Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine a study of displacement, mutation and translation

Jasmine, the 1989-novel by Mukherjee, investigates, in an essential and searching way, the trauma and possibilities – following dislocations and uprooted identities. In the novel, the crucial role of migration, compulsive and intended, literal and emblematic, found in the female subjectivity of the young protagonist–initially named Jyoti Vijh – represents the dislocation and mutative progression within the scrambled structure of the protagonist‘s personal history. Transmigration and transplantation in postcolonial diasporic context, a major theme in most of Bharati Mukherjee‘s novels, have often to do with the memory, history or past that is subdued in nostalgia where their ethnicity and culture are submerged. In most of her writing, Mukherjee describes identity that is dislocated and disrupted by exile in the light of postcolonial ‘otherness’ and gender—a perspective that further questions fixed concept of identity and can also be seen as a means of linking the different ethnic poles of that identity, bringing into close contact cultures earlier considered utterly estranged.

Mukherjee‘s women characters venture out for the New World, and experience its split structures, its split imperatives, through negotiations and diasporic relocation of selves. It was the ability of Mukherjee‘s characters to endure their exilic anguish, to work through their anxieties, alienations and dislocations towards a life that may be radically incomplete but continues to be intricately steam-rolled by aspirations and fantasies. These are symptomatic of the culture of survival and endurance that emerges from the other side of the colonial endeavor. From Mukherjee‘s point of view one can infer a cross-cultural assimilative code where the migrant performs an ideologically imperative function by dismantling cultural stereotype, margins and borders before creating a space through which new form of belonging can be relocated.