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Bharati Mukherjee: The Female Character Of Jasmine

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Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989),…show more content…
Though she has to lose many people and make numerous sacrifices on this journey, she never gives up. In a way, she becomes victorious even in her most difficult times. She never accepts her defeat in her quest for a dignified life.
Jasmine is born as Jyoti in an Indian village named Hasnapur in Punjab. She is “the fifth daughter, the seventh of nine children” (Jasmine 39). Generally in the third world countries like India, the birth of a girl child is neither welcomed nor celebrated.
In fact, it is considered a sin for a woman to bear a girl child. Therefore Jasmine tells:

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 fulfil. But daughters were curses. A daughter had to be married off before she could even enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations. Gods with infinite memories visited the girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations. My mother’s past must have been heavy with wrongs. (Jasmine
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