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CHAPTER - I

Origin and Cultural identity : Meaning And

Interpretations

Bharati Mukherjee was born on 27th July 1940 in

Culcutta to Bengali Brahmins members of the highest caste

among Bengali Hindus Sudhir Mukherjee and Bina

Mukherjee. Her Father, Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, was a Chemist

who had studied and done advance research in Germany

and the United Kingdom. Her mother, through hot very

educated, ensured that their entire three daughter received

the best of education. As a consequence Bharati Mukherjee

and Two sisters attained postgraduate degree.

There were the golden years of Bharati Mukherjeets

childhood, made possible by her father’s success as a

businessman as well as a scientist the family lived with in

the walled compound which meant that the daughter were

becoming “increasingly alienated from the middle – class

Calcutta of their early childhood” (Alam 1).

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 Sudhir Lal Mukherjee moved to Borda to start afresh

after the quarrel with his partner and then again to Cembur,

Bombay, in 1967. By this time his daughters were married;

they all had love marriages. Sudhir Lal Mukherjee seemed to

have shaped Bharati Mukherjee decision to be a writer, not

only imbuing her with his belief “in the power of the world

(1987 interview 39) but also by taking the initiative in

sending her off to the writers workshop at the university of

Iowa” (Alam 2).

Bharati Mukherjee reveals the very essense the India

Hindu culture she says:

In traditional Hindu Families take ours, men

Provided and women were provided for, my

father was, a patriarch and I a plaint daughter,

the neighborhood I’d grown up in was

homogeneously Hindu Bengali speaking, and

middle class, I didn’t expect myself to ever

disobey or disappoint my father by setting my

own goals and taking charge of my future.

Until the age of 8,9 lived in a house crowded with

40-50 relatives my identity was viscerally

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 connected with ancestral soil genealogy. I was,

who I was because I was Dr. Sudhir Lal

Mukherjee’s daughter because I was Bengali

Speaking and because my desh the Bengali word

for husband was an east village called fairdpur.

(Mukherjee 1)

It Seems the Bharati Mukherjee developed a sence of

isolation with in herself at this early juncture of life. It is not

very easy to assert one’s independence at an early age of 8.

So she found an alternative by drawing herself within to

discover her own identity. says she:

There was absolutely no sense of privacy, every

room felt crowded. In fact in the traditional

Bengali Hindu family of my kind to want privacy

was to be selfish. That was why I was so

entranced by the idea of Iceland heving little

population and lots of space… so in a sense what

I did was in order to make privacy for myself

make a little emotional physical space for myself,

I had to read, I had to drop inside books as a

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 ways of escaping crowds. As a result I become a

very bookish child, I read and read all day …… I

was three year old. That it’s a very accelerated

“education literacy. (Vignissen 34 – 35)

An era when education of women was not given so

much of importance, Bharat Mukherjee manged to give

herself a very early start she went for Seriour reading. She

read writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky at any early age.

The little girl with an incisive focused mind could

comprehend her future career as a writer at the age of 10:

“I know from when I was very young long before I was ten,

that I was going to be a writer” (Vigneseen 37).

Bharati Mukherjee discovered her identity rather very

early in life. She carefully found a pastime for herself, which

held lots of openings for her. Her Parents encouraged her,

her mother especially seems to be stimuli to on early start in

life. Bina Mukherjee played a major role in her daughters

upbringing. On many occasions for instance, It was her

determination to see her daughters independent and safe

from the humiliation after suffered by middle class women in

traditional Hindus marriage that led her to “make sure

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they’re well educated so no one can make them suffer”

(Alam 8).

Bharati Mukherjee at an early stage of life came to

encounter the various. Facets of life of Indian culture where

o bride commits suicide due to dowry demands. Atrocities

inflicted on women moulded her bent of mind; “To be

woman, I had learned early enough, was to be powerless

victim whose only escape was through self – inflicted wonds”

(Mukherjee 229).

Besides Joint family system of living with 30 – 40 add

relatives did not make life easy. In Indian culture and Hindu

family and especially in a joint family, every one’s concerned

about the other person every one tends to butt-in the affairs

of others and the name given to it is “Concern and love”:

So When Clark and I, at my uncle’s request,

visited the room where I had spent the First eight

years of my eye, I saw super. imposed on that

uncultured and recently painted room… central to

the metaphoric in my pursuit of privacy. Survival

from too much love. That was what privacy, to

escape to me but in the middle – class India, to

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 escape love is practically impossible; between

disastrous, however murderous, it is still love.

(Mukherjee 222)

Back in Calcutta, insistence on the part of Bina

Mukherjee got them admitted into a convent school instead

of traditional Bengali school. But as English become her

medium, she was totally cut off from her mother tongue

though she never felt guilty about it. The mental block which

was manifested during her early stay in big family, was

released through contact with outer world. English language

and life style proved cathartic and gave the balance in life.

This catharsis is denied to her character, Dimple Das Gupta

and result in death and murder. She observes that when a

language is sacrificed, the person is uprooted: “The gradual

erosion of the vernacular also contained an erosion….. I had

had was less destructive than this new sense of being a

minority on account of my colour. I felt I was a shadow

person because I was not white” (Mukherjee 182).

Adaptation and transformation become her two

weapons very early in life. Passivity in outside world makes

her more rebellions, when after marriage she has to settle in

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Canada and face the problems of racialism and

multiculturalism. Her attitude to adaptation helps her to

make the decision to reside in U.S.A. as an immigrant than

to struggle to be a accepted as an expatriate writer in

Canada.

Life in Calcutta in the middle of 1959, in the compound

of the pharmaceutical factory, was a phase in their family

which her parents referred to as “the good days”. Bharati

mukherjee considered the compound walls to be the

boundaries of her own kingdom and two sisters and herself

as the princesses who were escorted back and forth from

school to home, attending the celebration at factories,

distributing sweets to the factory workers. The grounds of

the Victorian house were metamorphosed into a beautiful

garden, complete with pool and imported rarities.

The sabbatical year in Calcutta makes her realize that

she is more of a misfit in the old world and though she is

unable to reconcile with her new world, still it is the world

which she prefers.

The city was infested with Naxalite agitation, workers

beaten up, and hell raising riots, recurrent on a permanent

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basis. The Victorian mansion inside the factory compound

with sprawling garden and field out her off from world,

which was dark and frightening. So was the mansion in

which her friends stayed. A feeling of colonialism prevailed

even after the British left because the bungalow and

mansions were the heritage of British who had built them in

order to alienate the outside world. Her published work

consists of seven novels are The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife,

Jasmine, The Holder of the world, Leave it to me, Desirable

daughters, The Tree Bride. And the two no – fiction works:

Days and Nights Calcutta, Sorrow and the Terror. Short

stories: Darkness, The middleman and the other stories.

The later winning her the 1998 National Book Critics Circle

Award. In her work, Bharti Mukerjee creates a vivid,

complex world about the disruption and transformation,

that arises in the face of an intermingling of cultures; the

terrain which she has so brilliantly made her own her

acclaimed novels and cultures the trials and tribulations and

trauma as afflict immigrants trying to establish their

identities in the new world and adverse conditions, have

been deftly handled in her novels.

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 It The Tigers Daughters the author creates a heroine

who, like herself, returns to India after several years in the

west to discover a country quite unlike the one se

remembered. Memories of a genteel Brahmin lifestyle are

usurped by impression of poverty, hungry children and

political unrest.

The second novel, wife is the story of a young Indian

woman Dimple Dasgupta, who attempts to reconcile the

Bengali ideal of the prefect passive wife, with the demands

of real lye. Dimple finds the adjustments to marriage more

difficult of shock and despair. She keeps contemplating ways

to commit suicide.

Consequently, the existent deteriorating Pathetic

conditions of Calcutta was totally excluded from their lives,

which was limited to the company’s walled compound, and

the walled compounds of Loreto convent school run by Irish

nuns who regarded the ‘walled – off school compound in

Calcutta as a corner of England.

Bharati Mukherjee was not only for removed from the

Calcutta life but was also being cut off from the Bengali

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Culture. The nuns were stimuli in devaluation of the belief in

her own Culture and Hinduism.

The seeds of uprooting were sownearly in her high

school, later on she leaves for America for further studies.

She decides to marry during a lunch break and decides to

Settle as an immigrant in united states. After graduating

from Loreto convent school, she completed her graduation in

English (With Honours) from university of Calcutta in 1959.

She did her Past gradationin English and Ancient Indian

Culture from the university of Barda. The education in

Bardda which involved study of ancient culture and rich

heritage of Hindu origin, reinstated her beliefs in Hinduism,

and the values inculcated into her by her traditional devolt

Hindu Parents. The interblending of traditional and modern

ideas inculcated in her by her parents gave birth to a person

who become independent and self confident to seek a career

as a writer and an academic in far- off land.

Even before she was in her teens, mukherjee wrote a

novel of 60 – 80 pages about English children when she was

in England. She wrote short stories for the magazine Palm

Levels in Loreto Convent School, which contained

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fictionalized episodes from European history. By the end of

the collage, she had made the decision to be a writer which

was endorsed by her father. Fate played a major role when

a VCLA Drama Professor was invited to their house for

dinner. He was in India with few students on a “Project

India” and suggested that Bharati Mukherjee be sent to

professor Paul Engle in Iowa, and later on, the wife of a

visiting Fulbright Professor gave her a recommendation

letter. This lady Bharati Mukherjee to bag a scholarship with

PEO Group, eventually landing her in Iowa’s writers

workshop in September 1961. In 1963, She earned her MFA

From the university of Iowa. She was admitted to doctoral

programme in English and comparative literature which she

completed in 1969.

Marriage to Clark Blaise had an impact on her life and

career as an academic and as an author. As she herself

says, her marriage is an intensely literary marriage. Mutual

adjustment and compatibility helped both of them to have a

healthy married life, with two sons. When Clark Blaise

heeded to find his roots in Canada, Bharati Mukherjee

moved to Canada in 1966 to teach at McGill at his insistence

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though reluctantly. Later on, Clark Blaise agreed to leave

Montreal in 1980 because Bharati Mukherjee could not

reconcile with the racial attitude of Canada, and they both

settled as immigrant in America. The traumatic upheavals

drove Bharati Mukherjee jee to revolt against the system

initially but, later on, she decided to live in congenial

environment as an immigrant in U.S.A. Her brief Sub-

biotical as an immigrant in U.S.A. Her visit to India proved,

that the nations, which everyone expatriates and

immigrants has about ones motherland. Proved to be wrong

but the people, who leave behind their motherland, try to

maintain the same attitude towards the old world.

The visit to Calcutta made Bharati Mukherjee realize

that India had changed a lot. The colonial still existed

among the upper class people but now, the exploited and

downtrodden had reached their tether’s end, and started

revolutions, which had changed the whole scenario. Staying

with relatives and attending marriages was nostalagic, but

the changed situation forced Bharati Mukherjee to realize

the nuances of the two cultures. The freedom of west did

not exist in Indian metropolis. The behaviour of aristocrating

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Parents (who like Indian Parents loved her to the exlent of

something her) was enough reason for her to decide her

future as an immigrant. The aristocratic bahaviour, which

charmed little Bharati Mukherjee early in life, did not hold

the same attraction:

On the other hand, Clark Blaise is more inclined

and impressed in fact, charmed by the exotic

Indian culture and people commerce.

Community, marriage, family, on the rights when

I was feeling not …. And I would think they were

the some thing, sambow- commerce, community,

marriage, family- all part of the Indian’s identity,

part of the world image that antedated my own.

(Mukherjee 105)

Clark Blaise ideas have been of great inspiration for

Bharati Mukherjee, as she has pointed out in her interview.

He has been a great support, a willing audience and critics

of her works. At times his advice has been crucial for her

work. For example, when writing her first novel she could

not make up her mind about inserting an episode were her

heroine is seduced by a lees – than agreeable character

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because of her gears that people would conclude that(10)

“Something similar happened to her” (Alam 10).

Together the couple has created two full length works

entitled Days and Nights in Calcutta is by Clark Blaise and

the first Part of Days and Nights in Calcutta is by Clark

Blaise and the second part is by Bharati Mukherjee. When

introduced, India seemed a poor country to Blaise, but

slowly, reconciliation brought about a change in attitude,

and Clark Blaise in more sympathetic to Indian than Bharati

Mukherjee herself. Bharati Mukherjee herself- imposed exile

created havoc with her life in Canada and a feeling of

uprooted ness Seeped in, after the realization that India of

yesteryears had changed beyond recognition. She felt more

comfortable in America where life was easy.

The mirage tended to disappear on the hard rocky

earth of reality. The childhood memories were crushed and

an irritable, nature Bharati Mukherjee refused to become a

split Personality. The decision to stay abroad bore no guilt

on her conscience. India instantly became another Asian

country rather that homeland.

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 Bharati Mukherjee attitude towards exile, expatriation

and immigration has changed over the year. Although she

now has a full and joyous sense of herself as an immigrant,

living in a continent of immigration She had at first self like

an exile, or at best an expatriate. As on exile mukherjee felt

drown to the country she had left behind and compelled

from time to time to evaluate the nature of her ties to her

“home.” As an expatriate in Canada, she considered herself

superior to immigrants, people who appeared to her as “lost

souls, but upon and pathetic,” while expatriates “knew all

too well who and what they were, and what soul fate had

befallen them “(Alam 36)”.

Accepting and adjusting to new situation with aplomb

seems to be a regular feature of her life. Jasmines decision

to leave her country to fulfill her husbands dream up taking

all kinds of dangers and challengers seems to reflect facet of

the author’s life.

There are several phases in Mukherjee’s life: the first

phase early childhood in a joint family till the age of 8; the

second and the happiest phase was her life in England; the

third was return to India where she led a protective and

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sheltered life in her father’s Factory Compound. A new

venture is on uptaking when she leaves for U.S.A. to pursue

her academic career.

The uprootedness in her began early. Changing

countries became a regular feature of her life unsettled life

and insecurity brought bitterness which did not last long

because of Co-operation of her husband and their decisions

to shift to North America as immigrant.

Her works can be divide into three phases

corresponding to the three phases of her life in North

America. The Tiger’s Daughter and essays of Days and

Nights in Calcutta are of the first phase when Bharati

mukherjee considered herself in exile and felt oneness with

India. The second phase works are most of the stories of

Darkness, the essay An Invisible woman: and The sorrow

and the Terror can work written in collaboration with her

husband. This is the phase when Bharati mukherjee had

shaken off the ties with India. The works of second phase

project the life of Indian expatriates in Canada. The third

phase includes works like the Middlemen and other stories,

Jasmine and her essays which reflects the life of immigrant.

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The work reflects her happy mood, the attitude of

transformation and adaptation to new terrains.

In 1988, Bharati mukherjee, already having written

two novels and a collection of short stories, wrote a

Controversial and thought provoking essay titled

“Immigrant writing Give us your maximalis. Published in the

New York Times Book Review, it focused on the American

fiction and its policies of Immigration with this piece Bharati

mukherjee not only established herself as decisive voice in

the US multiculturalist debate, but also “Consolidated her

position as one of the best known South Asian American

writer” (Grice 83).

Bharati mukherjee in her essay has distinctly

categorized the two type of American literary circulation, as

“minimalism” and “maximalism” the former concentrating on

fiction revolving around subjects like mid life crises,

childlessness, divorce and prevalent hazards in the society

like drugs and AIDS. Maximalist fictions evince the

experiences of the immigrants, their emotional upheavals

characterized by change. Immigrants who have shelved

their past lives, culture and language, rummaging through

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new realms, live through centuries of history in a single life-

time. Instead of being a burden she celebrates the

immigrant experience.

The two essays American Dreamer Published in 1997

in mother Jones and Two ways to belong in America

published in New York Times, 1996, are contentious pieces

on Policy of immigration and citizenship in America. The two

non-fiction articles as well as other such papers are Bharti

Mukherjee effeort to define the experiences of immigrants in

America. Two ways to belong in America rejects the

disparate attend towards citizenship in America. Bharti

Mukherjee’s suter mira insists on returning to India,

choosing a life of expatiation whereas Bharti Mukherjee

accepts her status as an immigrant in America to free

herself from the bondings of part.

American Dreamer has more of personal ruminative

musings upon Bharati Mukherjee life and her transitions, her

marriage to Clark Blaise and her moving to Canada, the

turbulent years spent there and her Sabbatical year in India,

which changed her decision to becomes an immigrant, which

proved a pivotal moment in her life, innervating her

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evolution as an individual and as an Author. Her continuous

self.

The two books that Bharati Mukherjee co-authored

with her husband, one of them the sorrow and the Terror

and the story The management of Grief from The Middlemen

and other stories, and the stories of Darkness throw light on

her preoccupation with Indian experiencing metrical

discrimination in Canada, which could be undoubtedly traced

back to the Canadian immigration Policy the stories which

are about the Indian immigrant in America are tinged with

doubt at the success of their assimilation in the American

Culture. The multifarious activities of her characters remind

the readers of her own experiences:

In the united states, however, I see myself in

those some outcasts : I myself in an article on a

Trinidad – Indian hooker; I see myself in the

successful executive who sides Hindi film music in

his tape deck as he drives into Manhattan; I see

myself in the shady accountant who’s trying to

marry off his loose- living daughter; in professor,

domestics, high school students, illegal busboys

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 in ethnic restaurants. It’s possible with sharp ears

and the right equipment to hear America singing

even in the seams of the dominant culture. In

fact, it may be the best listening past for the next

generation of Whitman. For me, it is a movement

away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the

exuberance of immigration. (Mukherjee 3)

A notable recurrent feature of Bharati Mukherjee

novels is that they depict the new- immigrant women who

are forced to mutate, transforming themselves to become

self - emancipated, self- confident- members of the

American Society. Exceptions are there, but the male

protagonists are the only ones, who trends to dwindle

between the two cultures, and in spite of their patriarchal

superiority, in comparison to the female protagonist seem

dwarfed and demeaned.

One of the most difficult stories in that collection

interpret was Jasmine, about a young Trinidadian arriving in

Detroit with no papers, ho money, no prospects. As the

story ends with her having sex on the floor with her boss, a

married university of Michigan Professor who exoticize her,

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it’s very hard to tell whether we’re supposed to see jasmine

as a victim of gross sexual abuse, or as a world-eater who

will discard him when he has served his purpose.

The Tiger’s Daughter is a fictionalized story drowing

from mukherjee’s own first years of marriage and her return

home for a visit to a world unlike the one that lives in her

memory. The Parotagonist, Tara Banerjee, returns to India

that the one she remembers leaving. This first novel

addresses Mukherjee’s persnol difficulties of being cought

between two towards, homes and cultures and is an

examination of who she is and where she belongs.

Darkness, her first collection of short stories, focuses

on natives of South Asia who crave success and stability, but

are hardened by their histories and face the difficulties of

prejudice and misunderstanding this collection was a

transitional work for Mukherjee, who was reflecting back on

her difficult years in Canada and cherishing the opportunity

to establish herself in the united states.

Jasmine, Mukherjee most popularly read novel, was

generally received enthusiastically, but there was some

criticism that was too short and its plot too contrived to be a

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really successful works of fiction. It is a novel that stems

from an earlier short story from The Middleman and the

Other Stories and was expanded to a story of a young

widow who uproots herself from her life in India and re-

roots herself in search of a new life and the image of

America.

While Mukherjee has been received favorably by many

critics and academics, she has also faced a good deal of

criticism, Particularly from east Indian scholars and critics. It

has been said that she often represents India in her fiction

as la land without hope or a future. She has also been

criticized for a tendency to overlook unavoidable barriers of

caste, education, gender, race and history in her tales of

survivors Particularly within realistically allow.

Bharati Mukherjee is a cross- Cultural writer,

Mukherjee has won several grants and awards from the

Canadian Government, Universities and the foundation. She

received the national Magazine Award in 1981 for her essay

An Invisible Woman prior to that she wan the first prize from

the periodical distribution Association for her story, “Isolated

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Incidents”. Fiction that Mukherjee’s works received national

attention.

The most Poignant story of this collection is The

management of Grief where shaila Bhave and many other

faces the destiny of losing their loved ones due to the

calculating Sikh terrorists of Canadian origin. The story is a

depiction of individuals having their own ways of handling

their Grief. Though the insensitiveness of the Canadian

Government is evinced with belligerent attitude, yet the

citizens are shown paying Condolences to the deceased and

offering flowers to the Indians who have lost their relatives :

Dr. Ranganathan whips the pockets of his suits

jacket inside out squashed roses, in darkening

Shades of Pink, Float on the water, He tore the

rose off creepers in somebody’s garden. He didn’t

ask anyu. One if her could Pluck the roses, but

now there’s been an article about it in the local

Papers. When you see an Indian Person, it Says,

please give him or her flowers. (Mukherjee 186)

Bharati Mukherjee in her novel The holder of the world

blends the historical period of colonial new England and the

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cultural and trade contrast between South Asia and America

via and East India Company in the 17th Century. The

historical Contact between south Asia and America is tracked

down through the Contemporaneous Perspective of the

narrator and a 20th Century American asset hunter, Being

Masters, whose purpose is to find the spectacular diamond

which is called the “Emperor’s Tear” for a client. The Hindus

Raja somehow brings forth her self- realization and at last

she exists congenially with her ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ and

‘Future’ her mother, her self and her daughter.

Leave it to me is a novel which symbolizes the rooting

of the author to the American culture. In a way, she

celebrated her American status, with living up the novel,

with the social and economic realties of the society, but

again, the handing of Indian origins of the female

Protagonist Emphatically points out the equipoise

personality. The new novel exhibits the cross cultural

metamorphosis of the female protagonist, Devi- Bharati

Mukherjee’s Novel, revolves around devi, who is the adopted

daughter of Italian – Americans, but as she grows, the

uniqueness of her physical attributes ostensibly innervate

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doubts into her mind, about her birth origins. the quest is to

find her last identity, to understand her psyche and to find

her bio parents. Her journey is of an American to search for

her Asian roots. Devi is not searching for a new identity, but

her journey, somehow indicates the journey inside of find

one’s own identity in this universe. Like the Hindi Goddess,

Devi Slaughters the demons in her universe and paves a

bloody path to reach her good :

Destiny works itself out in bizarre looks. I made

the It call. Domestic dispute, I told the

dispatcher. Let them find out how bloody. I heard

the urgent police sirens. I waited a long while for

the waist chains, handcuffs, leg shackles, and

just when I prayed for my misery to be over, the

waves rocked wild and heaved last chance free of

its moorings. (Mukherjee 239)

The influence of her mother, a strong willed lady who

is not subjugated to the atrocities of society, is etched on

Bharati Mukherjee’s mind. The strength that she gained as a

child, the nurturing qualities of her mother that is evident in

the (character of Jasmine) Fashioned Bharati Mukherjee’s

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oven all personality. The resilience power inherited from her

parents enables to take a stain in life, her unwavering

stance, which sees her through all the experience in Canada

and North America helps her in her ingenious delineation of

characters in her works.

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 CHAPTER - II

Bharati Mukherjee : A writer of Diaspora

A Diaspora (in Greek – “a scattering of seeds”) is any

movement of a population sharing common national and

enthic identity. While refugees may or may not ultimately

settle in a new geographic location, the term Diaspora refers

to a permanently displaced and relocated collective.

An Indian citizen who has migrated to another country,

person of Indian origin who is bourn outside India, or a

person of India origin who reside India other term with the

some meaning are overseas Indian and expatriate Indian. In

common usage, this of includes Indian-born individuals and

also people of other nations with Indian ancestry who have

taken the citizenship of other countries.

The tem Indian Diaspora has acquired a new meaning

with the achievement of Sunita Williams, She has proved

Indians wherever they are whether on the other side of the

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globe or in the space have never ever severed their

umbilical chord from the land of their origin and have

maintained a link with their ancestral land in terms of

culture and religion.

Bhiku Parekh commenting on the nature of Indian

Diaspora in his paper some Reflection on the Indian

Diaspora:

The Diasporic Indian is like; he spreads out his

roots in several soils, drawing nourishment from

one when the rest dry up for from being

homeless, he has several homes, and that is the

only way he has increasingly come to feel at

home in the world. (Parekh 66)

The word Diaspora in Greek means dispersal or

scattering of seeds. The term Primarily used to refer to

Jewish dispersion, came to be used to refer to

contemporary situations that involve the experiences of

migrations, expatriate workers, refugees, exiles, immigrants

and enthic communities. “Indian Diaspora” means

population outside India, particularly of those who have

migrated to foreign lands and in course of time renounced

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their Indian citizenship. The term stands for the fragments

of Indian population outside India who have aduired the

citizenship at the foreign countries and new belong to the

country of their migration but can trace their origin from

another land.

Since the later half of the 20th Century the word

diaspora is being used as substitute of ‘deteritorialised’ or

transnational, which refers to population that has originated

in a land other than in which it Currently resides and whose

social economic and political networks cross the borders and

which plays significant rules in the lived and societies of the

country of its adoption as well as the country of its origin.

Bharati mukherjee is one of the major novelist of

Indian Diaspora who have achived enviable positions with in

a Comporatively short creative span. As an expatriate in the

united states, she has captured evocatively the Indian

immigrant experience in her novels and two collections of

short fiction. The creative odyssey that started with ‘The

Tiger’s Daughters (1972) and produced Leave it to me

(1907) recently has kept her seriously involved in exploring

the comp laxities of cross–cultural interactions:

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 In order to understand process of the effect of

learning through foreign languages on Indian

diaspora in Mauritius or to examine the influence

of language on the socio cultural life of

descendants Indian immigrants in Mauritius an

investigation of the angoing interaction between

the indo mauritians and environment provided to

them through formass and informal educations,

becomes necessary. (Pandey 84-90)

Bharati mukherjee is an established if not

controversial, voice of the Indian Diaspora in North America

Born into a Bengali Speaking, Hindu Brahmin family in

Calcutta in 1940, mukherjee lift India for the university of

Iowa in the united states of America in 1962 where she met

and married the writer clark Blaise. In 1966, she followed

her husband to her ancestral home of Canada, where they

lived, first in Toronto and then in Montreal as citizen until

1980. In 1981, mukherjee and her family lift Canada to

return to the us, residing in New York until the late 1980s,

before the move to San Franciso, California, where she

31
continuses to live and work mukherjee become a naturalized

US citizen in 1998.

In a critical and creative career that has spanned over

thirty years, Mukherjee has been engaged in redefining the

idea of Diaspora as a process of gain, contrary to convention

perspectives that construes immigration and displacement

as a condition of terminal loss and dispossession, involving

the erasure of history and the dissolution of an “original”

culture concomitant with her literary and ideological

prescriptions of Diaspora, Mukherjee has elected to describe

herself as an “American” writer and has announced through

as an “American” writer and has announced through various

forums that it is the cultural narrative of America that has

provided the enabling site for her own identity

transformations as well as those she celebrates in her

fictions. Her reversionary cultural politics has aroused

considerable critical interest, itself a measure of the author’s

rising status, and it is necessary at this stage to briefly

gesture to the widen discourse of literary criticism in which

Mukherjee is placed with a view to understanding some top

32
the meanings accrued to her and to her writings n a

Diaspora context.

Her characters Diaspora, “with sentimental

attachments to a distant Nome land but no real desire for

permanent return (Mukherjee- 35)”. Mukherjee locates the

trajectory of her identity and cultural politics in the course of

crossing and recrossing multiple borders of language,

history, race, time and culture. Disrupting the constraints

and absolutisms of nationalist boundaries, her poetics of

Diaspora embody her sense of what as in her case, it means

to be a writer who was born and raised in India, been a

citizen as Canada and the united states, and who has been

shaped and transformed by the cultures of India and North

America. Mukherjee herself elucidates her aesthetic stand on

the identity reformulations made possible by Diaspora and

its context in terms that involve a trajectory from

“Unhousement” to “rehousement” a process that entails

“breaking away from the culture into which one was born

and in which one’s place in society of assured” and “re-

rooting oneself in a new culture.” Has can 39. I this age of

Diasporas,” She argues “one’s biological identity man not be

33
one’s only identity. Erosions and accretions come with the

act of Emigration” (“American Dreamer”4).

Mukherjee’s experience of the Positioning in Diaspora,

that “Space constituted through and between place and …

marked out by flows” (Glroy Small Acts 193)., Enable her

cultural productions to map a site that reconfigures the

dominant discourse of multiculturism and citizenship in

Canada and the united states. Gilroy’s characterization of

Diaspora as a space “marked out by flows” part icularly

resonates with the terms of my discussion for it calls up that

global dynamic of “flows” of peoples, cultures, idea, capital,

and instifulions that has given rise to what has come to be

known as “Cultural Citizenship”, a category as analysis

which has gained. Currency in recent scholarship on identity

politics in response to the dramatic transformations that are

taking place as a result of the great waves of migration of

the past fifty years thus, while conventional narratives of

citizenship frame national identity within neatly bounded

spatial- parameters, placing emphasis on “roots” and

original, cultural citizenship offers a flexible formwork which

can deal with the questions of home and belonging set into

34
motion by the complicated “routes” of identity an age of

Diaspora.

As a concept that addresses that relationship between

cultural identity and citizenship cultural citizenship takes into

consideration the subjective notions of race, ethnicity and

otherness in the making of the national narrative of identity

and citizenship. Central to cultural citizenship, then is the

idea of difference. The Cultural anthropologist Reno to

Rosado argues that cultural citizenship involves the right for

people from minority of subordinated Groups (recent

immigrants women, members of disadvantaged ethnic

Groups etc.) to be different and still belong to the nation. By

thus linking culture and citizenship, the fundamental aim of

the discourse of cultural citizenship is to call for “the positive

acknowledgement of difference in and by the mainstream”

(Miller 2).

Bharati Mukherjee her novel Jasmine seems to skip

from one identity to another and gives the impression of on

escapist, but she is more stable she transforms as the

situation demands and in spite of a battered body and mind,

she struggles to live a life on her own conditions without

35
making a comprise leaving But Might seem to be a selfish

act but it is her own decision to drift away from a life which

is not fulfilling. It seems that she is defying the predicament

widowhood. The preaching of Bhagwad Gita Seems to be a

Predominant factor while Bharati Mukherjee was conjuring

up Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee’s new characters totally

American, Steeped in its culture and it Seems that Fondly

Mukherjee has lest behind her past culture but the next

moment she adjoins the Indian Culture and Hippie Culture.

Jasmine in the Novel Jasmine, meets professor

Vadhera in the united states of America, who is trying to

create diasporic scenario of Punjab in his home. Punjab is

not the same old Punjab anymore for Jasmine, Punjab

signifies the terrorist infested place where her husband is

brutally gunned down by terrorists. For Professor Vadhera,

Punjab is the old- place where there in greenery,

brotherhood, exuberant familial bonding, and happiness.

Professor Vadhera is not aware of the new terrorist insisted

Punjab, or for the matter, even if he Knows he acts

unaware:

36
 They had taught me a great deal about surviving

as an Indian in New York. If I had been a

different Person with a different set of

experiences, if I had been another Nirmla, as

they’d expected, then professor is lesson would

be life- off riming, invaluable, inexpressibly

touching. They had kept a certain kind of Punjab

alive even is that Punjab no longer existed. They

set nothing go, lest everything be lost.

(Mukherjee 162)

Bharati mukherjee has differing experiences of

diaspora in Canada and the US have influnced her and her

literary productions, leading to imaginative textual and

cultural negotiations with and interpretations of dominant

narratives which exemplify through her stance on the

discourse of national identity formation in born nation an

engagement beyond simplistic ways of dealing with or

responding to multicultural in a charge after made against

the author. Beside providing opportunities for contesting

hegemonic narrative of national consolidates on the

dynamics at work in the fictions that I will set out to

37
examine also help us gain some sense of the relationship

that exists between cultural different and national unity or

identity. At the very least, by suggesting that it is something

that can be negotiated and contested, they problematize for

us the nation of multiculturalism. “One should not forget

that this too is a narrative of sort, a discourse shaped by

cultural and ideological needs” (Mukherjee 162).

Diasporic writing occupy a significant position around

cultures and countries. Cultures travel and takes root or get

dislocated and individuals internalize nostalgia or experience

amnesia. Though the immigrant writers share common

features yet the difference based on the condition of their

migration and settlement cannot be overlooked:

…governed by different reason in different times

of history. Economic reason governed the

movement of the indentured labour and of the

trading communities in the earlier period…has

governed the migrations of the modern times.

Immigrants ,who migrated to foreign countries

asindentured labour to fiji, Guyanda, Trianidad

Caribbean island and to Mauritius some one and a

38
 half century age initially faced…loss of their

religion and culrure, struggled hard to maintain

their identity. (Pandey 127-128)

Diasporal dream figures prominently in all the fiction of

Bharati mukherjee covering many moods of expatriation has

taiga, frustration, uncertainly, and despondency. In her

novel Jasmine and The Tiger’s Daughters. Bharati mukherjee

has shown dual cultural shock. This migration or Cultural

transplant leads to a crisis of identity and final reconciliation

to the choice. She has presented a fascinating study of the

problem of a displaced person in America as well as India.

The theme of isolution, disintergration of personality is

taken up by the novelist. Bharati Mukherjee in her novel

Wife (1990) respectively. For want of love, the life of chief

protagonist become meaningless. There is a gradual

disenchantement frustration a sense of aloneness which is

almost existential in its intensity in the life of Dimple (wife)

suffers from depression and frustration. In the cases

situations lead to the onset of neuroses mental tension

gradually rise and finally shapes the link with sanity.

39
Jasmine smuggles herself in the United States of America,

encounters all kind of humiliation in order to fulfill her

husbands dream. But unlike a dutiful wife, She is more

resilient to her situation reality of America is hard and

makes he rings inside initaiality : “We took the bridge into

queens. On the streets of saw only more greed, more

people like myself, Newyork was an archipelago of ghettos

seething with aliens” (Mukherjee 140). The disparity

between the rich and the poor is very wide in India but it

evicts in states, too.

The westernized American society and the modern

technological culture soon affected the simple normal life of

India. The human relationship was whipped away by the

whacky modern culture acquiring the latest modern of

products, in order to make life comfortable become the sole

ambition. The power emanating from technology

advancement of the first world lured the simple moralistic

values of Indian culture. Immigrants feel uncomfortable in

both the cultures, because they compare the comforts of

American with this own comforts, whereas in American they

son how feel indadequate, exist in the Diasporic ghettos

40
and lead a life which is more or less orbited around them

own people. Acceptance into the “majority” is difficult.

There might be exceptions, people who excel in this field

and help out in raising finds for political parties go get

recognised and participate in the mainstream:

From being a marginal minority who come to

America with the sole idea of securing well paying

jobs after completinggradate studies and

professional raining, and saving enough money to

settle down in India, and lead a farily affluent

retired life, Indian immigrants are how coming of

rage, and having second thoughts about

returning. The care holders who come to this

country in the sixties, and had planned to go

back to India after fifteen or at the most twenty

years, have take the citizenship, and me how

reluctant to leave America Perm dnantly.

(Mukherjee 16)

Jasmine unknowingly encroaches the grounds in order to

root herself into the American culture. She destroys,

knowingly or unknowingly, intruding into the lives of

41
married men. Taylor is abandoned by wheelie for her own

progress, and Jasmine steps into take her place. Each one

of the wives, be it Karin or wylie befriend Jasmine.

Jasmines urge to get rooted makes her march forward

towards her self emancipation. Her genuine repulsion to the

Vadheras initality shows her desire to go out and embrace

the unknown. She feels cuffocated in the self created

giretto in the house of Vadheras:

Jasmine’s temporary refuge with the vadheras is

an encounter with the insubstantiality of identity.

But the vadhera’s incomparably pale ghostliness

is a kind of vacuity. Mr. Vadhera is jrozen in

sclerotic lie intended to cover up his humiliating

and ghoulish as a sarter of Human hair, Mrs.

Vadhera is caught between the simulacra of two

lives, one in America and the other endlessly

rehercased on videotapes of Hindi films she

watches she dreams of both, having neither.

(Roshni 105)

Professor Vadhera in Jasmine and his family attitudinal

behaviour encapsulates the Indian diciporic getto. The

42
feelings tha lead to creation such ghetto in the realns of

American Dream. The self created existence in hybridization

is not a fated forced on them. Closely observed, One can

justify professor Vadhers working as a hair sorter by looking

at it positively. Instead of locking out her resilient power can

be categorized as his way of surviving in American. He lives

in the world of duality of rather being the provider of his

family, he maintains the same atmospheres as in India. Him

wife, a contemporary of Jasmine, finds a way out by working

in a shop and watching videos. The parent’s expectations

are traditional and they detest any intrusion in this house.

The mother-in-law expect her daughter-in-law to stay back

at home so that she can take out her frustrations on her

looking at the Vadhera family is like looking at any others

Indian immigrant family who shuttle between the two

cultures.

The cross culture into unters inevitably give birth to

apprehension in the mind of the expatriates and immigrants.

The confusion, misunderstandings and ambiguities in the

new culture are obvious:

43
 We he had married, he burned hi India society

membership card. He was Professionally cordial,

nothing more, with Indian doctors at the hospital.

But he knew he would forever shuttle between

the old world and the new. He couldn’t pretend

that he had been reborn when he become and

American citizen in a man hat ion courthouse.

(Mukherjee 105)

Bharati Mukherjee blends past with present and future,

blends tradition with modernity, the juxtaposing of two

cultures, Indian and American- blended in the same

bloodline:

I did not know I was capable of all that, not at

meg age.” he said, to which I laughed, not at the

all that of which there had been a considerable

amount, but at his professed amazement I

realized that for Bish his “age” was not

chronological, but mythic. He was seeing himself

as fitting into the ancient, discrete divisions of

life…… By hi age alone, Bish should still have

been a householder. But the state of California

44
 and my lawyers had aborted that phase much

earlier Indian it should have been. Rubi was still a

child; more children might well have followed.

(Mukherjee 148)

The protagonist, a South Asian immigrant questions

her identity, if she is an Indian or an American? Whose does

she stand in the new world? Though immigrant, expatriate

and diasporas (South Asian are deferent aspects of the

same terms the psychological and the cultural origins are

disintegrated. The dilemma of identity is born due to conflict

between psychological and cultural inheritance. As Manju

Sampat writes :

Mukherjee decries hyphenation that is thrust on

most South Asian immigrants. European

immigrants are never referred to as Polish or

German Americans, So why should an Indo

American, She questions. European immigrants,

because of the colours of this skin, easily blend in

Despite feeling totally adjusted to being an

American immigrant, Tara is Frequently asked,

“Who are you really?” She feels ‘tried’ of

45
 explaining Indian to Americans. I am sick of

feeling an alien.

Spivak also suggests that the counter narrative of the

diasporic elites Past coloniality and this further point is

relevant to my discussion of Mukherjee who disavows her

my class and postcolonial insertion in to the new world of

America. Mukherjee identifies we U.K. and Canada with

imperialism and describes her choice to emigrate to us as

choice for freedom from imperialism Her mythologising of

herself as a writer is aimed at constructing herself as an

American and at reading her own experience as national or,

more precisely, neo- national. Mukherjee neo- natiolism,

figured in the fantasy land of opportunity and the romance

of the immigrant, is therefore the countenarrattive to her

own diasporic condition and the dilemra of past colonality to

identify with the cestare and she fact. re- enacts its

imperialist stragties in her appropriation of the label

immigrant whereby the past colonel diasporic, fined a

nuturing and corroborative spore this enclave in her

attempts to remark history.

46
 Jasmine is a novel Produced by an Indian immigrant

woman, Bharati Mukherjee which depicts how living out

one’s ethnicity is made somewhat easier today in a

multicultural America through the path to Americanization.

But, for the Indian first generation female protagonist,

Jasmine, this is not achieved without a hitch. The tension

revealed in the conflicting Portrayalis of alien (Indian) and

local (American) cultures towards American are uniquely

handled by the writer and which shows, to a particulars

extent, Jasmines desire to overcome gender and race

barriers.

Indeed, Cultural identities con not be attributed to

irreducible cultural feature, but the negotiation of cultural

identity implies cultural exchange and recognition of cultural

difference. The hybid space is thus a site which witnesses

cultural performance and interaction and it is in this sense

that the boundary become the place from which something

beings, “… the bridge gathers as a passage that crosses”

Bhabha 105.

Jasmine is determined by strategies of resistance,

including shifting names and corresponding identities,

47
escaping from traditional space, using both violence and

sexuality in order to move beyond restrictions imposed on

her and thus renegotiating the space in which she actually

resides.

Jasmine has a monoculture and monochromatic, view

of the American Society and responds promptly to the

bahavioural patterns of American rather than the ethnic

community of Indians. Jasmine realise the naked reality and

wants to run away from the “fortress of Punjabiness”

(Mukherjee 148) She instantaneously indoctrinates the

Americanisation of the personality in her character but the

persistent Indianness seems to stick to the subsurface of her

adaptations. Jasmines metamorphosis from her so- called

Indianness and Punjabness into a newfound ‘liquid’ identity

of an American, translated into words through the live in

camaraderie of Bad Ripplemiyer, is the celebration of

amalgamated, egalitration society.

Mukherjee Contribution to the literature of Migration

consists in the new dimensions of indeterminacy and

complexity she introduces into the conflicted discourse of

migrancey and raelling identities. Her fables allegorize the

48
migrant’s split between the longinig to embrace destroys

and be destroyed by the promote of America. Which

engaging a range of strategies for surviving and managing

displacement, her migrant struggle indeterminately with

questions crucial to all Diaspora and exile : whether to

preserve or to reject identity by fleeing from or embracing

fixed location; to create a new self and destroy the old ;to

be an asserter, an outlaw, an assimilator; to erase or to

preserve the past; to accommodate or to destroy the self’s

subjection to social accommodation and “belonging” to work

within or in opposition to the rules of systems and culture.

The “Cultural Diaspora- isolation” what Stuart mall

Calls marks the beginning of the desire for the survival in

the community of adoption. The paper aims to explore her

sense of alienation in Canada where life as an immigrant

was unbearable, that forced her to make an effort towards

the process of economics, social and cultural adjustment

further, the paper will explore her desire for cultural fusion

in the new devilling, which in fact, in her own inward voyage

in The middleman and others stories and Jasmine. Bharati

Mukherjee novel, The Tree Brides deals with colonialism in

49
India, terrorism in U.S.A. and the British Diaspora in India.

As Sandip Roy writes:

Bharati Mukherjee certainly never thought

in 1961 that she could be both Indian and

American in quite this way. “When I was a child,

we were wary of Bengalis who had moved out of

Bengali,” says Mukherjee. To be a “Probash”

(diasporas) Bengali, was to be a sorry creature,

cut off from true Bengali culture…… she

remembers at that time, evening a place like

manhattan, Indians were so few that when

passing each other on the street they nodded and

smiled. “By the time I come to write Jasmine

Indian immigrants were for more visible as a

community, but the rhetoric for talking about

immigration was struck in the old melting pot

versus rejection of American Culture,” Says

Mukherjee. “That meant either you had to reject

wholly the Culture that you had come from or

you become very American and gave up

something in order to acquire the other.

50
51
 CHAPTER - III

Multiple Identities and crisis of

belongingness in Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee in an Indian American writer who has so

for published three novels, two collections of of short stories

52
some very hard- hitting essays, and two non fiction books.

It is a label that Mukherjee herself has never embraced- an

identity which she appears to see as confining rather than

defining, a means of marginalizing a group of writers, of

confirming them as other, and thus making them mute.

In Jasmine mukherjee has shown a cultural shock, Jasmine

leaves her country in search of her dreams. This migration

and cultral transplant leads to a criosis of identity.

Mukherjee avoided the immigrant writer’s temptation to fals

in the trap of glorifying his native country. Brinda Bose’s

comments in her perceptive essay:

A question of identy where Gender, Race and America

meet in Bharati Mukherjee are very much to the point:…

famale American identity; for her, a happy guilt less

amagamation seem impossible, and what goes on inside her

therefore is a similtaneous fracturing and evolving identity.

Bharati Mukherjee Focussus in all her fiction, on the

theme of alienation, and an exploration of the place in

habited by outside by those who are considered ether-

notably (Indian) Immigrants or expatriates more specifically,

Mukherjee depicts all her outsiders as female, in a deliberate

53
efforts to focus on the particular condition of female

alienation in contemporary society, on the male/ female

dichotomy and the continuing colonization of female identity

in contemporary patriarchal societies, useally- in Mukherjee

fiction India and the united states, in Jasmine (1991), her

mast accomplished novel, there is a marked shift, a refusal

to recognize those restrictions those restriction, a refusal to

accept invisibility. Here the title of the novel identifies the

protagonist, Jasmine by name rather than by her

relationship to a husband or a father. Which in contact

suggest resistance to the imperial shackles. Jasmine in

depicted as a representative of all womanhood.

Jasmine uses the metaphor of a Journey, in this case

through three continents to emphasize the distance Jasmine,

and by extension all woman kind, has to travel in search of

her true and freedom from the confines of a dominant

Patriarchal Culture. In Jasmine Mukherjee’s interest in the

crisis of identity, while incorporating national and cultural

identity focuses Primarily on gender issue, on the Position of

women as other, alienated by the system of Particiarchy

from power structures and the right to self determinations.

54
It is this aspect of the Novel which I of a female Protagonist

from childhood through various experience and crises, into

maturity and, more importantly, her self- identity and place

in the subverting a western genre which, for a woman

educated in a Calcutta convent school and the United States

is inherently hers too.

Jasmine’s journey to maturation can be divided into

four distinct stages (Paralleling, in number at least, Four

stages of traditional Hindus life), each of which is

represented by a change of name, or reincarnation, and

which, in leaving its own scars leads Jasmine to a greater

awareness of her female self- identity; Jasmine is a female

bildungsroman because it details Jasmine’s growth up from

a restricted, male- defined girlhood into the freedom of

liberated self- defined womanhood.

Jasmine’s birth in the village of Hasnapur, Jallandhar,

District Punjab, India is carefully stated to signpost her

culture identity. The significance of her female identity is

also signposted daughters were curses. A daughter had to

be married off before she could enter heaven, and dowries

beggared families for generations. Gods with infite

55
memories visited girl children on women needed to the

Punished for sins committed in other incarnations. When she

is named “Joyti” which aptly means light- the opposite of the

title of mukherjee’s first collection of stories, Darkenss

(1985), and an allusion to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

(1902) the name is given by her grandmother. Joyti will be

given other names, but this is the only time she is named by

a women, though that woman is both a product and

preserver of the Patriarchal system that Jasmine is bourn

into unwittingly, however Jasmine’s grandmother chooses a

name which can be seen to at least offer the hope of

difference.

Predictably, her first change of name of identity occurs

with her Hindu marriage, a ceremony which Hindus the

female to the male more certainly than in the west consider

for example a cautionary word of advice from an Indian

acquaintance of Mukherjee’s record in Days and Nights in

Calcutta:

Now, then; Mr. Blaise, Please do not be rash and

call us sexist. You see, the impulse to worship

one’s husband should be seen as a short cut to

56
 the worship of God. How good is your Bengali?

Can you read the inscription below?

When she marries, Jasmine adopts her husband’s

name and becomes Joyti Vijh. Where she had previously

been defined by her relationship to her father, she is now

re- defined in relation to her husband; the continuity lies in

the line of (Male) power : But Joyti’s Family name is not all

that change when she marries Prakash Vijh:

My husband Prakash Vijh, was a modern man, a

city man… He wanted to break down and joyti i’d

been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of

city women. To break of the past, he gave me a

new name : Jasmine. He said, “You are small and

sweet and heady, my Jasmine you’ll quicken the

whole world with your Perfume.

Joyti, Jasmine : I shuttled between identities.

(Mukherjee 76- 77)

Thus Prakash, with a shiva like, gesture of Power, destroys

Joyti and crates Jasmine. As she herself acknowledges. “Prakash

had taken Joyti and created Jasmine”(Mukherjee 97). But is this

any more than a change from feudalism into Patriarchal

57
Subjection? Prakash’s desire to change the given name of his wife

as well as her family name is Possessive (“my Jasmine”), an

assertion of Patriarchal Power which could be the consequence of

a more subtle, even subliminal male desire to control female

identity.

The next stage of Mukherjee’s bildungsroman takes place in

the united states. In florida, on her first night in the country,
Jasmine is raped (an almost clichized symbol in Colonial and past
colonial fiction of the brutal relationship between colonizer and
colonized); the melting pot culture of the united states can offer
no magical solution to her status as outsider. She then moves
upto New York, First into an Indian ghetto which saps her
individual identity, and then into a live- in job as a “day- mummy”
to Duff, the daughter of Taylor and Wylie Hayes. In Florida and
New York Jasmine in known variously as Jazzy, Jassy and
Jasmine, all derivatives of Jasmine, before Taylor renames her
Jase, a third identity which is a more lasting abbreviation of her
second one :
At the Jucture jasmine pauses to examine her so-

for tri-coloured identity. “Joyti was now a sati-

goddess; she had burned herself in a trash –can-

funeral pyre… Jasmine lived for the future, for

vijh and wife, Jase went to movies and lived for

today. (Mukherjee 176)

58
 When Jasmine continues her journey and moves to

Iowa, she change her name once more to Jane Ripplemeyer. In

doing so she again defines herself through her relationship with a

man, this time with Bud Ripplemeyer, the man she lives with,

though she is not legally married to him.

There is also one another identity that Jasmine

Possesses which is relevant to her spiritual growth. At various

stages of her journey Jasmine takes on, temporarily, the identity

of Kali. This is an interesting contrast to the legendary Figure of

Sita, Whom the then unmarried Dimple considers the ideas role

model for a wife: “In Dimple’s dream, she become Sita, the idea

wife of Hindu legend”(Mukherjee 6). As Mukherjee explains in

Days and Nights in Calcutta, “To the Hindu girl-child, Sita is an

exemplary figure. The lesson is clear, uncomplicated. The wife’s

role is one of self-obligation” (Mukherjee 32). This is a pervasive

ideal which helps to confine the expression of female identity, and

another impulse Jasmine must overcome during her process of

maturation.

It is only by letting go rather than clinging to a cultural

identity as do the Indians transplanted into north. American

setting in Mukherjee early short stories, that Jasmine achieve a

59
degree of freedom. At this point she can what she does’nt want to

be even if she can’t see what she does want to be. As Jasmine

continues her Journey west, in a manner which paradise the

American western genre, it is with the inference that every sunset

she rides into is also the prelude to a new down. Jasmine’s

journey is not over, despite the distance she has travelled.

In Mukherjee’s text Jasmine’s neighbors in Iowa seen

guilty of just such a practice. Jasmine is treated as an intriguing

oddity and mined for her culinary exoticism. How ever she

proudly notes, “ I am subverting the taste buds of Elasa country”

(Mukherjee 5). In a more Positive take on the local Passion on for

her Indian Cooking, Jasmine reveals “Multi Culture Consumption”

to be a double edged practice. On one side, characters such a

Jasmine consume, create and resubstantiate devalued cultural

heritage through the communal.

Jasmine bears indices of Father cultural mixing. In the

Novel through first- person narrator’ immigrants identity, some

markers of her deepening insider experience of America are from

her understanding of baseball loyalties of science fiction serials

like monster Truck madness and the python on satellite Tv as well

as of Lutheran relief charity sales.

60
 In Bharati Mukherjee’s Novel Jasmine, the eponymous

south Asian protagonist successfully survives her illegal

existences in America. She accomplishes this not only through

constant motion thereby evading immigration auttmrities but also

by inheriting multiple identities, obscuring and complicating any

acceptable nation of a fixed “America” identity Deepika Bhari

suggests that this constant movement and readjustment this

“Shifting and multiple identity” of the migrant postcolonial subject

between static polarities while rejecting the fixity that would be

indicated in the acquisition of civic identity. Characteristic both

her (postcolonial) condition and the that at the ever evolving

nation with which she chosses to identify Affected by and like wise

affecting the space of America, Jasmine Practice states of

perpetual identity change as she travels from Florida to New York

city, to Iowa, and finally toward the west and California:

... I am twenty four how, I live in Baden, Elsa

Country, Iowa, but every time I left a glass of

water tomy lips, fleetingly I small it. I know what

I don’t’ want to become….…… How can anyone

leave New York, He said, How can you leave

New York, You belong here. (Mukherjee 6)

61
 I open this essay with Jasmine because the Novels in

emblematic of global mobility narrative that are currently so

eagerly embraced, narrative that mulberry and peach necessary

demand as to rethink while Hualme their Protagonist mulberry,

over the condition of what Bharati name “Jasmine’s land

Americans” always becoming, “She is hardly granted the luxury of

transformance Personal and positively construed self- identity nor

does she significantly affect the landscape through which she

moves. Rather, national conflicts after become embodies my

immigrants, the Psychanatic Consequences of National burden

crossing.

Despite the Novels multiple selve Suggesting, as in

Jasmine, an advantageous, method of survival the book does little

to service a Past modern project that views subjects who resist,

whether consciously or not, singular identification as liberated into

passive multiplictig, borderlessness; and transalality. Instead this

essay propose how hegemonic, inter and intra-natural ideulges a

woman encourage duplication behaviour, in women such or

mulberry who seek some personal enjoyment and freedom but

often of physchomatic expense this essay considers now alien

“immigrant narratives in the United States, themselves tethered

62
to interested colonialist practice that conveniently over look

political connection between the local and the global, inhabit

immigrants subjectivity and progression, my focus on Jasmine

allows me to drow. Clean compression between Jasmine

successful and mulberrys failure Jasmine success and serves here

and as where in the essay as an apt segue this discussing now

Asian American novels invite either aggressive marketing to

popular ordinance or relegation to dusty liberty shelves, Jasmine;

reception, which I prices more sothun the books contain becomes

representative of “ Acceptable” women’s immigrants trails; the

novel thus enjoy’s popularity in Asian American.

Jasmine was obviously going though some from of an

identity crisis not is the typical sense, but in the fact that she was

letting everyone around her decide the role that she should play

and the personality she should taken on until she and she has

willingly accepted her new names and identity shift but she finally

realize she is not happy with being plane, Jane and reflects other

of the identities that have taken her this for in a life and perhapes

will have been part of her again “I have already stylist thinking of

myself of Jane, Adventure, risk, transformation: The Frontier is

Pushing indoors through uncaulked windlow… I cry … through all

63
the lives I’ve give birth to, cry for all my dead” (Mukherjee 240-

241). With that she leave with Taylor who come to Iowa for her

she is willing to risk all in order to adopt a name and discover an

identity that she can call her own.

In attempting to resolve her crisis of identity through

nomenclature- from Joyti to Jasmine, to Jase and to Jane-

Coupled with change in geographical, Iowa- Jasmine trice all

external alternatives but to no avail. The Person one sees at the

end of the novel moving away with Taylor is very much the some

one encounters at this earlier stages in the book. The movement

without cannot necessarily mean transformation within respect of

one with the inherited Indian ethos.

Perfect balance between tradition and modernity is put

through the character of Jasmine in Jasmine, who retains her

values while she keeps changing identity like a chameleon and

keeps pace with the American life. Her Driving force is to prove

the astrologer’s prediction of widowhood and unhappiness false.

This makes her adaptation or acculturation easier. Every time she

changes her identity she is reborn and rejuvenates in her rebirth.

She refuses to stagnate, and live of sacrifice but not be happy in

it. She leaves Bud to be with Taylor in the end because of this

64
virtue of falsifying the astrologer’s predictions and the belief that

nothing lasts in America: “In America, nothing lasts I can say that

now and it doesn’t shock me, but I think it was the hardest lesson

of all for me to learn.” (Mukherjee 181)

In Bharati Mukherjee Jasmine a constant shifting of

identity is a point of strength allowing the Protagonist a way out

of colonial and Patriarchal oppression. By changing identities

Jasmine succeeds in assimilating into her new host countries the

U.S.A. Jasmine life is a Prepetual process of migration from one

place to another, from one identity to the next Jasmine lives her

life in the “interstial space” common. Outwardly Jasmine responds

very promptly to the behavioral patterns of the American Society

and instantly inculcates it in her character. However, a tenacious

Indianness seems to cling to the subsuface of her adaptations.

Indra Bhatt Pertinently comments: “Jasmine takes a bird view of

the American life does not touch the deeper layers of values

there” (Mukherjee 179).

Changing countries eventually made Bharati Mukherjee

resilient and more tolerant and adoptable to all kinds of

situations. Adjustment and withdrawal symptoms were already

ingrained in her from childhood. The self- protective sense,

65
developed early, helped her to switch countries. The transition

from self- inflicted exile as an expatriate to self- preservative

settlement as an immigrant is evident in her novel Jasmine where

the Protagonist Prefers change instead of warmth and safe cocoon

of family Protection and love.

Accepting and adjusting to new situation with aplomb

seems to be a regular feature of her life. Jasmine’s decision to

leave her country to fulfill her husband’s dream, up taking all

kinds of dangers and challenges seems to reflect a facet of the

author’s life.

When the immigrants come to settle in America they

are easy faced with a New Culture, a new set of rules and a

hostile group of people who do not mix very easily:

The situation faced by migrants who leaves their

own country to settle in a new one is basically the

problem of learning to adopt to an unfamiliar

culture. This problem can be dramatic if the new

Culture is very different from the one they lift.

(Mukherjee 6)

Jasmine’s every movement is a calculated step into her

Americanization and with each development a vital change is

66
marked in her Personality. Jasmine’s flight to Iowa and her

renaming as Jane is indicative of a slow but steady immersion into

the mainstream American culture. Here we encounter a changed

Jasmine- one who had murdered Half- face for violating her

chastity, now not only willingly embrace the company of an

American without marriage but also is carrying his child in her

womb. We are simply surprised at her act Since every Idea

revolts at this form of an Indian widow. But one should never

forget that she is an adopter, a survivor. Du is also a fighter who

has survived eating worms and rodents in the refuges comp.

Jasmine easily identifies her self with Du because both have made

Odysseous exploits in order to live. ”They communicate silently in

a no- questions asked relationship of strong identification : they

come from the some. “Third world” and share a common legacy of

suffering and survival” (Sharma 153).

An Immigrants life is in fact a series of reincarnations. He

lives through several lives in a single life- time. This truth explains

the condition of Bharati Mukherjee as we as that of Jasmine as

Mukherjee confides is one of her Interview:

I have murdered and reborn at least three times,

the very correct young woman I was trained to

67
 be, and was very happy being, is very different

politicized, shrill, civil right activist I was in

Canada, and from the urgent writer that I have

become in the last few years in the united states

(Connel 18).

The statement has a marked similarity with Jasmine’s

outcry:

There are no harmless, compassionate ways to

remake oneself. We murder who we were so we

can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams.

(Mukherjee 29)

Mukherjee, by the subjecting heroine to multiple codes of

society and geographical locales seems to send the massage that

if one has to assimilate oneself to the mainstream culture of

adopted land, should forget one’s post. This nation finds ample

support from Jasmine’s statement:

Once we start letting go- let go just one thing,

like not wearing our normal cloths, or a turban or

not wearing a tika on the forehead- the rest goes

on its own down sinkhole. (Mukherjee 29)

68
 All through her stay for more than three years in Iowa

Jasmine has been faithful to Bud- She had acted like on Indian

wife who exults in her loyalty towards her husband. She has

identified all her dreams and wished with Buds. She has scarified

all her individuality at the holy shrine of matrimony. She thinks

that even the memory of the past life amounts to a kind of

disloyalty to Bud because he feels frightened by her stories of

Hasnapur. At Iowa she is perfect wife who tries to please her

husband by all means. She plays the temptress at this be best

and hangs up all decency to yield to the sexual passion of a

crippled person.

Jasmine’s restless move from one place to another betrays

her gripping alienation and bewilderment. On more than one

occasion she realizes that she is an “Outsider” and “Other”

itmerica an illegal immigrant with out passport living among

aliens where ways she know knows nothing about. She is always

apprehensive about America being and thinking, suffers

humiliating of disappointing” (Mukherjee 29). Again her failure to

understand Wylie’s decision to leave Taylor testifies to the fact

that she is a poor immigrant.

69
 Whereas wife’s narrative is straight forwardly chronological,

the narrative structure of Jasmine is Crystal, and tracks the

central character’s cycles of memory from the narrative present of

her life in Baden, Iowa, as the wife of an agricultural bankers,

back through her farmer existences as an Indian peasant girl, the

arrival as a young a vulnerable Immigrant in America and her

transitional period as an au pair for a New York couple. Each of

these stages is represented by a name change she starts out as

‘jyoti’ of Hasnapur is rechristend ‘jasmine’ upon her arrival in

America is nicknamed ‘Jase’ by her Employers in New York, and

finally becomes the all-America ‘Jane’ in Iowa. The considerable

attention paid to these name change in the text underscores its

symbolic and structural Importance. For example at pivotal

moments in the character’s life. Jyoti / Jasmine/ Jane reflects

upon this aspects of her identity. “In Baden, I am Jane. Almost,

She says at one point: and letter: ‘Jyoti, Jasmine; I shuttled

between identities” (Mukherjee 117). Jasmine Emerged as a

survivor from her violent past and this also indicated a clear shift

in emphasts in Mkukherjee’s writing.

In Jasmine the lass of identity that accompantes Jasmine’s

America is figured as a liberation rather than a restriction. When

70
Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane Sheds previous lives, she sheds with them the

oppressions and heartaches of those earlier incarnation always

moving one step closer to Empracing America as her desh

(name). The first instance of this is upon Joyti’s arrival in the US,

when Mukherjee uses the image of Sati Voluntary Immolation by

a Hindu wife upon her husband’s funeral Pyrej. Prior to this,

Joyti’s husband Prakash has been murdered by Sikh extremists in

India, and Joyti has vowed to fulfill their Joint dream of

emigrating to America together, on her own. At this point, Joyti-

soon to become Jasmine- Literally burns all of her baggage:

My body was merely the shall, soon to be

discarded. Then I could be reborn, debts and sins

all paid for…. I buttoned up the jacket and sat by

the fire with the first streaks of down, my firs full

American day, walked out the front drive of the

motel to the highway and began my journey

travelling light. (Mukherjee 121)

Mukherjee there by uses the image of Sati to symbolically

represent Joyti’s consignment to the flames of both her former life

and her name, along with her physical baggage. But, we might

ask, what of the woman goes too? If mukherjee Continually

71
suggests that ‘Americans’ are not born, but made, what she

seems to say here it that they can be born and made, and that

both immigrant and country are transformed by the process.

Like Joyti/ Jasmine/ Jane, too, he seemed to shed his former

life upon his arrival and threw himself wholeheartedly into new

life watching sitconacs, eating of Mc Donalds, and acquiring

English:

Du is Ripplemyer He was Du then… he does well,

though his sometimes contemptuous. He barely

spoke English when he arrival; now his fluent,

but with a permanent accent, ‘Like Kissinger’ he

says. (Mukherjee 13)

We were so full of wonder at how fast “he become American,

but his a hybrid” (Mukherjee 222). Only does Du transform

himself, but he also transforms his environment. As mukherjee

notes, “‘I’m writing about the way that America has been

Viethamzied, and the way my, characters are Jane too announce

‘I’m going some where” (Mukherjee 240). And also leaves. Jane’s

insistence that she was re- born American and through this

discarded her Indian identity- that her transformation was

‘genetic’ as she puts it- contrasts with Du’s added- on

72
Americanness, and serves to underscore mukherjee belief in

enthic identity as a choice. This in many ways prefigures the

identity. Performance we witness in her novel Jasmine, though,

Mukherjee makes we of a split narrative Persona in which to

thematize the issue of ethnic identity. Here, ‘Debby’ is the

adopted daughter of Italian Americans, who embarks upon an

odyssey in search of her birth parents, an Indian father and

American mother.

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is constituted at the

intersection of these elements of American myths: westward

movement and immigration. In the Novel the personal history of

Jasmine, an Americanized Punjab narrator, is Paralleled with the

growth of the united states as a nation that is developed by

immigrants who come from ‘East’ of the continent: for Jasmine

this means India and for the founders of America, it means

England. Jasmine, an illegal immigrant from India, legitimizes her

history by utilizing American literary tradition to incorporate her

story into the grand narrative of the nation.

Jasmine’s surrounding environment influences her formation

of her identities, and she navigates between temporal and spatial

locations, her perception of herself change, thereby resulting not

73
simply in Du Bois “double consciousness” but rather a multiplicity

of consciousness. There multiple consciousnesses create a tension

within Jasmine, for she feels the need to reconcile these

confecting perceptions so that they do not wage a psychological

war within her. Jasmine’s means of reconciliation is to reinvent

her identity completely to create a new self whenever she is

confronted within contradictory self- perceptions. Jasmine does

not simply perceive herself differently, but rather she becomes an

entirely different person with each now environment she enters

for Jasmine, assimilation classes to be defined as adaptation and

instead transforms the definition to the creation of a new self. But

regardless of Jasmine various Permutations of new identities, her

past always remains to a certain degree, haunting her with its

returns and disrupting the new life that she attempts to create.

Jasmine then meets Lillian Gordon, the women who provides

her with a temporary home while teaching her now to “become

American” or at least begin the process of assimilation. Lillian is

the test figure in Jasmine’s life to rename her, bestowing upon

her the westernized nickname “Jazzy”, a symbol of her entrance

into and acceptance a American Culture.

74
 After she has collected herself and regained a certain degree

of self- confidence, Jasmine leaves Lillian soon finds herself stifled

by the inertia of this name, for it is completely isolated from

everything American- Jasmine feels as though she has simply

wanted into a continuation of he former teenage days, and

muses, “It was as though a had never left India … I had traveled

the world without ever leaving he familiar crops of Punjab”

(Mukherjee 83). While Jasmine creates a new identity for every

new situation, he farmer Identities are never completely erased,

for the they emerge in specific moments in the text and

exacerbate the tension between self- Perceptions, thereby causing

Jasmine to create yet another more dominant identity different

from all those that come before.

When the inertia of the Flushing home becomes simply too

much for Jasmine to bear, she proceeds with her migratory

pattern and moves to New York city to become the au pair for an

American family. When Jasmine moves in with Taylor, his wife

Willie and their daughter Duff, She creates yet another identity

based upon a new perception of herself. While living with the

Hayes family, Jasmine begins to master the English language,

thereby empowering herself to further appropriate American

75
culture thus as Jasmine becomes more fluent in English,

discovering the intricacies of vernacular expressions, she becomes

more American. Taylor begging to call her “Jase” and “Jassy”

Anglicized versions of her home that represent the emergence of

her increasingly westernized identity.

Jasmine creates her final identity when she moves to Baden

and meets Bud Ripplemyer, an American bankers who instantly

falls in love with her they eventually marry and Bud renames

Jasmine “Jane” yet another evaluation of her home and sigh of

her new identity initiated by a male figure in her life Bud is

reminiscent of Prakash in the companion. He encourages Jasmine

to freely “change roles from caregiver to temptress” whenever

she feels the desire to do so” (Mukherjee 97). Yet Bud differs

from all of Jasmine’s previous lovers in that he is the first one to

view her sexuality through the line of his own orientalist fantasy.

Jasmine knows this, and unequivocally states, “Bud courts me

because I am aliens I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability. The

east plugs me into instant vitality the wisdom. I rejuvenate him

simply by being who I am” (Mukherjee 98).

Jasmine has almost totally appropriated American culture,

and in Baden country, the community desire to make her familiar

76
and see her as assimilated, thereby allowing Jasmine to adopt a

completely new identity with ease. The “Jase” of New York nas

now receded so that Jane May advance; “I whisper the name,

Jase, Jase, Jase as is I am calling someone I once knew”

(Mukherjee 99). Jasmine’s racial identity also morphs in Baden,

for her deference is recognized but not comprehended or openly

acknowledged, nor are attempts made to under stand the

specifies of this difference. Rather, the Baden community

attempts to westernize Jasmine so it may see her as familiar

instead of alien:

In Baden, the farmers are afraid to suggest I’m

different. They’ve seen the aerograns I receive, the strange

lettering I can decipher. To the, alien knowledge means

intelligence. This want to make me familiar. In a pinch,

they’ll admit that I might look a little different, that I’ma

‘dark- haired girl” in a naturally blond country. I have a

“darkish complexion” (in India I’m” wheatish”), as though I

might be Greek from one grandparent, I’m from a generic

place. “Over there, which might be Ireland, trance, or Italy.

I’m not a Lutheran, which isn’t say I might not be

Presbyterian…” (Mukherjee 33).

77
 For the first time, Jasmine’s recial identity is not

comprised by way of her difference, but rather her similarity

to that which is familiar to and “American” for the Baden

community. Her friends and neighbors attempt to diminish

Jasmine’s differences by describing her as though she were

European and essentially white, all traces of her Indian once

try wiped away. “They tell me I have no accent, but I don’t

sound Iowa, either. I’m like those voice on the telephone,

very clear and soothing may be Northern California, they

say (Mukherjee 13). Once again, Jasmine’s recial identity is

contingent upon her environment and its other inhabitants,

and in Baden she is seen as “Almost white”, but in no way

South Asian or African- American or Caribbean as she was

perceived at other points in her life. Jasmine new Perception

of her race is an essential aspect of her identity as “Jane”,

for when Jasmine perceives herself as being assimilated, she

in fact becomes the “typical American” that she has always

wanted to be.

Yet in characteristic style, Jasmine cannot remain in

this stable life in Baden, for she desire more adventures and

disruption, and she thrives on the presence of change in her

78
life. The end of the novel finds Jasmine moving to California

with Taylor, uncertain of what the future will bring but

nevertheless confident in her delision to leave. Jasmine’s

desertion of Bud for Taylor at he end of the novel suggests

that she will create yet another identity for her new

environment, wherever that location may be. This sense of

movement at the end of the novel further reinforces the

nation that Jasmine’s identity is forever evolving in relation

to her Surroundings, and while we as readers can infer that

another identity of some sort will be create, we do not know

the specific nature of the text, Premonition of “Jane

Ripplemeyer” Mukherjee causes the read, to feel the same

ambiguity toward identity that Jasmine does, thereby aptly

conversing the sens of uncertainly that is the essence of

diasporic identity formation.

Identity with in Jasmine is flexible, constantly evolving

and completely unpredictable. A for grittier Portrayal of the

diasporic experience that Divakaruni’s The mistress of

spices, this text presents the complexities of identity and

perception in a less idealistic manner. While Tilo comes to

embrace the multiplicity of her self perceptions and various

79
identities, Jasmine chooses completely recreate herself in

the face of conflict, resulting in multiple selves that do not

exist simultaneously as they did for Tilo, but instead interact

with one another at different junctures in the text, with a

constant progression to the next identity. Through out her

life, Jasmine has created many Selves and she is aware of

the fact that she now has the power to continue create even

more identities. When Jasmine leaves Baden at the and of

the novel, she ambaries an uncertain future that parallels

her identity:

By the virtue of her own identification with the

Indian Disspora, Mukherjee probes deeply into

the inner conflicts of well educated, sensitive

adults whose traditional codes of economy of

passion and material desire collapse amid their

inadequate comprehension of the American

Paradigm of life, liberty, and the pursuits of

happiness. Mukherjee shows the diasporic

Indians as living in between two cultures,

constantly journeying into new meanings and

fashioning new identities. (Nelson 210)

80
 The political crisis in Punjab dominates, the early

chapters of Jasmine, but Bharati Mukherjee fails to

conceptualize the separatist movement in Punjab in terms of

the troubled history of the subcontinent, but her emphasis,

predictably, is on the violence.

Bharati Mukherjee’s characters have been

modulated, time to time, through has own personal

experiences. The protagonists of earlier novels exhibit a

conflict in character. Characters are not able to adjust in the

new environment. They are like babies reborn in a new

culture, not able to forget the past and apprehensive of the

future, they forget to live the present. The adjustments take

a valid twin either way. They assimilate or turn out to be

split personalities.

The final crisis of the book comes when jane is

confroted with the souring of the American dream, though

the suicide of Darrel. Du’s departure from home in search

for his family destablizes her. She is caught between her

duty towards the cripple bud and her love for Taylor. She

makes the final choice. The does not feel guily, but relieved.

She has stopped thinking of her self as Jane. She feels

81
potent enough once again to reposition her stars. Time

would draw its own conclusions about her true identity.

Adventure, risk and transformation- the frontier is pushing

indoors. She cries through all the lives. She has lives and for

all her dead. She is out of the door freddy with wonts and

reckless.

82
 CHAPTER - IV

CONCLUSION

We have seen the various ways in which Mukherjee

present the complex consciousness of the South Asian

diasporic woman and her process of identity formation. In

Mukherjee’s Jasmine, identity is as liminal as the space in

83
which Jasmine herself lives, indeterminate in its “in

betweenness” and continuously transforming as Jasmine’s

geography changes. Finally, in Mukherjee’s Jasmine, we see

the celebration of a forever evolving identity, one that is

constantly moving as quickly as cultural connections are lost

and found in the diasporic experience resulting in the creation

of selves that are endless in their possibilities and uncertain in

their futures.

Jasmine, a diasporic South Asian women living in

America, yet it is a story that moves outsides of the

established conception of the “Coming of age tall” for Jasmine

does not so much grow into her identity as develop new ones

throughout the courses of her life.

Jasmine is primarily a novel of cultural tranplantation.

At deads with a young widow’s story who was born in Hasanpur

Village, District Jullandhar in India. Jasmine was born the year

when narvest was very good. Her father was reluctant tiller of

therty acres, who had grain to hard for drought. She had been

a male child, birth would have ben lucky. But she was a girl,

and girls are curses, because the have to morry off with the

dowries. And good infinite momories visit girl children on

84
women. Who needed to be punished for since commited in

other incornation.

Jasmine exemplifies the traditional model of an American

immigrant’s success assimilation both in content and form. At

the moment of the story telling, Jasmine made of

reconstructing her history in that of an American. Employing

the American myths of the western frontier and the pilgrim

immigrant, Jasmine letitimates her illegal immigration story in

American mainstream tradition her history of Americanisation

that starts in India and tentatively ends in the west Parallels of

the Pilgrim fathers from east of the continent of continues to

the western expansion of their descendents.

Jasmine’s American success by assimilation therefore,

conversely highlights the colonial mentality of Jasmine as an

Indian women, who believes that she needs to become a white

middle class American, like Taylor and Diff, to survive.

Mukherjee invariably focuses sensitive protagonist who

lack a farm sense of cultural identity and, are natural victims of

racism, sexism and numerous forms of social oppression. The

beauty of much of her fiction lies in its being informed by her

personal identification with the characters lends her novels a

85
flavour rarely found among expatriate writer. She achieves a

dispassionate objectivity through understatement and ironic

observation she feels for her suffering protagonists, at times

empathises with them but seldom fails to underline their

human vulnerability. Though she has herself undergone the

traumatic process of acculturation, she has not allowed her

prejudices to infect her art.

Jasmine presents a character whose first instinct is

survival, she realize this through multiple identities in different

places. Bharati Mukherjee herself is one such immigrant who

has assimilated into the American ethos. She writes about

people who have left their countries of various reason and

come to America with their hopes, this aspiration, their

struggle, their alienation, their pain and trauma.

Bharati Mukherjee’s fictional text so for seems

conclude her claim that has as an immigrant writer in America,

her goal is to Project he rapid and dramatic transformation of

the united states since the easy 1970 & since any reality has

up side and downsides. It is perhaps a measure of her success

that her most recent novels portrory American culture and

society. Nothing in her novels suggest that the characters of

86
Bharati Mukherjee’s novels pride a roll mode for American

Immigrants, but it is emlemetic sort of the restless search for

freedom and that has always characterized Americans, often

banding old responsibilities for new possibilities. She choused

to speak her own voice, given her own version about what it

man to be an immigrant from India, and Indian Canadian and

American. “A Culture is supposed to be something that one

should be proud of Bharati Mukherjee has invested in the

present and not the past” (Mukherjee 1).

Jasmine’s Metemorphosis, with it sudden upheavals

and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an

American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts

the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her

and others like her- out new negations, friends and lovers. In

Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic

and unaccepted as the many worlds in which she lives.

However, does feel times that the qualities attributed to

Jasmine are exaggerated, may be out of Mukherjee’s

unqualified sympathies for her Protagonist.

Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1990) is a story of Indian widow

Jyoti’s successful attempt to reshape her destiny, and find

87
happiness in the united states her journey through life led

Jasmine through tranformations. Jyoti was her first name, the

Jasmine, then Jase and at the last Jane. Her name changed in

every ne city- Punjab, Florida, New York, Iowa and California.

Where she moved, But in every stage of her life she revolted

against her fate. Joyti born in Hasanpur and Punjab & Married

to Prakash the young ambitious city man, who always

thrashed, tradition. He gave her a new name like Pygmalaian,

a new identity and a new name Jasmine for Jyoti.

Her husband gives her a new name, to break of

the past, Jasmine, and says, “You are small and sweet and

heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your

perfume” ( Mukherjee. Thus, she shuttled between identities of

Jyoti and Jasmine.

“She Jasmine is running away for life not

escaping from life which is a positive step” (Dimri 176 ). Puspa

N. Prakhar things that Jasmine’s stay at Taylor’s for two years

is the most fruitful period that Jasmine of her life in America :

This period is Jasmine’s is the must restful

and comforting emotionally physiologically,

intellectually, how ever, it is a face of

88
 minute observation of complex in a

deliberation on, and involvement in her new

environment. (N. Prakhar 113)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Mukherjee, Bharati. The Tiger’s Daughter. New York : Grove

Press, 1989.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Darkness. New Delhi: Penguin, 1975.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. New Delhi : Penguin, 1975.
Mukherjee, Bharati. The middleman and other stories. New York :
Grove Press, 1988.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Leave it to me. London : Chatto and windus,
1977.
Mukherjee, Bharati. “American Dreamer”
http://www.mojones.com/mother-jones/jf97/mukherjee.html.
Mukherjee, Bharati and blaise Clark. Days and Nights in Calcutta
Hungry mind find: Paper Back, 1995.

89
 Interviews with Bharati Mukherjee
Vignesson, Runar. “ Bharati Mukherjee : An interviews”, span, No.
34-35 (1993) http://www.ds Murdoch.eduau/~cntimum
/listsenv/span/34vignisson html.
Connel, Michal, Greasson Jessi and Grimes Toa. “ An Interview
with Bharati Mukherjee”, Iowa Review, 1990.
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Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee: Criticism and Interpretation.
Twayne’s United States Author’s Series, 1996.
Bhatt, Indra. “ Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine; and immigrants
Attemps at Assimilation “, in Bala, Suman ed.American
literature Today. New Delhi : Prestige, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of culture. London. Routledage,
1994.
Brinda, Bose. “ A question of identity: where Gender Race and
America meet in Bharati Mukherjee. 56 Mukherjee”, In
critical perspectives, ed Nelson, 55, 57 period. New York.
Garland publishing, 1993.
Dimri, Jaywanti. “ From marriage to muder, A comparative study
of Bharati Mukherjee’s and Jasmine”, in Suman Bala, ed.
American literature today. New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1994.
Dayal, Samir. “Creating Preserving, destroying : voilance in
Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine”, in Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed
Bharati Mukherjee critical prespective. London: Garland,
1995.
Grice, Helena. “Who speaks for us ?” Bharati Mukherjee fiction
and the politics of immigaration, http://www.sagepub.co.
uk/ journal s/details/issue/sample/903170. pdf.

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Glory, Paul. smallActs : thoughts on the politics of black culture.
London serprents Tail, 1993.
Husain, Abids. The national culture of India. New Delhi : National
Book trust, 2008.
Krippling, Alpna Sharma. “ Towards an Investigation of the
subalterm in Bharati Mukherjee’s The middleman stories and
Jasmine, “In Emmanuel S. Nelson ed Bharati Mukherjee :
Critical Prespective, 2004.
Lal, Malalshri. “ Bharati Mukherjee”, ed : International literature
in English : essays on the modern writer. New York : St.
James Press, 1991.
Miller, Toby. “Introducing … Cultural Citizenship” Canada :
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Mukherjee, Bharati. “Immigrant writing : Give us your
maximailits!” New York time review, 1988.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Desirable Daughter. Rupa :Prestige, 2004.
Nelson, S. Emmaunell. Bharati Mukherjee : Critical Prespective.
New York & London : Garland, 1995.
N. Parekh, Puspa. “ Telling her Tales : Narrative voice and gender
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Nelson, ed. Bharati Mukherjee : Critical Prespective, New
York : Garland, 1994.
Prakha Bhiku. “ Some reflection on the Indian Diaspora”, (Journal
of contemporary though Baroda, 1993.
Pandey, Abha. Indian Diasporic literature. New Delhi : Creative
Books, 2008.
Roy, Sandip. “ Bharati’s visible Ghosts, “ http//www. Indian
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Sampat, Manu. “ Expert experience, Biblio, 2002.

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