'Segments of the Self' in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

'Segments of the Self' in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine Mr. A. Venkateshkumar Assistant Professor Department of English Bharathiar University Gobi Arts and Science College Gobichettipalayam Tamilnadu India Abstract Migration is as old as human history. The Bible talks about the exodus of Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. Exodus of a different kind and for a different purpose takes place every day in different parts of the world. In world history, the dispersal of the Jews in different parts of the world away from their homeland is referred to as ‘diaspora’. The terms ‘immigrant’ and ‘expatriate’ in general refer to persons who live outside their country by choice. But in the works of ‘Bharati Mukherjee’ these two terms assume distinct connotations. The ‘immigrant’ willingly transforms herself / himself to fit in and absorb the best in the host culture. The immigrant experience, therefore, becomes a transformative process of the ‘self’ in it’s relation to society. In Jasmine, the protagonist, though widowed at a young age, casts aside the weeds of a widow and begins her stride towards liberation and empowerment. Ostensibly on the grounds of committing Sati on the Florida University Campus where her dead husband Prakash wanted to study, Jasmine lands on the Florida coast. Despite the odds against her, she gets assimilated successfully into the American Culture / Society. She changes herself in order to change the www.ijellh.com 509 world around. Her self is fragmented as Jyoti-Jasmine-Jazzy-Jane. Jasmine becomes Mukherjee’s ‘objective correlative’. Key Words: Migration, diaspora, immigrant, expatriate, Self and Sati Introduction Migration is as old as human history. The Bible talks about the exodus of Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. Exodus of a different kind and for a different purpose takes place every day in different parts of the world. In world history, the dispersal of the Jews in different parts of the world away from their homeland is referred to as ‘Diaspora’. It is derived from the Greek term ‘Diasperien’. ‘Dia’ means ‘across’ and ‘sperien’ means ‘ to show or scatter seeds’. The term ‘Diaspora’ now refers to displaced communities which have been dislocated from their homeland through migration or immigration or exile. Diasporic traversals interrogate the rigidity of identity. Therefore, diasporic literature addresses issues like identity, culture, hybridity, nationality, home, homelessness, mimicry and binarisms like self /other, insider/outsider and margin/centre. Identity is an important issue in diasporic literature. Bharati Mukherjee’s own life, with it’s dislocations and displacements, explains her compulsive interest in recording the immigrant experience in her fiction. Her experience in India, Canada and America have left an indelible mark in her sensibility as a person and also as an artist. The Segments in Self Bharathi Mukherjee published Jasmine (1989), fourteen years after the publication of wife (1975). Jasmine, a new phase down in mukherjee’s literary career. Though she continues to talk about immigrant lives, her angel of vision has radically changed. Jasmine passes through a six-stage transformation. Jyoti is a seven-years-old girl in Hasnapur, a village in Punjab, Jullundhur District. The war between fate and will, determinism and free-will begins when the astrologer under the Banyan tree foretells Jyoti’s widowhood and exile. The little girl defies the prophecy of the old www.ijellh.com 510 man calling him “a crazy old man” (J 3). She pooh-poohs the prophecy and expresses deep faith in her future. She says, “you don’t know what my future holds” (J 3). Not able to accept the resistance offered by Jyoti, the astrologer chucks her hard on the head. Jyoti falls and suffered a star-shaped wound on the forehead. Still Jyoti shouts, “it is not a scar [. . .] it is my third eye” (J 5). So saying, she swims to where the river is a “sun-gold haze”(J 5). Suddenly, her fingers touch the soft water-logged carcass of a small dog. The moment she touches it, it breaks into two and stench emanates from the carcass. Jyoti understands what she does not want to become. The stark reality is that she is fifth daughter and the seventh child in a family of nine children. By the kind intervention of her mother, she stays three years longer than her sisters in school. Luckily, she finds the right kind of mentor masterji, the village schoolmaster. He is quick to identify the special talents of Jyoti. To Masterji, Jyoti is a “lotus blooming in cow dung” ( J 16). By teaching her English, he helps her demand more than what she had been given at birth. Learning English is “to want the world” (J 68). Thus Masterji exposes her to the world outside, particularly the West. Unfortunately, Jyoti’s father gets killed, gored by a bull. Mataji becomes a widow. The whole family in misery. Consequently, Jyoti’s brothers, Aravind and Prar drop out of the technical school in Jullundhar. They start a scooter repair shop. Jyoti’s brother bring home their friends. On one such occasion, Jyoti falls in love with Prakash, a smart young man from Amritsar. Even without seeing Prakash, Jasmine falls in love first with his voice and later with the owner of the voice. As a progressive young man, Prakash marries Jyoti in a registrar’s office. Both Prakash and Jyoti begin a nuclear family in the city. Very soon, Prakash changes the ‘feudal Jyoti’ to “Jasmine”, a semi-liberated city women. This is the time Punjab is rocked by the Sikhs’ demand for an independent khalistan. The Khalsa lions walk the streets of Punjab setting off bombs and killing innocent people. Prakash, who has been preparing to go to Florida Technical School, U.S.A., gets killed accidentally in a bomb blast engineered by Sukhwinder Singh. Actually the bomb is not meant for Prakash but for the Hindu women shopping inside a sari shop. www.ijellh.com 511 The ultimely death of Prakash throws Jasmine into the widow’s hut, where she is cooped up with her mother. But a girl with a special mission cannot be confined to a hovel in Hasnapur. Nothing can quell the rage in her heart; nothing can extinguish the fire in her soul; nothing can stop her quest for liberation and nothing can deter her stride towards freedom, fulfillment and self-realisation. She spends all her husband’s savings to secure a fake passport. She wants to commit 'Sati' on the Florida Campus where Prakash wanted to go to college. After a hazardous journey in a Shrimper called the Gulf Shuttle, she reaches the Florida Coast as an illegal immigrant. Capitalizing on the helplessness of Jasmine on the Florida Coast, Half-Face, the captain of the Shrimper takes her to a Florida motel and rapes her. Donning the image of kali by cutting the tongue, Jasmine kills Half face, the evil incarnate. Sullied by the act of rape, she surrenders her plan of committing sati. She settles for a symbolic burning of Prakash’s suit and her white sari in a trash can outside the Florida motel. This act symbolizes Jasmine becomes a new women without the hangover of the two thousand years of history. Simultaneously she gets ready to imbibe the two-hundred-year history of the New World. Henceforth, all her encounters with strangers in the new land are benign. Lillian Gordon, a seventy-years-old Quaker lady shelters her. She teaches her how to ‘talk’ American and ‘walk’ American. She trains her to survive in the New World. Under the protection of Lillian Gordon, Jasmine becomes “Jazzy”. On Jasmine’s request, Lillian Gordon sends Jasmine to meet Prof. Vadhera, a teacher of Prakash who lives in Flushing, New Yark. Jasmine spends five depressing monts in the company of Indian ‘expatriates’ in flushing, New York. There are many startling revelation for her in store. Prof. Vedhera is not a professor in a college in New York, but a storer of imported human hair in a hotel basement. Jasmine understands that clinging on to one’s own culture tenaciously while living in an immigrant locale does not help an immigrant in any way. So, with the help of Kate Feldstein, Gordon’s daughter, she enters the household of Taylor and Wylie Hayes as an au pair. Taylor is a professor of physics at Columbia University. Wylie works for a publishing house. In Taylor’s apartment on Claremont Avenue, Manhattan, Jasmine becomes “Jase”, the reborn-American. She also becomes the day mummy of Duff, the adoped daughter of Taylor and Wylie. Jasmine falls in love with the world of Taylor and wants www.ijellh.com 512 to become a part of it. Jasmine gets accommodated into the private life of Taylor because Wylie falls out of love with him and falls in love with Stuart Eschelman, an economist. Wylie pursues her “chance at real happiness” (J 181), giving the role of caretaker to Jasine in the Taylor’s household. Before things settle down after the abrupt departure of Wylie, Jasmine spots Sukhwinder in central park, selling hot dogs. She moves to lowa, much against the advice of Taylor. In lowa, Jasmine runs into Mother Ripplemeyer, a Lutheran of German extraction. Mother introduces Jasmine to her son Bud Ripplemeyer, an lowa Banker. Eventually, Jasmine becomes a teller in Bud’s Bank. Karin, Bud’s wife estranges from Bud, facilitating Jasmine becomes 'Jane Ripplimeyer', the live –in companion of Bud. They adopt Du, a Vietnamese refugee, as Bud wants to make up for his fifty years of selfishness. The hormony in Bud’s multiethnic family is marred when Harlan Kroener, a frustrated farmer shoots and maims Bud. Bud is permanently confined to the wheel chair. Subsequently, Taylor and Duff reappear in Lowa. They solicit Jasmine to go with them to the Colifornian frontier which is further west. Jasmine invites Karin, the divorced wife of Bud to take charge of Bud. Pregnant with Bud’s child, she “scrambles ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope” (J 41). Jasmine is Mukherjee’s model of ‘fragmented self-immigrant’. Mukherjee herself has experienced the exuberance of ‘immigrant’ existence. An ‘immigrant’ in Mukherjee’s conception transforms his or her identity as many times as required in order to reach the ideal. Obviously, an ‘immigrant’s ideal is to get assimilated into the mainsteam culture. So an ‘immigrant’s progression is from the fringes of the dominant culture to the centre. The movement from begin an ‘expatriate’ to becoming an ‘immigrant’ is not easy. ‘immigrant’ experience entails pain. It means shedding of one’s old identities and emotional hangovers. The ultimate purpose of an ‘immigrant’ is ‘to belong’ in an immigrant locale. The other possibility for anyone who chooses to live in another country is the life of an ‘expatriate.’ An ‘expatriate’ keeps himself aloof and distances himself from the dominant culture only to bunker into nostalgia for a lost homeland. Conclusion www.ijellh.com 513 The life of Jyoti-Jasmine-Jazzy-Jane is a fictional rendering of ‘fragmented self'. Jyoti, which means light, is born in a gender-biased society. In such a society, the very birth of a girl child is viewed as the consequence of a woman’s sins of the past. So one’s past decides the present and makes or mars one’s future. People believe, “Gods with infinite memories visited girl children on women who need to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations” (J 39). So, in such a culture, a person’s past dictates the present and decides the future. Jyoti wonders, “if I had been a boy, my birth in a bountiful year, would have marked me as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfill” (J 39). Jyoti’s mother laments the quirks of fate for heaping beauty on jyoti, the fifth girl child and not on the first girl child. Gods are responsible for such a cruelty. Jasmine, the protagonist, though widowed at a young age, casts aside the weeds of a widow and begins her stride towards liberation and empowerment. Ostensibly on the grounds of committing Sati on the Florida University Campus where her dead husband Prakash wanted to study, Jasmine lands on the Florida coast. Despite the odds against her, she gets assimilated successfully into the American Culture / Society. She changes herself in order to change the world around. Her self is fragmented as Jyoti-Jasmine-Jazzy-Jane. Jasmine becomes Mukherjee’s ‘objective correlative’. www.ijellh.com 514 References:  Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New Delhi: Penguin Publishers, 1990. Print.  Stephen, Stanley M. Bharati Mukherjee: A Study in Immigrant Sensibility. New Delhi: Prestige Publishing House, 2010. Print.  Tandon, Sushma. Bharati Mukherjee's Fiction: A perspective. New Delhi: Sarup, 2004. Print.  Agarwal, Malti. English Literature: Voices of Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Private Limitated, 2009. Print.  Nelson ES. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993. Print.  http://www.languageinindia.com/oct2013/jamilaamericanbrat1.pdf www.ijellh.com 515