Summary Of By Any Other Name

Every person within their lifetime tend to entrench themselves to a cultural identity based on where they inhabit. But will that apply to a situation where they are introduced into new environments with cultures different from theirs ? In the memoir “By Any Other Name,” two Indian sisters whose name are “Premila” and “Santha” were introduced into an Anglo-Indian school, where they encountered opposing views on their culture and faced racial discrimination from the school’s staff. On the other hand, in the personal essay “Two Ways to Belong in America,” two Indian sisters from Calcutta whose name are “Bharati” and “Mira” diverged into two distinct cultural identities as Bharati followed the American lifestyle whilst Mira still retained her

For example, Premila in “By Any Other Name” has shown that she had changed her point of view on British culture when a momentous conflict between her and her teacher occurred in school. Premila’s trial to surmount her conflict can further be seen in the climax of the story, where Premila decided to leave her school and take Santha home with her (Santha 38-39). Premila was upset that her teacher made her and her Indian peers sit at the back of the room, isolated by everyone else, and stated that it was because Indians cheat. (Santha 39). Following Premila throughout the story, one can also see that she had changed her perspective on British culture from positive to negative when her teacher was putting a derogatory cultural stereotype on her. This demonstrates the point at the start of this paragraph because Premila’s trial to overcome conflict had influence the way she initially perceived British culture as positive at the beginning of the story into negative at the story’s climax, which resulted in her quitting her school. Comparably, in “Two Ways to Belong in America,” one can perceive that Bharati’s attempt to overcome her conflict through her leaving the United States changed her initial point of view of Indian culture (Bharati 72). Since her marriage with an American of Canadian parentage, Bharati hoped to put