Analysis Of Jasmine And Wife By Bharathi Mukherjee

Bharathi Mukherjee , born in 1940 in Calcutta, married a Canadian fellow-student, Clark Blaise, at the University of Iowa, in 1963. She lived in Canada from 1966 to 1980. She became a naturalized Canadian, got Canadian citizenship and lived in Toronto and then in Montreal and held teaching positions at McGill University and Concordia University. She migrated to the U.S.A. in 1980 with her family and became a U.S.A. citizen in 1988

In her novels Jasmine and Wife, Bharathi Mukherjee has shown a dual cultural shock. Jasmine and Dimple leave their respective countries in search of their dreams. This migration or “cultural transplant” leads to a crisis of identity and a final reconciliation to the choice. She has presented a fascinating study of

But at the core of every culture remains the uploading of basic human values. A globalised culture has evolved and it must combat with the world of heterogeneous societies who do not wish to leave aside their historical particulars which give them uniqueness. Bharati Mukherjee and many others are taking up issues like identity crisis, nationalism, alienation, marginalization, insider outsider, hegemonic. Power discourses in the fiction that they are writing today. In Mukherjee both novels the role of memory in a process of change is often used by the writer in an effective way. It is through the eyes of the first generation settlers that the second generation learns about the homeland. Another way to look at the diasporic writing is to note the motifs of dislocation, homelessness, rootlessness and escape. John Hartley rightly states. The psychological and cultural experience of diaspora can be one of hybridity, exile, nostalgia, selective adaptation or cultural invention. It is a experience that is sought to be transmitted to readers through the diasporic literature, the diaspora writers are obsessed with search for identity and their writing displays a poetics of exile and

The experiences of exile may be accompanied by a sense of belonging to the former homeland and a continued allegiance to that remembered culture while staying within the host country. As such, the diasporas can be defined as “heterogeneous cultures spatially separated from their place of origin yet living betweeness places in their identify the cultural life”. (73). The stress on in-betweenness in such cases has to be underlined here. This very characteristic has been brashly put forth by Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands: sometimes we feel that we starddle two cultures: at other times, that we fall between two stool.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s Wife and Jsamine chronicle the journeys of two young women to the US for different reasons, under dissimilar circumstances. Both of them pass through torturous physical ,mental and emotional agony affecting their whole being to such an extent that they are driven to violence, Jasmine starts her life in the US with a murder, Dimple rounds up her stay there is a striking semblance in spite of the wide difference between their temperaments and