DIASPORIC EXPERIENCES IN THE NOVELS OF BHARATI MUKHERJEE'S 'JASMINE' &
JHUMPA LAHIRI'S 'NAMESAKE Alka Pushpa Nisha
Assistant Professor-English Govt. Nehru PG College Deori Dist.Sagar (M.P.)
Abstract: In the last twenty years or so an increasing number of third world writers have emigrated to the west and have chosen to write in the English language. The style and content of their writing have been greatly influenced by the extent to which they have been able to identify and adopt to their new environment. Those who still feel alienated in their new country tend to write about people and events which are typical of their country of origin and are anxious to infuse Indian local colour in their writing. However, those who have been able to identify with their host country, developed a multicultural perception which enables them to write from a wider and more exciting view.
It is interesting to note that the history of diasporic Indian writing is as old as the diaspora itself. The most interesting aspect in the modern history of Indian English Literature, is the emergence of men and women novelists, creating a notable sensation all around the world with their award winning works of art. Some of those who have given a "new tone, tenor and content to Indian fiction in English include Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghose, Vikram Seth Allan J.Sealy, Geeta Mehta and Arundati Roy "(Jaydip. S.Dodiya,p iii) Not to forget some of the writers belonging to Indian diaspora like Rohinton Mistry, V.S.Naipaul, Chitra
Banerjee Devakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Desai.
Introduction: Diasporic literature has made a significant contribution to Indian Writing in English by its rich exposure to multiculturalism. Diasporic literature addresses issues such as identity, culture, hybridity, nationality, home, homelessness and binary categories like self/other, insider/outsider and margin/center. The psyche plays an important role for immigrants that reconsolidate the past into the present.
The elements of recollection reduce the distance between the host land and the homeland. Through the recollection, the past incidents of the native land are reflected in an immigrant's mind. Salman Rushdie's comment on memory is mentionable: ...we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost... create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind (Rushdie 1991:4).
Migration and immigration have directly or indirectly affected several generations of contemporary writers in English engendering hybridism and culture complexity within them and
urging them to grapple with multiple cultures and countries and tensions between them. These immigrants are haunted by some sense of loss and agonize over the home left behind; and they create their writings with elements of imagination. The impact of diasporic experiences on their psyche depends on their level of belonging in a foreign land.
Women writers, those in India and those of the Indian Diaspora, are r forward with strong and sure strides matching the pace of the world. They are recognized for their originality and individuality. These writers are able to sensitively portray a world that has in it women, and with content rich in substance. Their women are real flesh and blood protagonists who are awesome with their relationships to their surroundings, their society, their families, their mental makeup and themselves. In 1960s, a remarkable change was brought about in Indian fiction by the women writers who portrayed women not merely as wife or child-bearer but as liberated self from male and social oppression at various level in the gender biased society.
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In this article, we propose to study some very successful women writer of Indian Fiction in English Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri to see how as a woman they seek to depict the life of women in their world and to search for the identity in the diaporic situation and experiences.
As a writer of Diaspora, Mukherjee's novels and short stories express the nomadic impulses of Indians, who in their deliberate search for materially better life migrate to the west and consequently face tensions of adaptations and assimilation. As a novelist, she has clearly stated her aim in her novels as, "My aim is to expose Americans to the energetic voices of new settlers in this country". (qtd. in Inamdar 39). Mukherjee is at her best in the depiction of cross-cultural conflicts and shows how her characters take control over their destinies. Many of her stories are "about Psychological transformation, especially among women" (qtd. in Connell 1990: 15)
As a writer, Bharati Mukherjee is concerned about depicting her picture of Indian life intelligible and interesting to the American readers through her novels.
But she is too good an artist to distort reality just to capture attention. She avoids stereotyped versions and sentimental exaggerations and tries to pack into her novels a rich resonance of meaning by the deft device of combining immigrant, feminist and existentialistic perspectives. She focuses her attention on the growing awareness of the dark spots in the lives of her characters, and their courageous efforts to discover areas of light. This search for light, for happiness and fulfillment is subtly linked in her fiction to her protagonists' struggle for selfactualization.
The novel Jasmine as a whole deals with a young Indian widow's successful attempt to reshape her destiny and her happiness in an alien land. The protagonist Jasmine goes to America and
there she meets with many problems and overcomes it Finally, she settles in America and accepts the American way of life and asserts her identity in a foreign land.
In Jasmine, the bold events which have allowed Jasmine's transformation from the ill fated village girl, Jyoti, to the self-assured emancipated American Woman, Jane are told in a narrative reversion. Jasmine is not Jasmine yet, she is called Jyoti. Jyoti is presented as an unlucky child, born female and intelligent. At the age of seven, Jyoti is a rebel. When the astrologer under a banyan tree foretells Jyoti a life of
"widowhood and exile" (Jasmine 3) she cannot accept it. As a fighter, she wants to react to the astrologer's attempt to reduce her to nothingness by falling down and making a star shaped mark on her forehead which she interprets as "my third eye" (Jasmine 5). So, she starts the war between her fate and her will by creating her own interspace for individual growth. Jyoti is also courageous and resourceful; when attacked by a mad dog in the Hasnapur fields, she is able to kill it with a staff she carries. Her action reveals her desire to live and she herself says "I wasn't ready to die" (Jasmine 57) shows her longing for life. Her grandmother wants her to marry and settle in life. But against her grandmother's wish, she decides to study and through education she wants to get a better life. So she continues her education, picking up knowledge not only from books but also from hearing men talk about politics, from Newspapers and the radio.
At the age of fourteen, she falls in love with Prakash, her brother's friend, a twenty-four year old electronic student and marries him. Prakash plays a modern enlightened man in the life of jasmine. He renames her Jasmine to remove from her any trace of traditional dutifulness since as he says to her "only in feudal societies is the woman still a vassal" (Jasmine 77).
So, he says that she is not Jyoti, the village girl anymore but Jasmine, a modern city woman. Prakash and Jasmine lead a happy life but their happiness soon comes to an end with the death of Prakash. His untimely death at the hands of terrorists, leaves Jasmine grief stricken and frustrated with ineffectual anger. One half of the astrologer's prediction - widowhood - comes true, leaving Jasmine in a daze.
But she rebels against the idea of spending the rest of her life as a destitute widow at Hasnapur. So, she decides to go to America to commit Sati, burning herself along with her husband's suit at the site where he would have gone to University.
Fate has a few surprises for Jasmine. In a stunt-film-like manner Jasmine lands in Florida as an illegal alien. In Florida, Half-face, the deformed captain, in whose ship she is smuggled into America, proposes accompanying Jasmine to a motel in order to protect her because she is young, beautiful and Asian and could tempt bad guys. However, Jasmine ends up being the prey of her own assumed saviour. Half-face becomes the villain and rapes her.
The transformation of identity starts from this moment. She wants to punish the Halfface. So she slices her own tongue with a blade and with her mouth full of blood, she moves towards her villain. Just one stroke of the blade on his throat and the scene of the murder is perfect: I wanted that moment when he saw me above him as he had last seen me, naked, but now with my mouth open, pouring blood, my red tongue out (Jasmine 118).Jasmine's full transformation, from the victim into a vengeful goddess, seems to be reinforced by imagining herself as the reincarnation of Kali, the goddess of destruction.Her Kali-like encounter with Half-face forces her to change her mind and instead of dying she kills him and decides to live and complete Prakash's mission of
making good in America. Possessed and transformed by the rage of the Goddess Kali, Jasmine undergoes a quick shift of identity. From dutiful lost widow she is now a free murderess in search of multiple reincarnations.
Jasmine is ready for her next reincarnation as Jazzy and lets herself be refashioned by Lillian Gordon, whose mission in life is to help undocumented aliens survive in America. Lillian also helps her to get back her self-confidence and pays for her trip to New York so that she can live with Professor Vadhera, a gentleman who was instrumental in Prakash's securing admission in an engineering course.Jasmine spends five months in Professor Vadhera's house.
Dejected by the discovery that the Professor is eking out a living not by teaching but by trading in human hair, she decides to leave that house. So she asks Professor Vadhera to help her to get a "green card, even a forged one"(Jasmine 148). As soon as the Professor manages to get her a forged green card, she flees from the Vadhera apartment and takes one more plunge into America. Having determined to live on her own, she leaves the place. After a short period of hand-to- mouth existence, Jasmine gets the chance to work as caregiver to Duff, the little daughter of Wylie and Taylor. Jasmine achieves another identity as Jase by Taylor and starts her transformation into a sophisticated American woman.
Jasmine is more attached to the name Jase than Jassy, which is given by Wylie.
She prefers Jase to Jassy, however, partly because she is attracted to Taylor.
In Lowa, she achieves a new identity as Jane, a caregiver to Bud Ripplemeyer and Du, a sixteen-year old Vietnam War victim adopted by Bud, after his grown-up sons left the house and he is separated from his wife Karin. Violence mars the even tenor of her life yet again:
this time in Bud's becoming a cripple waist downwards by a farmer. So she takes care of him and does everything he
wants. She lives with Bud, the prospect of unwed motherhood does not disturb her in the least. After some days, she receives a letter from Taylor informing her that he and Duff would call on her shortly. It is actually a pleasant surprise to her. She does not like to marry Bud and therefore she decides to leave Bud- and live with Taylor. Jasmine became a vital, life-giving force to Taylor, Bud, Du and Duff - they all love her anddepend on her. She has learnt to live not for her husband or for her children but for herself. Shefinds a permanent home for herself with Taylor and Duff in California. At every stage, Jasmine's life ends in terror, violence and fear. But like the proverbial phoenix, Jasmine rises from her ashes, as it were.
In an interview, Mukherjee has said, I believe that our souls can be reborn in another body, so the perspective I have about a single character's life is different from that of an American writer who believes that he has only one life.(qtd. in Carb 1988-89 651)Thus, Mukherjee narrates the various lives of Jasmine in Jasmine
Jasmine's life shows that America has transformed Jasmine, and she has transformed America too: Then there is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out of the door and in the potholed and rutted driveaway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope (Jasmine 241). These concluding remarks release the tension, which runs like a red thread throughout the novel, between Jasmine's predicated fate and her desire to escape and transform it.
Jasmine may or may not appear as a rubble-maker to everyone stepping into the orbit of her life, but at every stage in her trouble-torn life, in all her identities as Jyoti, Jasmine, Jase, and Jane, she seems to act boldly and unhesitatingly, thrilled at the prospect of
"adventure, risk transformation" (Jasmine
241). The word 'transformation together with her words of farewell to the mental image of the astrologer and his words which have been haunting her all these years, Watch me reposition the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross- legged above my kitchen stove (Jasmine 240) suggests that Jasmine has indeed achieved self-actualization in America.
Thus Mukherjee shows how the American way of life, shapes Jasmine to assert her individuality and identity in an alien land.
The immigrant writer faces common plight of immigrant experiences of exile, alienation, dislocation and loss of culture and identity.Jhumpa Lahiri, too have blended sensual and sentimental details of Indian tradition and culture and the diasporic experiences skillfully.she says "India is an inescapable presence in this strong first nine polished and resonant tales". She explores indianness in varying degrees in all her stories, whether they are set in Calcutta or in the United States. In her novel Namesake, the element of nostalgia also plays an important role for reflections upon their identity. This clearly shows their desire to go back and celebrate their past, and it denotes homesickness, a yearning for home. In The Namesake (2003), nostalgia about a train accident in India helps Ashok to decide his new born babe's name: "He remembers the page crumpled tightly in his fingers, the sudden shock of the lantern's glare in his eyes... but with gratitude" (Lahiri 2003:28). The name Gogol is the production of nostalgic exploration. Again we can see Ashima's aspiration to return to India in spite of permanent settlement after marriage in Massachusetts in The Namesake (2003).
The meeting point of the past and the present too are illuminated by the writers through the nostalgic representations of the characters' efforts.
In foreign countries, lack of adaptability, lack of assimilation, and the multiple identities of the immigrants make them feel lonely and unsociable.
Alienation is also one of the significant ingredients that indicate an immigrant's transportation, exile, uprooting and sense of loneliness in a new atmosphere. This sense of loneliness and isolation is mirrored in the characters of Ashima, Gogol, Moushumi and Sonia in The Namesake (2003). Ashima's understanding of the vast gap between home and the host culture and the generation gap between her, and her son Gogol and daughter Sonia causes Ashima's separation from the new society.
On the other hand, Gogol and Sonia, who are born and brought up totally in the West, find their parents' spiritual leanings increasing their confusions. Their self fashioning as Westerners receives a push- back each time they encounter aspects of their ancestry either outwardly or inwardly. Sometimes the second- generation migrants revolt against their perplexed position. The Gingilis celebrate
"with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth ofChrist, an event the children look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati" (Lahiri, Namesake 64). But once Sonia, in one of her growing-up years, refused her Christmas gifts after taking a Hinduism class in college, "protesting that they weren't Christians"
Through migration, immigrants have lost their material relationship to the land of origin, but theycan still preserve their cultural or spiritual relationship through memory. The novel opens withAshima recalling her homeland fondly. She is in an advanced state of pregnancy, admitted in ahospital for her delivery. "....nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, eversince she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, whichshe knows, somehow, she will survive. It's the consequence: Motherhood in a foreign land. .... It was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by
those she loved." (Lahiri2003:6) Ashima tries to settle in and adjust herself to her surroundings, but she feels strange and lost in this country and spends hours remembering her parents and family, and reading the samefive Bengali novels time and again. While waiting for the child to be born, she relives the pastuntil the point of her depature for Boston. The thought of bringing up a baby in an alien landterrifies her."...to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare." (Lahiri 2003:6) Gradually Ashoke and Ashima's circle of Bengali acquaintances grow and the cultural spirit of Bengal is recreated whenever the friends meet. This is because of their shared history. The first generation wants to preserve their culture and customs in the foreign land. They are clinging to their culture through tokenism. It is significant that every other Saturday Ashoke and Ashima send Gogol for Bengali language and culture classes at the home of one of their Bengali friends. But the children in the class study without interest, wishing they could be at a ballet or softball practice instead.
(Lahiri 2003:66). They are truly caught between two worlds, one is powerfully alive, the other powerless to be born.
The second generation lives a better life than the parents whose roots still do not allow them to embrace the foreign land but their identity always reflects their parents past migrant history. After graduating Gogol gets a job in a firm and is posted in New York. He meets Maxine and is invited by her for dinner. While eating dinner with Maxine's parents, he recalls his mother's hospitable nature and how, "she would never have served so few dishes to a guest." (Lahiri 2003:133). In this way, Food in the novel is an object, an encouraging fragment of the homeland, which these immigrants want to stick on to. Spices and flavor waft through like themes in a piece of music as evidenced
by the following passage. "...with the samosas, there are breaded chicken, cutlets, chickpeas with tamarind sauce, lamb biriyani, chutney made them to create their native kitchen on foreign land." (Lahiri 2003: 150)Ashoke, Ashima and all first generation settlers want their children to do well and get good jobs. The American dream looms in front of their eyes and they want their children to exploit the situation and derive the maximum benefit for Semselves; out they must follow the indian moral and cultural code at nome This is the only way these immigrants keep searching for their homelands through different levels of existence, physical, as well as material.
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