Trancultural Voyage

A Transcultural Voyage: The Agony, The Dilemma, and The Ecstasy

Immigration is a global phenomenon in today’s modern world. Bharati Mukherjee,

one of the promising diasporic novelists, has taken up the problems and experiences faced by

the Indian immigrants in the U.S. As Foster says, “the world is in motion, as never before,

with massive migrations altering the trajectory of millions of lives” (43). In a well-known

Bill Moyer’s interview, Bharati Mukherjee states that immigrants must violently murder their

old selves upon coming to the U.S.A. Therefore her woman protagonists who are immigrants

or become so at a later stage, undergo a transformation from their former selves in their own

country into different new selves in the host country. According to Enakshi Choudhury,

immigrants have to “survive in grossly foreign environment”,(84) they have to adopt and

imbibe the art of living in the alien culture. Bharati Mukherjee’s heroines also shed their past

life and experience and take upon a quite new self once they cross the border of their native

country. So an analysis could be made about their attitude before the movement, and the

process of transformation thereafter.

According to Lavin Dhingra Shankar: “Among critics Mukherjee is considered one of

the few ethnic artists who look beyond the immigrants sense of alienation and dislocation to

trace psychological transformation especially among women” (15). This chapter tries to

reflect on the metamorphosis of Bharati Mukherjee’s protagonists in Wife, The Tiger’s

Daughter, and Jasmine, who change their mindset with their geographical journey. It

examines how identity crisis finds its articulation in these novels in which the

protagonists are uprooted from their moorings and are expatriated to alien countries.

Bharati Mukherjee seems to start from Dimple, the heroines of Wife, takes up Tara, the

protagonist of The Tiger’s Daughter, and then give final touches through the portrayal of

Jasmine, the protagonist in the novel by that name. Dimple in Wife starts with the agony

which transforms into dilemma of Tara in the Tiger’s Daughter and finally ends up in the

ecstasy of Jasmine. As a result of their transcultural voyage the protagonists try to flee their

past in their quest for embracing the new life. Their transcultural voyage changes their lives

psychologically, emotionally and physically.

These novels chronicle the journey of three young women to a foreign country for

different reasons, under different circumstances. All of them share a sticking semblance

inspite of wide differences between their temperament circumstances, their actions and

reactions. This chapter analyses as to how Bharati Mukherjee portrays the immigrant

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women’s attempts to assimilate themselves, to find a place in the mainstream of the life of the

adopted land, abandoning the former lifestyle of their country. It also examines in what way,

in this process, they have to pass through torturous physical, mental and emotional agony,

which affect their entire personality largely turning them into a whole being.

Although female protagonists in Bharati Mukherjee’s novels keep changing

repeatedly, it is not that the transformation takes place only after their migration. These

women change their outlook, more or less, even while living in their own country. These

changes are minor and in the seed form but pave the way for the major changes of their

mobile lives.

Wife is about displacement and alienation. It portrays the psychological

claustrophobia and the resultant destructive tendencies in Dimple. Dimple Dasgupta,

the protagonist of Wife, is a twenty-year-old, timid, middle-class Bengali girl. Due to

a general strike in Calcutta, Dimple’s prospects of getting a degree are post-poned

indefinitely. Hence she waits eagerly and romantically to be married for the next

alternative for a woman in India is marriage.

Mukherjee portrays quite vividly the preparations for Dimple’s marriage and

her endless waiting for a husband in her house at Rash Behari Avenue. Through this

depiction, Mukherjee demonstrates the truth that marriage is the only source of

redemption for a woman in a patriarchal society. The societal orientation for a girl

child begins very early in her life, and like any other average Indian girl she waits for

her marriage, the only big event in a woman’s life. Rani Dharker effectively pictures

this opinion in her article “Marriage as Purdah: Fictional Rendering of a Social

Reality”:

Marriage is a sun around which the girl’s life rotates. . . .Marriage is the

ultimate goal of a girl’s life hence. . . a girl from the age of three starts

fasting for a good husband (49).

Dimple expects excessive love, freedom, fortune and happiness after marriage. She

thinks, “Marriage would bring freedom, cocktail parties on carpetes lawns, fund-

raising dinners for not able charities. Marriage would bring her love”(3). She thinks

that marriage is a doorway to real life and hopes it will bring her freedom, fortune and

perfect happiness. She strongly believes that love will become magically lucid on her

wedding day. To her, premarital life is nothing but a “dress rehearsal for actual

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living” (3). Reading novels and film magazines has made her too romantic, leading

her to negation of the hard realities of life. At the same time, because of traditional

conditioning, she also imagines herself as “Sita, the ideal wife of Hindu legends” (6).

She is on the verge of obsession owing to her excessive eagerness, anxiety and intense

desire to get married.

Dimple is finally married to Amit, a consultant engineer, but her wants remain

unfulfilled. Her life in the joint family of the Basus bristles with problems. Her sense

of dissatisfaction in all things at her-in-laws irritates her and starts affecting her and

makes a shift in her psychology. Lack of privacy, lack of freedom even to choose the

colour of her bedroom curtains, absence of basic amenities and the ever growing

demands of the joint family drive her crazy. All the premarital illusions of Dimple get

shattered one after another soon after marriage.

Dimple realizes that playing the role of a wife in a joint family is an arduous

task. She has always lived in a fantasy world, a world created by herself. But when

she confronts the hard realities of life after marriage the feathers of her imagination

are clipped. When a woman turns a wife, she is expected to care not only for her

husband, but also for all the other members of the husband’s family. She has to

simultaneously play the role of a care-giver and a pleasure dispenser. Very soon,

Dimple understands the discrepancy between the premarital dreams and the marital

realities. The first shock to Dimple is the mother-in-law insisting on calling her

Nandini. Later, in order to please Amit she atkes to wearing bright colours, reds,

oranges,and purples. She tries to imitate the ways of Mrs.Ghose. Though she does

not like Amit’s habit of killing crows, she becomes a mute spectator to his sadistic

pleasure.

Amit’s habit of killing crows and petting parrots has symbolic value. His

excitement in killing crows proves his immature self. The killing of crows proves his

sadism. It manifests itself in various ways in his relationship with Dimple. His silent

arrogance, total indifference to her desires, utter lack of interest in nurturing his

relationship with Dimple are expressions of his sadism. Amit wants to stroke parrots

because they are cute, little, harmless,caged birds which can be trained to mimic his

words. Beautiful birds with clipped wings which can imitate human speech are

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agreeable companions to Amit. Symbolically Amit is willing to show love and care to

Dimple provided she imitates Amit’s ways. He wants to see her imprisones in the

cage of matrimony. Conversely, Amit hates crows which are frightful, ravenish,

scavenger birds. Crows are never reared at homes like parrots and pigeons.

Moreover, they cannot be trained to imitate. In short, Amit wants a wife who can

follow accepted patriarchal values without any indication of independent thinking.

Though the idea of living abroad terrifies Dimple, she is ready to go with her

husband to any country of his choice. Dimple makes sincere efforts to fit into the new

role of a wife, yet she finds it hard to do so. She is not happy in the dingy apartment,

where every act of hers is to please others. In the jopint family system, individual

freedom is almost always sacrificed for collective good. A few weeks after her

marriage to her great shock and dismay, Amit confesses, “I always thought I’d marry

a tall girl. . . . Also convent-educated, fluent in English” (26). Since Dimple cannot

do anything about her height, she makes efforts to improve her English. There is no

private space for Amit and Dimple. Dimple feels that life has betrayed her and

marriage has deluded her.

In the course of time when Dimple becomes pregnant she abhors the very idea

of being a wife and regrets her pregnancy. Her killing of the mice which looked

pregnant suggests that she does not feel at ease with her pregnancy. This act of killing

is a manifestation Before leaving for the U.S., she wants “everything to be nice and

new” (41), she aborts her child in a bid to start her life afresh abroad. This is her first

act of asserting her own will, regenerating herself, migrates to the US with her

husband, Amit in search of her future.

Dimples happiness of migration to US is inexpressible. She feels like being

freed from the large getting of servile domesticity. Once Dimple sets her feet at the

foreign land, she is both shocked and afraid of its huge size. First few days pass

pleasantly but after that, she starts getting bored, noticing and feeling the difference

between New York and Calcutta. A sense of frustration starts creeping in owing to

Amit’s not getting any job and their living in the Sen’s small apartment. The Sens are

very conscious of their identity and never try to come out of, their little India which is

around them. The sens are disgusted with Americans and the English language. The

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“little gesture” which she very conscious of their identity and never try to come out of,

their little India which is around them. This explains the sudden physical isolation that

marks the beginning of Dimple’s life in New York. Instead of the social visibility and

relevance that marriage gave her in India, Dimple now suffers from cultural and social

invisibility and disempowerment that on the everyday level reduces her marital

relationship to random details from which she tries, and fails to piece together a

recognizable reality.

While Amit is engrossed in amassing money, Dimple is in pursuit of happiness

and independence. Since Dimple enters the US abruptly, without any mental

preparation, the shock is too much for her. She finds it hard to understand the cultural

codes of the country. She is torn between the traditional role model of a submissive

Indian wife and the new role model of an assertive independent wife offered by the

West. But at a particular stage, she establishes contact with the host culture. But she

does not get a good facilitator to help her encounter the alien reality, she has access

only to the televised version of the alternate reality. She eventually falls a victim to the

cultural pressures and experience the agony of a disappointed expatriate.

Dimple leaves to the US with dreams about her future. Dimple expected some

trouble in the American set up when she stepped in because she realized agony was

part of any new beginning but the agony she experienced was beyond her endurance :

She had expected pain when she had come to America, had told herself

that pain was part of any new beginning, …. But she had not expected

her mind to be strained like this, beyond endurance (115).

The new world of Dimple fills her life with agony. Dimple’s journey to

America shatters her dreams for it is in America that the gulf between Amit and

Dimple widens. Her social circle in New York shrinks, since she has to move only in

the circle of Punjabi and Bengali families. Within the circle of Indian immigrants too

Dimple finds herself an alien. This is because Calcutta society offered her more

freedom where she had atleast a few intimate friends. In America, even with her own

community she experiences rejection. Hence she feels lonely and alienated.

Trying to define the concept of alienation K. Raghavendra Rao observes : “….

Alienation is a condition of loss of an essential part of the self. It is, therefore, a

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condition in which the self is placed in a position of insecurity, anxiety, anguish, loss

of identity and loss of authenticity” (99). While Sidney Finkelstein defines alienation

Rao, Raghavendra K. “The Alienation Games : The Poetry of Nissim Ezekierl”,

Perspectives on Indian Poetry in English, Ed. M.K. Naik, Abhinav Publication, New

Delhi, 1984 as “a psychological phenomenon, an internal conflict, a hostility felt

toward something seemingly outside oneself which is linked to oneself , a barrier

erected which is actually no defense but an impourishment of oneself” (137).

Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature,

International Publishers, New York, 1965.

Asnani describes Dimple’s agony experienced due to her exposure to a new

culture as “a dilemma of tensions between American culture and society and the

traditional constraints surrounding an Indian wife (42). When the outlets to relate to

people around her get blocked her personality indicates fragmentation. As Chaudhury

says, “She does not want to lose her identity but feels isolated, trapped, alienated and

marginalized (84).

Amit dismisses Dimple’s suggestion of taking a part time job which excludes

her from any activity which defines her identity by her own passivity. This isolation

and emotional starvation starts the process of her psychological disintegration. She

desires to go out and experience the world outside, but is held back by the inhibitions

of her native culture. As Leong describes, Dimple is “sensitive enough to feel the

pain, but not intelligent enough to make sense out of her situation and breaks

out”(490).

Amit could be blamed for the condition of Dimple because he never thinks of

her as a individual with identity. He never allows her to do anything that would enable

her to strike roots in the surrounding culture. He does not have the inclination to

understand her loneliness. His own problem of pursuing a job turns him apathetic

towards Dimple’s piling and emotional turmoil.

Once Amit finds a job and moves into the Mukherjee’s apartment, Dimple is on

her own all day and remains confused, and frustrated. She feels truly betrayed in her

marriage with Amit because he does not fit into the frame of her dream boy at all and

cannot provide her the kind of life she had dreamt to live. She feels alienated and

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blames Amit for not boring her. Her daily routine gets disturbed. In fact, she herself

had not expected this kind of change in her; “her mind to be strained … beyond

endurance .. inertia, exhaustion, endless indecisiveness” (115).

She misses the social life which is very important for individual growth. The

fear of losing her identity grips her .The stress caused by displacement, alienation and

loneliness is too strong for Dimple that she develops the symptoms of insecurity. For

her, the future is bleak, the present dull and boring, and the past too remote to be

connected. This makes her withdraw herself from all physical and mental activity.

The alien circumstances accentuate Dimple’s hypertension and drive her to the

brink of regression and abnormality. Despair sets in her life. Born out of frustration

are her seven ways to commit suicide in Queens. The furious outburst of Dimple

shows her accumulated frustrations. She suffers from an inferiority complex and

thinks that she is unable to win her husband’s love. In this stage of psychological drift,

she hits upon the idea of violence against herself and Amit. Her consciousness is shot

through the nightmares of violence of suicide, of death through strangling and

mugging. This a result of her life in America which underscores her inferiority and

makes her contemplate ways of bringing an end to her tortuous existence. She has

already been in a sick state of mind ever since she left India but the alienation from

her husband, environment and the outward glitter, futility and meaninglessness of

American life drive her to the fits of psychic depression and ultimate insanity.

America has outwitted her and now she is gripped by a sense of nostalgia. And even

without her knowledge her loneliness feeds into alienation coupled will fear. She has

willingness to engage in the present western scenario.

As Asnani rightly deserves. “An expatriate is tenaciously conscious of

preserving identity even in most trying moments of life. Dimple is entrapped in a

dilemma of tensions between American culture and society and the traditional

constraints of an Indian wife, between a feminist desire to be assertive and

independent, and the Indian need to be submissive and self-effacing (42).

As the novel advances to its end, we notice Dimple anxious to settle her scores

with America. Her spirit rebels and she enjoys all the prohibited freedom. Dimple

starts looking for a substitute when all her dreams are completely shattered. When she

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goes out she puts on Marsha’s sunglasses, which as Janet says, “are the most typical

index of American culture” (98). Dimple tries to imbibe the openers and modernity of

American culture and to adopt to the ways of life there but cannot afford do that,

either an account of money or for her fear and basic inhibitive nature. She cannot keep

a balance in her ideas.

Initially she recedes into a world of fantasy and later seeks fulfilment in Milt

Glasser. Through him she tries to achieve whatever she had hoped to get in America

as “He was, to her, America” (174). Later her friendly relationship with Milt melts

and transforms into love and ends in physical relationship. But she is untroubled by

any sense of guilt at her infidelity. This indicates her drifting away from her inherited

culture and its values. Inspite of all her efforts to accept the American life she

struggles with her own sense of fear, betrayal and personal instability. Out of

depression and mental strain, almost on the verge of madness.

An inner violence generates in her, leading her to convert from a future-

excited, future-enthusiast into a morose carving out almost seven ways of committing

suicide or killing her husband, seeking revenge, “Her own intensity shocked her she

had not considered herself susceptible to violence” (117), but gradually “she began to

feel that violence was right, even decent” (117).

Finally, Dimple, kills Amit in an act of self-liberation from the stifling,

smothering life offered to her. Her accumulated grievances against the world of which

Amit is the visible symbol, release the destructive energies in her. She stales him

seven times as if liberating herself from the forceful bondages imposed through

matrimony and regenerating herself through blood. The murdering of Amit serves as

an outlet to all her agony and asserts her American identity.

Dimple’s agony experienced in America ends up in murdering her husband.

Though it is because of her psychological breakdown, the passive violence in her

spirit gets multiplied in coming to America where “talking about murder is like

talking about the weather” (161). It is the American notion of freedom for women

which makes her realize her living as an agonizing one. It is her life in America which

intensifies her agony and turns the violence inside out.

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So, this final act of Dimple’s murdering her husband reflects her complete

transformation when she, never like before, asserts herself. Though Dimple does not

acquire new names, does not show any trace of outer changes, she undergo a total

internal metamorphosis. She gets rid of persons and predicaments she thinks of a

obstacles in the path of the desired life. As Dimi states circumstances compel “Dimple

Dasgupta, the pliant, docile, obedient and submissive daughter” (173), a typical Indian

wife and an imaginative romantic individual turn into a helpless and old, sick, furious

desperate murdered. Her dissatisfaction mixed with passive inner complaints, her

conventional thinking and unconventional desires juxtaposed to each other, and her

main attempts to presence a traditional lifestyle and to embrace the open and frank

lifestyle of America at one and the same time, lead to a traumatic upheaval inside her.

This redraw her an insomniac, guilt-ridden wife, a silent conspirer and, finally a

stunning murdered. As Rao questions, the novel raises an important question : ‘Was

the Indian wife happier in India with her limited freedom and greater docility, or does

she achieve happiness in her painful search for more individual freedom in the process

of maturing?” (22).

The next novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, depicts the next stage of expatriation

where agony of Dimple tranforms into dilemma in Tara. The novel deals with an

upper class Bengali Brahmin girl who goes to America for higher studies. Though

afraid of the unknown ways of America in the beginning, she tries to adjust herself to

it by entering into wedlock with an American. She returns to India after seven years to

trace her cultural roots and to reclaim her inherited identity but finds herself a total

stranger in the inherited milieu. She realizes that she is now neither Indian nor truly

American. She is totally confused and lost. As Bharati Mukherjee said in her

interview with Sybil Steinberg :

It is the wisest of my novels in the sense that I was between both

worlds….. I was like a bridge poised between two worlds (46 – 47).

A Times Literary supplement receiver notes Tara’s Wedernisation has opened

her eyes to the gulf between the two worlds that still make India the despair of those

who gourn it” (736).

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The agony undergone by Dimple as a result of the transcultural voyage develops and

changes into a sort of dilemma faced by Tara.

Oh, Calcutta! “Times Literary Supplement June 29, 1973.

Rao, Narayanan. K.S. Review of Wife, Books Abroad : Spring, 1976

Tara is packed off by her father at an early age of fifteen for her study. When

she comes to terms with the American life her reactions are one of fear and anger :

For Tara, Vassar had been an almost unsalvageable mistake. If she had

not been a Banerjee, …. If she had not been trained by the good nuns at

St. Blaise’s to remain composed and ladylike in all emergencies, she

would have rushed home to India at the end of her first week. (10).

In America Tara feels homesick. She senses discrimination even if her

roommate refuses to share her bottle of mango chutney. “Each atom of newness” (10)

bombands her at Vassar. She also prays to “Kali for strength so she would not break

down before these polite Americans” (11). She feels proud of her family and

genealogy, she defends her family and her country instinctively. Shobha Shinde refers

to this as “an immigrant away from home idealizes his home country and cherishes

nostalgic memories of it” (58). As an uprooted expatriate, Tara clings on to Camac

street and does not consider Koth Street, New York, her home. Her expatiate

obsession is revealed when she hangs all her silk saris to make her apartment appear

more Indian Tara creates a little India physically & emotionally without any

communication with the host culture.

But circumstances so contrive incidentally that Tara falls in love with an

American, David Cartwright and marries him. Tara, who once defended her Indian

genealogy, breaks it with courage. She believes that her marriage will give a new

definition to her American existence. But her husband is wholly western and she is

unable to communicate with him the finer nuances of her family background and of

life in Calcutta. Doulit, fear, suspicion and misunderstanding surface in their personal

relationship. This is so because they are rooted in their cultural differences. Christine

Gomez defines this experience as :

A complex state of mind and emotion which includes a wistful longing

for the past, often symbolized by the ancestral home, the pain of exile

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and homelessness, the struggle to maintain the difference between

oneself and the new, unfriendly surroundings, an assumption of moral

and cultural superiority over the host country and a refusal to accept the

identity forced on one by the environment (72).

In India a marriage is a coming together of two families. But in America, a

marriage is simply a contract between two individuals. Hence David is hostile to

genealogies and often mistakes Tara’s love for family for over dependence. His naïve

questions about Indian customs and tradition, highlight their cultural differences and

make Tara feel insecure in an alien atmosphere.

Oscar Hanlins’ words in The uprooted aptly describe Tara’s condition in

America :

“You long of cause of the safety, you cherish still the ideals of the nest … You

are alone in a society without order, you miss the support of the community, the

assurance of a defined rank” (5).

Handlin, Oscar. The uprooted, Boston : Little Brown, 1973.

Tara fails to make use of the freedom and opportunity offered by the host

culture. Her problems of alienation, loneliness, despair, loss of identify and total

anonymity in America spring from her uprooted condition.

To overcome this feeling she decides to go back to India and belong there.

After a gap of seven years Tara comes back to India. For years she has dreamed

of this return. She believes that all shadowy fears of the stay abroad would be erased

quite magically if she returns home to Calcutta. But the new Americanized Tara fails

to enjoy her stay in India for she views India with the keenness of a foreigner.

Although she has always regarded herself as on India, she discourses she is more an

outsider than a nature, concerned with the complex & confusing web of politics

poverty, privilege and hexarchies of power in India. When she comes to confront the

changed and hostile circumstances of her home country, all her romantic dreams and

ideals crumble down. She realizes that she has drowned her childhood memories in

the crowd of America. The alien western culture which has almost become second self

to her is constantly in clash with the culture of her native soil. The clash is deeply felt

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in the psyche of Tara who finds it difficult to adjust with her friends and relatives in

India and even with the tradition of her own family.

On landing at Bombay airport, Tara is greeted warmly by her relatives as

‘Tutul’, her nick name, which sounds strange to her Americanized ears. Seven years

ago while on her way to Vassar “she had admired the house on Marine drive, had

thought them fashionable, but now their shabbiness appalled her” (18). She did not

like the look of the railway station. She “thought the station was more like a hospital;

there were so many sick and deformed men sitting listlessly on bundles and trunks”

(19).

With coming back to India, America looks like a dream land to Tara. Her

sickness at the present situation makes her think about her husband. The thought of

her husband suggests the second self developed in her. The alien land has become

more of a home to her. She repents saying, “Perhaps I was too impulsive, confusing

my fear of New York with homesickness” (21). She felt herself rootless in India too.

Tara herself wonders at the foreignness of her spirit which does not permit her to

establish an emotional kinship with her old relatives and friends. She herself wonders,

“How does the foreignness of spirit begin?”(37).

Tara forgets the next step of rituals while preparing for worship with her

mother. This upsets her for she realizes what America has done to her: “As a child,

Tara remembered, she had sung bhajans in that house … But that had been a very long

time ago, before some invisible spirit or darkness had covered her like skin” (54). She

feels that the American culture has covered her like an invisible spirit or darkness.

This makes us understand that in the deepest core of her heart, Tara has an intent

desire to behave like an ordinary Indian but her re-rooted self in America has made

such common rituals alien to her. She perceives that she has become an alien to her

native values also and it fills her with a sense of rootlessness. Her alienation is

deepened as she is called by her relatives as ‘Americawali’ and her husband as

‘mleccha’. Hence she starts questioning the validity of her own identity.

Tara notices a lot of change in her friends during these seven years. Her friends

and relatives make her feel guilty for marrying an American: “In India she felt she

was not married to a person but to a foreigner, and this foreignness was a burden (62).

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Though she writes to David regularly, she fails to communicate her feelings for him.

For David, she is a foreigner and for her Indian friends and relatives she is a sinner

who has polluted herself by marrying an outcaste. Tara’s mind is constantly at conflict

with the two personalities. One of an Indian and the other of an American. Tara

realizes she has become rootless and out of place both in India and America. She is

caught in the gulf between the two contrasting worlds. At this instant, Tara realizes

that America has transformed her completely.

In India Tara sees disease, despair, riot, poverty, and suffering. While other

common Indians ignore it or accept it as an integral part of life, Tara is not able to.

Now she has started looking at the ugly aspects of India. Tara herself once ignored all

these things but her stay in the States has opened her eyes to the gulf between the lives

of the poor and those of the rich in her own country. Like the people of the West, she

has started looking at India as a land of poor people living in a hostile, unhygienic

conditions and suffering from starvation, decay and disease. F.A. Inamdar discusses:

“Tara efforts to adopt to American society are measured by her rejection and recursion

of India modes of life (187). In her mind she experiences an ongoing conflict between

her old sense of perception and outlook on Calcutta and her changed outlook. As

Jasbir Jain says:

Tara’s consciousness of the present is rooted in her life in the states and

when she looks at India anew it is not through her childhood

associations or her past memories but through the eyes of her foreign

husband, David. Her reactions those of a tourist, of a foreigner (13).

Tara realizes she has become rootless and out of place both in India and

America. Tara’s state is comparable to that of an expatriate who stands apart from the

emotional and spiritual tenor of the country that had once been her own. The

psychological, social and cultural displacement that she suffers from makes her

nervous and excitable.

Reena’s mother entrusts Tara with the duty of mediating between them and the

Irish American McDowell. But Tara fails to understand McDowell though she has

been in America. This makes us understand that Tara has not been able to gratify the

complications of American culture. She fails to understand that America is a land of

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diverse cultures and people from all parts of the world have settled there. Though Tara

marries an American she remains unexposed to the other cultures within America.

McDowell, being a black, belongs to the class of ‘have nots’ in America so it is quite

natural for him to join hands with the agitating crowd of labourers of Calcutta.

Later Tara meets Tuntunwala during her trip to Nayapur. When he proposes to

show her Nayapur, she does not decline this proposal. At last this meeting ends with

her claustrophobic rape by this wretched politician. Tara does not tell anyone of her

friends about her seduction just for fear of disgrace. Tuntunwala’s seduction outrages

Tara so much that she reduces to leave Calcutta for good because she finds herself a

misfit wherever she goes. Though she tries to look Indian and adjust with her friends

there is an invisible gap between them and she feels the breakdown.

In the end, the whole of Calcutta is burning with the violent demonstrations and

riots. The entire city loses its memories in a bonfire of effigies, buses and trams. In

such a situation, out of bewilderment, Tara looks at her innerworld consisting of two

cultures which are two worlds wide apart. Realizing that the reconciliation between

the two is impossible, Tara plans to go back to David. She decides to tell her friends

about her decision at Catelli Continental. In the meantime, the troop of marchers

heads towards Catelli and she with her company gets surrounded by the mob. In an

attempt to escape Joyonto Roy Chowdhury is caught in the messy crowd. Pronob tries

to save him but is unfortunately killed by the mob. This close of novel in the ‘medias

res’ leaves the reader to conjecture themselves as to what ultimately happens to Tara.

Tara’s desire to find a place to love, which she missed in New York, ends ironically in

frustration.

Tara finds herself sandwiched between two cultures. According to her America

is a land of strangers and all her attempts at assimilation are destined to failure due to

her otherness. In an attempt to Americanize herself she loses her Indian identity.

In the end when Tara is caught in the midst of the rioting mob we feel that the

turmoil outside is but an external manifestation of Tara’s inner state of mind. This

desperateness hints at the irreconcilability of such conflicts. The open ending tells

about the dangling personality of Tara which is torn between the American Indian

selves. The psyche of Tara is as a result of the tension created in the mind between the

15

two socio-cultural environments. Between the feeling of rootlessness and nostalgia.

On her return to her native land she finds that her native taste and touch have turned

alien to her. Her mind is torn between the cultural clash of the two environments and

leaves her in a state of dilemma.

Tara is projected as a middle woman between two cultures. She experiences

culture shock in diametrically opposed conditions. Her disillusionment with America

and India is not sudden but gradual. Tara represents an Indian woman, caught up in a

cross-cultural dilemma. The open conclusion of the novel makes us understand that if

Tara escapes from the riot she would go to America and lead a contented life

overcoming her earlier dilemma. As Edward states, “Tara’s predicament is that of a

divided self suspended between two worlds and rooted in neither”(6). Tara feels

fragmented in her identity and feels inadequate and incomplete. Sivaramakrishna aptly

describes the novel which reflects the ambivalences of Tara as “a dramatization of the

resulting ambivalences” (17).

He further states that in India, home may have proved soothing to Tara, but “it

could not insulate her from the short circuits of external reality”. (84). Tara is pushed

to the edges of her old world, and yet exiled from the new and she mainly tries

reconcile the two worlds.

The dilemma in Tara paves way to complete transformation in Jasmine. In

Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee tries to unravel the complicated layers of cross- cultural

reality through a series of adventures which the heroine undertakes during her odyssey

from Punjab to California via Florida, New York and Iowa. Her journey through life

leads Jasmine through many transformations: Jyoti, Jasmine, Jase and Jane via

divergent geographical locales. Jasmine is basically a story of transformation

reinventions and reincarnations of Jasmine. In this novel Bharati Mukherjee “depicts this

transformation and transition as a positive and optimistic journey”. Malavally, Rupa Belur,

“Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee”, A Review, April 30, 2001.

Jyoti, a simple peasant girl from Hasnapur. Her marriage with Prakash initiates

her transformation. She is a kind of rebel and non-conformist from her childhood itself

she marries Prakash a city man who believes in trashing traditions. She starts shuttling

between identities just after she shifts from feudal Hasnapur to urban Jullendar when

16

her husband gives her a new name, Jasmine, and with it a life of a “new kind of a city

woman” (77). After marriage she identifies her husband’s wishes with those of hers.

Prakash wishes to secure admission in an American Institute of Technology. They

dream about their life in America. But Prakash is killed by the Khalsa Lions and he

leaves Jasmine heart-broken and alone. Jasmine, being a born fighter does not let the

heart-rending tragedy to lose her courage. She decides to visit the supposed institute,

where Prakash had to get admitted, to burn herself. Just after her husbands murder, as

Roopa says “Jasmine sets off an agonizing trip as an illegal immigrant to Florida and

thus begins her symbolic trip transformation, displacement and a search for identity”.

Though she experiences a symbolic transformation in India itself, her actual

metamorphosis from a dutiful Hindu wife to a self-willed woman begins only after she

comes to U.S.A. It is only throughout her American odyssey that the place of her

transition and metamorphosis accelerates.

Her defiant denial of her predicted widowhood and excile seer, her decision to

learn English, to marry Prakash Vijh against the wishes of her parents, and lastly the

most vital, her decision to go to America after her husbands murder, show the seeds of

changes already present in her. We realize that she will not change either herself or the

circumstances. Mr. Sivaramakrishna, “Bharati Mukherjee”, Indian English Novelists, ed.

Madhusudan Prasad New Delhi. Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1982.

Jasmine leaves for America on forged papers without knowing what holds in

store of her. Jasmine’s first encounter with America is Half-face, the captain of the

ship. He rapes Jasmine. Jasmine lets herself turn into goddess Kali to kill that brute.

As Samir Dayal says, her killing of Half-face is a kind of self-assertion: “she

experiences an epistemic violence that is also a life affirming transformation” (71).

Dimri describes that her “transformation from a victim to a blood decouring Goddess

Durga is quite instant”.

After this violent encounter with the ugly world, Jasmine starts afresh. She

burns her husband’s suit there and with it, her former self and her past as well. Her

reinvention of her identity and her initiation into the American way of life begins in

the form of “Jazzy in a t-shirt, tight cords and running shoes” (133), with the help of

Lillian Gordon, a kind American Woman. Having learned to walk and talk American,

17

she grabs every opportunity to become American. Gordon helps Jasmine to proceed to

New York. Jasmine visits her husband’s former teacher, Devinder Vadhera. Among

the Vadheras she is a helpless widow and she finds life suffocating there. The freedom

loving spirit of Jasmine finds it difficult to cope with the conservative India

represented by the Vadheras. Hence she deserts the Vadheras and sets forth for

another adventure with the help of Kate, daughter of Lillian Gordon.

Jasmine reaches Claremont Avenue through Kate. She get an pair position in a

family in Manhattan. She is given a new name, Jase. This marks the beginning of her

acculturation. In the new surroundings, Jasmine becomes more Americanized. Her

Americanization is complete once she becomes the integral part of the family of

Taylor Wylie Hayes with their adopted daughter, Duff. Jasmine has experienced the

best moments of stay in America in the company of Taylor and Duff. She is absorbed

in the American world forgetting all about her strange mission. She falls in love with

Taylor when Wylie leaves him. But Jasmine is forced to run from New York because

she sights the assassin of her husband, Sukhwinder. She runs for life to Iowa, where

she takes on a new identity.

Jasmine’s life in Iowa begins with her chance meeting with Mother

Pipplemayer. She helps Jasmine in getting a job in her son Bud’s bank. Later, she

becomes Jane Pipplemayer, the live - in companion of Bud Pipplemayer. Jasmine’s

every movement is a calculated step into her Americanization. She slowly gets

immersed into the mainstream American culture. She willingly embraces the company

of an American without marriage but also carries his child in her womb.

When Du, the adopted son of Bud, leaves for Los Angels, Jasmine’s world is

shattered for he has been a silent companion in all her bright and gloomy moments.

This sense of bereavement sets the path ready for her last adventure with her former

lover, Taylor. Hence she leaves Bud without any scruples, despite being pregnant with

his child. She goes with Taylor and Duff to California where the promise of America

is eagerly awaiting her. It is perhaps Jasmine’s Americanness that has made her accept

Taylor’s offer to go to West towards an unknown future. Having seen death and the

worst of life closely many a time, having suffered and survived several times, she

seems to regard her relationship with Bud just another phase in her journey of self. It

18

is America that has taught her that nothing lasts in that country : “Nothing is forever,

nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate”(181). In deserting

Bud and choosing Taylor, Jasmine does not exchange between men but she changes

her whole world:

I am not choosing between men. I am caught between the promise of

America and old – world dutifulness (240).

In Jasmine’s tug of war between ‘old world dutifulness’ and the promise of

America, Jasmine decides to choose the promise of America. This makes one realize

that the conflict within Jasmine reaches a happy reconciliation and makes her ecstatic.

John K. Hoppe aptly observes that the novels “unifying theme is Jyoti / Jasmine /

Jane’s mutability, her adaptation to circumstances, expressed as a change from passive

tradition deject of faith to active, modern across cultural shape of her future.

Jasmine is never tormented by the clash of traditional Indian values of the

American world she faces. She is neither nostalgic for her past nor afraid of the

unfamiliar present. She transforms herself completely. She has used all her strength to

forge new alliances in the friendly soil of the adopted homeland. She understands that

breaking away from one’s ethnicity and absorbing the new culture is the only way for

survival. Jyoti who always wanted to live life on her own terms but could not, no turns

into Jase quiet and fully Americanized. Once she is emerald in the melting per

dynamic of North America, she assimilates into the dominant culture and casts aside

her identity as an Indian by the complete erasure of her Indian post. Delyani rightly

diserves : “In Jasmine the protagonist feels she can rip herself free of the past as she

assimilates in American society” (171).

Debjani Banerjee, “In the presence of History : The Representation of Past and

present India in Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction”, Bharati Mukherjee : Critical Perspective, ed.

Emmanuel S. Nelson. The fusion between the East and the West pleased her and she

rejoices that her journey to America has unfolded her affirming self. Her genetic

transformation makes it possible for her “to reposition the stars” (240). Even after

going through a series of transformation, the process of her reincarnations does not

seem to be complete.

19

She is still open to many more self inventions. Although her transformation is

genetic, she herself is never sure how many more shapes are in her. On the whole, in

her voyage of transformation and dislocation, and her yearning to find an identity, she

comes out emphatically a winner through incorporating new ideas, desires skills and

habits. It is her adaptability readiness to reinvent herself aid her assimilation into

American society.

Katherine Miller aptly describes Jasmines desire to change transcends all of the

limitations imposed by her race, class and gender. There are some common facts in

the transformation of the three protagonists. They undergo a sea change while

pursuing their desires. All the three look quite different from the one eve knew in the

beginning of their transformation of Dimple, Tara and Jasmine. Killing of Amit in the

case of Dimple, seduction of Tara by Juntunwala and murder of Jasmines husband,

her seduction by Half- Face and the violent attack on Bud cause a sort of change in all

the protagonists. All of them flee their past in their quest of embracing the new life

with a slight difference.

Miller, Katherine. “Breaking the Borders of Gendered Space : Female

characters in Avitta Van Herk;s No Fixed Address and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder

of the World”, July 2000.

While Tara and Dimple become isolated rootless aliens because of their

ambivalent attitude to their native tradition as well as the culture of the new world,

Jasmine enjoys the assimilated status of immigration by a sheer will to bond herself to

her adopted land. The tugging between the opposing forces does not intimidate

Jasmine, rather it excites her. Jasmine assimilates herself, to find herself a place in the

main stream of America life, leaving behind the whole life-style of India. Amidst

other immigrants like Dimple and Tara who stand alienated or hang suspended

between the two worlds, Jasmine feels proud that she is getting rooted in the new

world. As Martin Heidegger states, “A boundary is not that at which something stops

but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its

presencing”(154). Jasmine over powers the agony of Dimple and the dilemma in Tara

by her ecstasy because she is characterized by a tendency in which feeling of being

displaced is overcome by a desire to settle down, and find a new home.

20

To sum up, all the three protagonists are round characters. They cross the

oceans, physical and geographical boundaries which change their lives in all respects:

psychologically, emotionally and physically. In this process of metamorphosis, by

their sheer resilience and life force, they emerge victorious, self-assertive, and

opposite of their former self.

Works Cited

Foster, Douglas. “No Place Like Home” Review of Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee,

Mother Jones December 1989.

Choudhury, Enakshi “Images of Woman in Bharati Mukherjee Novels”, Literary Voice,October 1995.

Dhingra, Lavina Shankar, “Activism, Feminism and Americanization in Bharati Mukherjee’s

Wife and Jasmine”, HCM: A Journal of Asia American Cultural Criticism, Winter 1995.

21

Works cited

Asnani, Shyam M., and Deepika Rajpal. “Identity Crisis in The Nowhere Man and

Wife”. Quest for Identity in Indian English Writing, ed. R.S. Pathak. New Delhi

: Bahri Publication, 1992.

Chowdhury, Enakshi. “Images of Women in Bharati Mukherjee’s Novels”. LiteraryVoice, October, 1995.

Dayal, Samir. “Creating, Preserving, Destroying : Violence in Bharati Mukherjee’sJasmine”. Bharati Mukherjee : Critical Perspectives, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson.

New York Garland Publishers, 1993.

Gomez, Christine. “The On-Going Quest of Bharati Mukherjee from Expatriation to

Immigration”. Indian Women Novelists. Set 3. Vol. 3. ed. R.K. Dhawan. New

Delhi : Prestige Publication, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”. Poetry, Language, Thought.

Trans Alfred Hofstadter, New York : Harper and Row, 1971.

Jain, Jasbir. “Foreignness of Spirit : The World of Bharati Mukherjee’s Novels.”.Journal of Indian Writing in English 13.2, July, 1985.

Leong-Geok, Liew. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Expatriates and Immigrants, Displacement and

Americanization”, International Literature in English : Essays on the Major

Authors, New York : Garland Publishers, 1991.

Mukherjee, Bharati. The Tiger’s Daughter. New Delhi : Penguin India, 1990.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. New Delhi : Penguin India, 1990.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New Delhi : Penguin India, 1990.

Powers, Janet M. “Sociopolitical Critique as Indices and Narrative Codes in Bharat

Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine”. Bharati Mukherjee : Critical Perspectives, ed.

Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York : Garland Publishers, 1993.

Shils, Edward. “The Intellectual Between Tradition and Modernity”, The IndianScene” cited in R.S. Pathak, The Indo-English Novelists’ Quest for Identity,

R.K. Dhawan, ed. Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, New Delhi :

Bahri, 1982.

Shinde, Shobha, “Cross-cultural Crisis in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and The

Tiger’s Daughter”. Indian Women Novelists. Set 3. Vol. 3 ed. R.K. Dhawan.

New Delhi, Prestige, 1995.

Steinberg, Sybil. “Bharati Mukherjee”, Publishers Weekly, 25 August, 1989.