Published Paper Details:

Indian writers who live abroad quite often write about their experiences in foreign land along with their experiences of their mother land. Many a time it is found that they write about cultures, incidents, and impressions imprinted on their minds as writers. Sudha Murty is one of the prominent writers of 21st Century India. She is a bilingual writer who writes in Kannada and in English. She is well known for her writings. Wise and Otherwise, How I taught My Grandmother to Read?, Grandma's Bag of Stories are her remarkable literary works. 'Dollar Bahu', the novel is written by her which revolves round the worlds of three women characters viz. Vinuta, Jamuna, and Gouramma. The first two are the daughters-in-law, the former, an Indian Bahu and the later the dollar Bahu. Moreover, the novel has many stories of the Indians who went to the US. In this sense, the novel is a kaleidoscope of human faces of different cultures from Indian to American. It is a multicultural novel which shows cultural transformation of the characters due to variety of factors. People of Indian roots gathered in the US for different purposes are depicted by Sudha Murty. She describes two generations of Indians- first, Indians by roots and second American by roots. Murty's novel, Dollar Bahu can be divided into two parts. One of these parts is the stories of Indians settled in the US. It is in this part that the novel deals with the problems of cultural transformation. The second generation of the Indians in America face problem in relation to cultural and traditional practices in their lives. Shama, an elder daughter of Radhakrishna and Savitri is a representative of that group which is born in India but brought up in America. Chandra Shekhar and Radhakrishana belong to that group of Indians who are Indians at their root and did use of foreign culture for fulfilling their dream of wealth and luxuries. The paper attempts to examine the cultural conflicts and cultural transformation depicted in the novel particularly in relation to the characters that are in problem of cultural identity.