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”. Literary
Voice, October, 1995.
Dayal, Samir. “Creating, Preserving, Destroying : Violence in Bharati Mukherjee’s
Jasmine”. 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 Indian
Scene” 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.