The Role Of Identity In Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee’s promising novel, Jasmine, presents the life story of a young Indian woman in the United States of America. Mukherjee portrays the dilemma faced by the woman who attempts to adapt herself to the American lifestyle. Jasmine transforms herself from a simple village girl Jyoti to the American lady Jase by melding both Indian and American cultures. Mukherjee discusses the hybrid and hyphenated position experienced by the central character who undertakes the quest for identity. The text also highlights the protagonist’s struggle in retaining her cultural customs while acclimatizing in the new land. The present paper attempts to examine the hyphenated status of the central character, Jasmine. Jasmine’s crisis begins

Instead, throughout the novel Jasmine is always figured as an exceptional subject, and one of the things that makes her exceptional is her distance from her ethnic identity, even when in Punjab. … By saying that "Jyoti" is really "Jane," moreover, the novel argues that Jasmine is never actually Indian at all. After all, even at the moment of birth she escapes the future plotted for her by her "foremothers," as signified in her survival and her rejection of her grandmother's naming

Geoffrey Kain opines:

In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee mangers in a tale filled with tough raw experience- a smooth synthesis of Hindu religious imagery and concepts and American frontier mythology, traditions that equally and together define Jasmine's personal experience and that serve to clarify through a hyphenated mythology the essence of the new immigrant's experience, the experience of being, as Jasmine calls it, "suspended between two worlds." (157)

The worst experiences of her life, strengthen her inner self and she develops toughness and stability by overthrowing all pessimistic memories of the past incidents. As the caretaker of Duff, she decides to lead a peaceful life in the new land. Jasmine’s different names such as Jyoti, Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase and Jane indicate the transformation of her “self” at different points of time. Jasmine overcomes her hyphenated status through her unexpected mixing up of the cultures of both lands. She can be perceived as a true feminist persona who progresses in life combatting all the challenges in life and thus establishing her position in the social scenario. Jasmine is presented as a self-willed assimilated immigrant who successfully moulds a new life in America after undergoing multiple