Cultural Reconciliation through Self-Reinvention in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Abstract

The writings of Bharati Mukherjee mainly focus on the lives, experiences, and struggles faced by immigrants in the reconciliation between their dual identities in the new land. Her novel Jasmine not only features the cultural clashes that are prevalent in the cultural exchange, but also migration leads to alienation from its own roots. Jasmine is a novel that deals with immigration history and its impact. Assimilation of the people became prominent only with the advent of the twentieth century and with the development of a new mode of navigation and exploration, which made cultural exchange a more frequent phenomenon. The novel is set in the present, and the story deals with its protagonist, a young Indian woman in the United States of America. She tries to mould herself in the Western way of life and changes her identity in several ways and several times. Her transformation from a girl living in the village of Hasnapur as Jyoti to Jasmine, Jase and finally as Jane living in America shows the fluidity and evolving nature of an immigrant identity. Mukherjee’s autobiographical element is dominant in the novel, and we see several changes, displacement and dislocation that she underwent in her own life that are visible in the lives of the protagonist. The identity crisis that is prevalent in the immigrant is evident in the novel. The present paper scrutinises how Jasmine’s changing identities allow her to survive personal loss, displacement and cultural alienation during her reconciliation with conflicting cultural influences.