The postcolonial diaspora of the mid- to late twentieth century forms an important dimension of the postcolonial engagement with the globalization of cultures. Diasporic writing, a postcolonial scenario, elaborates issues such as marginalization, cultural insularity, social disparity, racism, and ethnicity. These writings address problems that arise from the transnational space created by a fluid community that is neither at home nor outside. Oscillating between the attractions of home and those from the new world, the migrants wage a constant psychic battle.
Postcolonial literary theory tends to privilege “appropriation” over “abrogation” and “multicultural syncretism” over cultural “essentialism.” The diasporic novel is entirely explicit in its reflection of hybridity of cultures. As Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture, such writing refuses to “oppose the pedagogy of the imperialist noun to the inflectional appropriation of the native voice,” preferring instead “to go beyond such binaries of power in order to recognize our sense of the process of identification in the negotiation of cultural politics” (233).
Jasmine: An Odyssey from Punjab to California
This paper analyzes the novel Jasmine by the Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee from a predominantly feminist and postcolonial perspective. In Jasmine (1989), Mukherjee tries to unravel the complicated layers of cross-cultural confrontations through a series of adventures which the protagonist undertakes during her odyssey from Punjab to California via Florida, New York and Iowa.
Jasmine, the title character and narrator, was born in a rural Indian village called Hasanpur in Punjab. Throughout the course of the novel the title character’s identity, along with her name, changes from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jazzy to Jane. The narrative shuffles between past and present, between India of her early life and America of her present one.
Cross-Cultural Tensions and Identity
Caught between the two cultures of the east and the west, the past and the present, Jasmine constantly shuffles in search of a concrete identity. She debates whether to act according to the desire for freedom which the American life offers her or to be dutiful. The Indian consciousness, embodied by Dida, her grandmother, supports duty. The western consciousness, embodied by her Manhattan employers Taylor and Wylie Hayes, encourages desire.
Jasmine’s first encounter with America is a kind of regeneration through violence. She confronts the reality of American society where nothing lasts. As she narrates: “We arrive so eager to learn, to participate, only to find the monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled. Nothing is for ever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate” (163).
She explains her final act by saying: “I am not choosing between men, I am caught between the promise of America and Old world dutifulness” (140). In this transcultural novel, Mukherjee represents racial and ethnic identities through attitudes and values regarding East and West. Throughout the novel the concept of binarism creates two constructs of East and West, producing racial and ethnic identities and differences.
In Jasmine, Mukherjee rejoices the idea of assimilation and calls for an end to futile nostalgic engagements with the past and a bold affirmation of the adopted land. At the core of all diasporic fictions, as is also shown through Jasmine, is the haunting presence of India — and the anguish of personal loss it represents, of absence that engenders an aesthetics of reworlding.
Works Cited
- Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
- Ghosh, Amitav. “The Diaspora in Indian Culture” in The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publ. & Permanent Black, 2002. 243-250.
- Mukherjee, Bharati. The Holder of the World. New York: Viking, 1993.
- ---. Jasmine. New York: Viking, 1989.
- ---. Leave it to me. New York: Viking, 1997.
- ---. Wife. New York: Viking, 1975.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978). 3rd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.