Desh and Videsh: Be/Longingness in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

Desh and Videsh: Be/Longingness in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Diaspora is the movement of indigenous people or a population of a common people to a place other than the homeland. It can be voluntary or forced and usually the movement is to a place far from the original home. World history is replete with the instances about mass dispersion such as the expulsion of Jews from Europe, the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the century long exile of the Messenia’s under Spartan rule. The term Diaspora carries with it a sense of displacement with a desire in the people to return to their homeland.

Much of the literature available on the Indian Diaspora pertains to Indian migration, their socioeconomic and cultural experiences, experiences of adaptation, assimilation in the new culture with feeling of longing for past experiences. Commenting upon the reasons for displacement in the Indian context, Kingsley Davis (1968) remarks, "...pressure to emigrate has always been great enough to provide a stream of emigrants much larger than the actual given opportunities." And Tinker puts it, " there is a combination of push and pull: the push of inadequate opportunity in South Asia and the pull of the better prospects in the West."(1977:10)

Indian history provides umpteen examples of mobility of people that undoubtedly was motivated by varied interests, facilitated the cultural exchanges with the rest of the world. Bhabha remarks in his Location of Culture: “The transnational dimension of cultural transformation -- migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation – makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths ...

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... straightest.” 24 (pp. 100-101).

Bharati’s depiction of Jasmine throughout the novel traversing different alien nations is superb. She highlights Jasmine’s alienation from her culture due to her constantly shifting identities. She longs for the safe confine of her original home in India. Security, peace and rootedness of an individual are replaced by feelings of anxiety, pain and fear in a sordid and exiled place .Temporarily Jasmine does acquire a foreign identity but it is fake. Her past : “ is fully alive like a seed in the soil, awaiting the season of warmth and growth to bring it to germination”(1998,156). Jasmine is therefore the most congruent exploration of Bharati into the dilemma of belonging and longing.

Works cited:

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge

Guha,Ranajit.” The migrant’s time”.postcolonial studies.1.2(1998):155-160.