about Tar Baby. As a result, Toni Morrison’s work highlights problems, but not solutions, that society should be aware of.

    Toni Morrison
    Toni Morrison

    When reading Morrison’s novels, one is prone to look for a character with African American ancestry. The Son has been identified as such a figure in Tar Baby by the majority of critics. In Morrison’s later works, he illustrates black people’s affiliation with their original culture solution. Tar Baby symbolizes an essential period in which the writer acquires an understanding of the intricacy and ambiguity surrounding African American people’s desire of self-knowledge. Furthermore, Morrison expanded the concept of alienation with Son and Jadine’s story to include not just social and philosophical difficulties, but also race and gender ones. She has made a significant contribution to American literature in this way.

    Reference

    1. Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood P, 2003.
    2. Duvall, John N. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
    3. Frisch, Mark. “Nature, Postmodernity, and Real Marvelous: Faulkner, Quiroga, Mal- lea, Rulfo, Carpentier.” The Faulkner Journal (1995–96): 67–81.
    4. Hallett, Cynthia Whitney. “Trickster.” Beaulieu 354–58.
    5. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.
    6. Hawthorn, Evelyn. “On Gaining the Double-Vision: Tar Baby as Diasporean Novel.”
    7. Black American Literature Forum 22.1 (1988): 97–107.
    8. Hemenway, Robert, ed. “Introduction: Author, Teller, and Hero.” Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. New York: Penguin, 1982.