Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989), …show more content…
Though she has to lose many people and make numerous sacrifices on this journey, she never gives up. In a way, she becomes victorious even in her most difficult times. She never accepts her defeat in her quest for a dignified life.
Jasmine is born as Jyoti in an Indian village named Hasnapur in Punjab. She is “the fifth daughter, the seventh of nine children” (Jasmine 39). Generally in the third world countries like India, the birth of a girl child is neither welcomed nor celebrated.
In fact, it is considered a sin for a woman to bear a girl child. Therefore Jasmine tells:
If I had been a boy, my birth in a bountiful year would have marked me as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfil. But daughters were curses. A daughter had to be married off before she could even enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations. Gods with infinite memories visited the girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations. My mother’s past must have been heavy with wrongs. (Jasmine
This became one of the boldest acts of defiance during this time. Yet, she didn't stop there. There is much more to her journey. This book illustrates her life like none other from the beginning to the end.
She has courage to keep going though bad times. She had the courage to show women that they can be more than just a housewife. She stayed clam through nearly 50 life-threating situations. At around age 12, she was captured by an enemy tribe and then sold to become a wife.
This paper attempts to examine the fictional projections of Indian girls, to see how they emerge in ideological terms. Their journeys from self-alienation to self-adjustment, their childhood struggles against the hypocrisies and monstrosities of the grown-up world, eventually demolishing the unjust male constructed citadels of power that hinder their progress- are the highlighted issues. The point of comparison between the two novels focused on here is the journey of Rahel in The God of Small Things and Sai in The Inheritance from a lonely childhood to a tragic adulthood passing through a struggle with the complex forces of patriarchal society. Both the novels portray the imaginativeness, inventiveness, independence, rebelliousness, wide-eyed wonder and innocence associated with these young girls.
Perseverance and a strong spirit had been methodically etched by God into the essence of this beautiful woman. These characteristics are only gained through overcoming challenges by which her accomplishments display. Delays often came that made her progress slow, but her persistence made both her, and her love, sure and steady.
First, this novel showcases acts of caring for family and friends, during a rough time for all the Indians bringing them closer into one community. The protagonist Sabine displays acts of caring among her friends and family. For instance, near the end of the novel, Sabine helps her mother’s friend, Lalita, despite having a sour relationship with her. Sabine saves Lalita from being arrested by lying to a military officer, thus making Sabine a more confident and brave person. Sabine faces her fear of the military and gains the power she
In the novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee talks about the hardships that Jasmine faced throughout her life. First, Jasmine had to witness her husband's death. Second, she had to find a way into America. Lastly, she was raped and abused by Half Face.
Bharati Mukherjee discus’s the loss of cultural identity while being a visible minority by using the setting, characters and the plot of her short story “Hindus”. The author uses the plot for the main character to meet new people and have new experiences that leads to the ending of her better understanding herself. The characters the main character meets along the way in the short story written by Mukerjee are very important in the end in finding her identity. She also uses the setting to show the differences of culture and living standards of those living in India versus living in the Americas. The author used the setting, characters and the plot to describe and demonstrate the cultural and identity loss that may happen when one moves away from their country and their
loses her life, but it is not a loss in vain, for she did accomplish what
People often said that daughters were “someone else’s treasure” and that the sooner you parted ways with them the “better off” everyone was (Sheth 9). As a result of this male dominated mindset and society, women were caught in a cycle of misery and restraint that was seemed impossible to abandon (Indian Women). Unfortunately, it gave rise to some of the most evil practices in the Indian culture, such as Sati, child marriage and the limitations on female education.
Mukherjee’s aim is to enlighten the immigrants through Jasmine, an exemplar in the novel. Mukherjee believes in order to for them to become a “real’ American, immigrants must disregard their cultural memory and past.
Girls, young women, and mature mothers. Society has consistently given women strict guidelines, rules and principles on how to be an appropriate member of a man’s society. These rules are set at a young age and enforced thoroughly into adulthood. When not followed accordingly, women often times too many face reprimanding through means of verbal abuse, physical abuse, or social exile. In the midst of all these strict guidelines and social etiquette for girls, a social rebellion started among girls and women and gender roles were broken, however the social rebellion did not and does not affect all girls and women. For instance, in less socially developed places, young girls on the brink of womanhood are still strongly persuaded to be a man’s idea of a “woman”.
The novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee is an incredible story about the transformation and life experiences of a Panjabi girl from India. The life of Jyoti is told from her point of view when she is twenty-four years old, and pregnant with the baby of Bud Ripplemeyer, a crippled banker who is more than twice Jyoti’s age. During the span of two months in Iowa, Jyoti narrates her biographical experiences in Punjab and in America as she strives to become independent. Jasmine illustrates that when one’s relationships go through changes, it will impact one’s identity.
The film “It’s a Girl” is about gendercide in India and China. Gendercide is when cultures either abort, kill, abandon, or neglect girls because of preferences to have sons. Cultures where this is common favor males over females because males bring strength and wealth to the family or provide care for their elderly parents. Boys also take the family name and pass it on to their children. Another reason that males are favored is because of marriage traditions. A marriage tradition called dowry is where the bride’s family pays the groom’s family in property and other wealth. Families do not want to have daughters because they will lose their wealth and their little girl to the husband’s family. India and China are both countries where gendercide is a widespread problem and they both have different policies and cultures that attribute to gendercide. India’s culture attributes to gendercide and the government does have laws in place to prevent it, but the laws are not enforced. However, China has the One-Child policy which is the reason for gendercide in the country.
It will depict how a quest for her identity gifts her chain of tragedies. The author’s portrayal of true picture will be analysed minutely how her quest becomes the only aim in life to know about her real parents and why she has been thrown like a garbage sack. Like the narrator of Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has changed citizenships and lived in various cultural milieus with disorienting rapidly. During her odyssey as a writer for almost three decades her creative sensibility has undergone many changes. There has been an ‘on going quest’ from ‘expatriation to immigration’ in her writings. Her major concern as a writer has been the life of South –Asian expatriate immigrants in U.S.A and Canada and the problem of ‘Acculturation and Assimilation’. An examination of the works of Mukherjee reveals a movement from expatriation to immigration. This movement coincides with her immigration from Canada to U.S.A. 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. In the U.S.A, there is a growing recognition of herself as an immigrant with an increasingly strong attachment to America and this experience of immigration is reflected in all her works in the U.S.A. Viewing herself as a writer, Bharati Mukherjee identified V. S. Naipaul as her role model. In
The present study is based on the idea of displacement as the major theme of the selected short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of maladies”. The book contains nine short stories and each one of them deals with the question of identity, alienation, and plight of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. But I would like to limit my studies to the three short stories from the collection viz. “When Mr. Pirzada came to dine”, Interpreter of Maladies”, and “Mrs. Sen’s”. The migration has become one of the most important issues of the contemporary world. Jhumpa Lahiri is also a diasporic writer like Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee. The characters in the prescribed stories are citizens of more than one country