Exposing the Real Jasmine

The prominent characteristic of postcolonial writing is the incorporation of writing back or rewriting history into the narrative from the point of view of the colonized. Postcolonial narratives speak out and attempt to expose the injustices of dominant culture often within their own cultural system. Within this framework, many female authors give agency to the once silenced female voice of the colonized. By employing their own narratives, many postcolonial female authors demystify the prescribed ideologies thrust upon them by a patriarchal culture while at the same time expressing their own sense of loss of cultural identity. Therefore, postcolonial literature applies a counterdiscourse that depicts the realities and struggles of people that are from the eastern world.

This type of counterdiscourse can be readily applied to Bharati Makherjee’s Jasmine. Mukherjee uses Jasmine’s gender as a vehicle to reveal the struggles and oppression women must endure as part of a male dominated society. Additionally, the changing of Jasmine’s name after her marriage and while she is in America can be read as metaphors for how colonalizers had authority over the natives. Once Jasmine is married, Mukherjee utilizes the dialogue between Jasmine and her husband to reveal the realistic dominance of men over women in certain cultures while also symbolizing how the natives’ beliefs and traditions were repressed during colonization. Another important facet employed by Mukherjee’s narrative is it exposes and subverts the dominant values and beliefs regarding cultural practices. Lastly, Mukherjee employs Jasmine’s rape in America by Half-Face to symbolize the brutality that was inflicted upon the natives during colonalization.

Mukherjee uses...

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...men, Mukherjee exposes the brutal sexual exploitation by the colonalizer. Mukherjee also destabilizes the myth of the colonizers’ justification of the need to civilize the native “other” by showing that the colonizers’ were the true savages. Moreover, Mukherjee speaks for the past native women’s voices by rewriting history to include their story of the brutalization by the colonizer.

In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee establishes that gender plays a significant role in the determination of status in Hindu culture. Mukherjee’s also utilizes Jasmine’s changing of names to represent the physical dominance of the colonizers, and she brilliantly uses figurative language to expose the viciousness during colonization. Through Mukherjee’s novel, the reader witnesses the realities and the consequences that are part of the eastern world.