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Chapter one

Introduction

Literature is the most specific and the precise record of human spirit and a

novelist is endowed with the perception and inquisitive mind of a historian and

sociologist who impart a faithful and true record of human life, society and socio-

political system in a different idiom. Good literature is always concerned with

significant socio-economic and political problems and it gains its essential unity when

a genuine writer gets an insight into the fundamental social and historical trends of his

time.

Indian English Literature is an honest enterprise to demonstrate the ever rare

gems of Indian writing in English. While Indian authors-poets, novelists, essayists

dramatists have been making momentous and considerable contributions to world

literature since the pre-Independence era, the past few years have witnessed a gigantic

prospering and thriving of Indian English writing in the global market.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee also known as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

was one of the greatest novelists and poets of India. He wrote Rajamohan’s wife and

published in 1864; it was the first Indian novel written in English. But the novelette

was never published. Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, notable for his

depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. His first main

novel Untouchable published in 1935 was a chilling expose of the day-to-day life of a

member of Indian’s untouchable caste. He received the International Peace Prize from

World Peace Council. His 1953 novel the Private Life of an Indian Prince was more
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autobiographical in nature. In 1950 Anand embarked on a project to write a seven-part

autobiography, beginning in 1951 with Seven Summer. One part, Morning Face

(1968), won him the Sahitya Akademi Award.

[Link] is best known for his works set in the fictional South Indian

town of Malgudi. Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary

career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide.

In 1964, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honours. A year

before his death in 2001, he was awarded Indian’s second highest civilian honour, the

Padma Vibhushan.

Raja Rao was an Indian writer of English language novels and short stories,

whose works are deeply rooted in Hinduism. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in

1964; and he was conferred the Padma Shri in 1969. Though his first novel was in

Kannada, he soon returned to writing in English and got universal acclaim. He wrote

his short stories between the 1930s and early 1940s.

Women writers in India are moving forward with their strong and sure strides,

matching the pace of the world. Indian women writers like Kamala Markandaya,

Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Nayantara Saghal and many more have played a

pioneering role in conveying the readers a wild range of indigenous Indian issues,

punctuated by a strong feministic outlook.

Feminism has been subtly handled in the massive work of English novels in

India. During the recent decades, a galaxy of Indian women novelists have started

writing about Indian women, their conflicts and predicaments against the background

of contemporary India. In the 20th century, women’s writing was considered as a

powerful medium of modernism and feminist statements.

Kamala Markandaya is an Indian novelist and journalist. Her much-acclaimed

novels are Handful of Rice (1966), Two Virgins (1973) and Pleasure City (1982). A

Silence of Desire is about the conflict between Indian spiritualism and western

materialism. In all her novels Markandaya has treated the theme of East-West

confrontation more comprehensively than any other Indian English novelist.

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and short story writer. Many of Anita Desai’s

novels explore tensions between family members and the alienation of middle-class

women. Desai published her first novel Cry, the Peacock in 1963, followed by Bye-

Bye Black Bird (1971), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Color Light Day

(1980), In Custody (1984), Fire on the Mountain (1977) and Fasting Feasting (1999).

Jhumpa Lahiri is a famous Indian-American author of Bengali origin. Lahiri’s

short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for

Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film

of the same name. Lahiri is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton

University.

Bharati Mukherjee is the most commercially successful woman of the Indian

Diaspora. She is also the most controversial narrator of Indian cultural identity in a

multicultural context. She is a professor, novelist, essayist, short story writer, fiction

writer, and non-fiction writer. Mukherjee is a writer from the third world. Like V.S

Naipaul, she claims to have “left India by choice to settle in the United States”. Her

treatment of the theme of rootlessness and expatriation is totally different from that of

other writers. Her fiction reveals that it follows a sense of direction, growth and

evolution.
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Bharati Mukherjee is one of the most celebrated writers of the Asian

immigrant experience in America. Her writings are largely honed by the multiple

dislocations of her personal life, which itself has been described as a text in a kind of

perennial immigration. Immigration and identity in the fiction of Mukherjee, examine

how post-colonialism affects identity formation in contemporary women’s immigrant

literature.

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, to an upper-middle class Hindu

Brahmin family in Calcutta. She received her BA from the University of Calcutta in

1959, her MA from the University of Baroda in 1961 and her Ph.D in 1969 from the

Department of Comparative Literature. She received her M.F.A from the Iowa

writer’s workshop in 1963. She married a Canadian fellow student, Clark Blaise, at

the University of Iowa in 1963. She lived in Canada from 1966 to 1980. She became a

naturalized Canadian, got Canadian citizenship and lived in Toronto and then in

Montreal and held teaching positions at McGill University and Concordia University.

She migrated to the U.S.A in 1980 with her family and became an U.S.A citizen in

1988.

While in Canada, Bharati Mukherjee published two novels, The Tiger’s

Daughter in 1971 and Wife in 1975. She also co-authored a book of memoirs with her

husband, entitled Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), on their year-long stay in India

during 1973-74, after a fire in their Montreal home. Other writings in Canada

included articles on civil rights such as An Invisible Woman and a few short stories

which were later published in the collection Darkness (1985). Mukherjee’s collection

of short stories The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) has won critical recognition

and awards.
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An examination of the works of Mukherjee reveals a movement from

expatriation to immigration. This movement coincides with her migration from

Canada to the USA. That is, Mukherjee’s interpretation of and reaction to her

experience in Canada led her to see herself as an expatriate and this theme of

expatriation is reflected in her writings in Canada. Mukherjee explores the immigrant

sensibility, recognizing its duality and fluid identity and acknowledging alternate

realities.

Mukherjee’s writing career begins in 1971 with the Tiger’s Daughter. It is a

story about a young girl named Tara who was raised in Calcutta, educated at Vassar

College in New York and is married to an American man. The novel explores her

sense of culture shock when she travels back to India intertwined with the political

situation in Calcutta and West Bengal.

Bharati Mukherjee’s second novels Wife (1975) deals with an entirely

different problem of expatriates. It is a story about a woman named Dimple who has

been suppressed by her husband. Jasmine (1989) is one of the notable works of the

author. The theme of the novel is an immigrant’s encounter with the new world.

Jasmine first appeared as a short story in the collection Middleman and Other Stories

and is later developed into a full length novel with a few modifications. It deals with

the story of Hindu woman who leaves India for the U.S after her husband’s murder,

only to be raped and eventually returned to the position of a care given.

Bharati Mukherjee’s fourth book is The Holder of the world (1993). It is a

beautifully written story about Hannah Easton, a woman born in Massachusetts who

travels to India. In Leaves It to Me (1977), the protagonist is a young woman named

Debby Dimartino, who seeks revenge on her parents. Desirable Daughters (2002) is

the sixth novel. It is a story about three Brahmin upper class sisters.

According to Jasbir Jain, “Mukherjee’s novels are representative of the

expatriate sensibility” (12). In Mukherjee’s almost all novels the protagonist is a

woman. The plot is further achieved by the device of journey from one country and

cultural milieu to another. She sketches her character as self-fashioning, autonomous

and self-determining. She admits herself in an interview about her protagonists as

they are a breed of pioneers who have the guts to forsake a predictable life in order to

throw themselves into a new one. Mukherjee thus born in India but now settled in the

USA and as a writer, America is at the centre of her heart. She finds America complex

and she wishes to penetrate deep into it. And so she writes about minority community

which escapes the ghetto and adapts itself to the patterns of the dominant American

culture. According to Alison B. Carb, “Like Malamud, I write about a minority

community which escapes the ghetto and adapts itself to the patterns of the dominant

American culture” (650).

Mukherjee’s handling of diaspora in her novels may be due to her first hand

knowledge of the contrary awareness it variably brings about. The celebration of

America as the land of freedom and opportunities constitutes the main spring of the

dream of Diaspora cherished by her fictional characters. Mukherjee’s uniqueness lies

in balancing with the Disreputable side of life in America on the one hand and with

character sketch transformation wrought in the majority culture by the immigrants

ushering in of disparate customs from different socio-economic backgrounds on the

other.
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Bharati Mukherjee’s early fictional models were from English literature “the

omniscient point of view and plenty of irony”, she says, and speaks of her imitation of

Jane Austen in The Tiger’s Daughter. Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Desirable

Daughter’s, explore the symbolic significance of these characters representing Indian

migrants to the U.S. These novels discuss the depiction of the development of

personal identity of confusion, the dilemma of adjusting between two different

cultures.

Thus, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is an enactment of the encounter of two

cultures, one ancient and other modern, each illuminating and enriching the other. The

Indian experience is reinterpreted through the Western idiom and this cultural and

linguistic counterpointing leads to a ‘precision of words’ in her novel. Bharati

Mukherjee considers herself the repository and exponent of experiences made

possible by immigration. Fiction and theories are simultaneously articulated. Through

a review of her own several transitions, Bharati Mukherjee has evolved a credo for the

new immigrant voices, which she calls ‘Maximalism’.

Mukherjee has allowed her Indian protagonist to interact freely with

American culture so that she not only takes but gives as well and by giving she

endows a new perspective to the land she inhabits. Jasmine escapes the Indian ghetto

in Flushing and adapts herself to the patterns of the dominant American culture.

According to R.S. Krishnan, "Mukherjee by making Jasmine the central figure and by

fore-grounding her experience, engages in a revisionism that inverts the basic

assumption of cultural encounters. Incidents and situation that might normally take

center stage in the collective American consciousness becomes, in Jasmine/Jane's

narrative means by which she shapes and reflects her own identity" (25).
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Bharati Mukherjee’s works reveal a perspective that is simultaneously shaped

by her ethnicity, post coloniality, gender and migracy. Almost all of her works deal

with these themes. Her major narratives of migration have earned her a significant

place in the contemporary literature of the United States. Her fiction presents the

complexities of contemporary social life in a genuine manner. The quest for an

authentic voice and all that it implies is what sets her novels apart. The basic

problem in her novel is articulation of emotions which are essentially

communicable. The most prominent aspect of Mukherjee’s literary handling of

diaspora is the use of woman as hero in the modern life and hence modern literature

will allow anyone to be a hero not as a conqueror of fate but as a person who strives

or fights for full right before achieving a self –forged identity.

In Canada, Bharati Mukherjee claims to have experienced an anti-Indian

attitude. Canada’s hostility to Indians and the non-recognition of her writing in

Canada are the twin recurring themes which appear with an almost obsessive

regularity in Mukherjee’s writing. She experienced herself as “a psychological

expatriate” in Canada. She became a Civil Rights activist in Canada and wrote about

the crippling effect of racism on individuals. According to Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, in

these novels, Mukherjee presents “some of the more violent and grotesque aspects of

cultural collisions”.

In Bharati Mukherjee’s novels she gives importance to the changes in the lives

of immigrants. Bharati Mukherjee is fascinated by English writers like Jane Austen,

[Link], and V.S Naipaul. Her unique ability lies in extending into her fiction the

most significant motifs from Indian philosophy. Her fiction enters a personal

continuum of time where events swing backwards and forwards from place to place

and from childhood to age, from despair to hope, compassion and love.
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An activist of civil rights, educator, an author of highly praised novels, two

collections of short stories and non-fiction works, Mukherjee utilizes her personal

experience in crossing the cultural boundaries. Her works can certainly be read in the

national context of Indian writing in English and in the international context of the

literature of the Indian diaspora. She is the strong voice of the immigrants from all

over the world in the USA, because of her determined rejection of the emotional

paralysis of an exile and her affirmation of the immigrant condition. She wants to

transform herself as an artist from expatriate writer into a confident redefined artist in

the immigrant tradition which sets her in the tradition of American main-stream

writers.

Mukherjee’s novels have in general female protagonists as the central

characters. She portrays the transformation of women when they pass through the

process of immigration. The theme Bharati Mukherjee deals with in her novels is one

of the significant themes of modern literature that is the depiction of cultural clash

causing cultural and psychological conflicts. She has been widely acknowledged as

the ‘Voice’ of expatriate-immigrant sensibility.

In her novel Jasmine, the writer discusses the life of Jyoti, heroine of the

novel. Later her name is changed by her husband and he calls her Jasmine instead of

Jyoti. By changing anyone’s name means changing her identity. In the same way

when Jyoti was a child an astrologer told her about her widowhood. This thing comes

true when she was seventeen years, her husband died in a bomb attack. Thus, she goes

to America to meet Prakash’s teacher Prof .Vadhera. On her adventurous journey she

is raped by the captain of ship. Jasmine contemplates killing herself but instead kills

Half-Face. She burns Prakash’s suit that she carried with her and leaves the motel.
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Jasmine meets Lillian Gordon, who takes her in. Lillian also has a daughter

named Kate Gordon-Feldstein. Jasmine begins working for Wylie and Taylor Hayes,

friends of Kate. She moves in with theme in Manhattan to take care of their adopted

daughter, Duff. Later goes to Bud’s refuge. Jasmine is pregnant by Bud. But her life

here too is not stable; it is like fluid. Soon she turns her mind again to Taylor and

decides to live with him. Like Jasmine, Mukherjee has changed citizenships and

cultures with remarkable rapidity. Jasmine has some threads of connection as an

autobiographical novel.

The dissertation proposes to analyze the novel, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee

using the tools of critical analysis, scrutiny and comparison. It is proposed to discover

the enigma of the character’s identity in this novel. The close textual analysis

highlights the literary skills of the novelist and the protagonist’s mission towards self

discovery.