Desh and Videsh: Be/Longingness in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

Even so, Mukherjee was “opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and Tshirts, and renouncing 3,000 years of cate-observant, ‘pure culture’ marriage in the Mukherjee family” (273). She embraces the American culture because she acquires conformity from it. Mukherjee’s love for America makes her more susceptible to adjust into America to the point where she does not even follow her own Indian tradition. This changes her identity negatively because the more she embraces the American lifestyle, the more she surrenders her Indian heritage. If she did allow herself to gain citizenship while maintaining her Indian culture, perhaps her identity would not be jeopardized, however it is. Mukherjee loses her identity as a traditional Indian since chose the American lifestyle over her own, and hence this reveals the trauma of self-transformation that results from sacrificing one’s identity.

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

Many people have different experiences with moving to different places, whether it’s to a new country or just another state. In the essay, “Two Ways to Belong to America”, Bharati Mukherjee shares a story of the differences between her and her sister’s experiences of immigration. Both sisters were born in Calcutta, India and moved to the United States in the 1960s in search of education and work. Bharati’s story of her and her sister can speak for many immigrants, especially mine. Immigration can be a distressing process to go through, and seeing immigration up close and personal with my grandparents and parents experience, also with my own experience. Both sister experiences are representative to my family’s experiences, almost parallel with Bharati’s love for the country as my mother and aunt are, and Mira’s dislike for the country as my grandparents were.

India. Indians have a great sense of identity--they value community rather than individuality (Hansel, 1993). So, most Indian scholars who have returned home do so because of a sense of family loyalty. On the other hand, they have spoken to Hansel (1993) of a loss of the individuality and privacy

Bharati Mukhrtjee is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian Writing in English. Her fiction examines how postcolonialism affects identity formation in contemporary women’s immigrant literature. Her basic concern is to deal with the problems of cross-cultural conflicts faced by Indian women immigrants. Her immigrants since they come from an Asian or non-European background, undergo experiences somewhat dissimilar to those of European immigrants in the past. In the Asian immigrants of America, the colliding worlds of their exile and immigration generate a number of psychological anomalies that merge into one another to form a unique blend of cross-cultural consciousness that can be measured only by its own ability to survive and succeed. The paper scrutinizes the journey of the human mind

The term Diaspora becomes more involved into English in the middle of 1950s. The study of Diaspora became the sense of the world. William Safran published in an article in 1991, he distinguish six rules to Diasporas from migrant communities. Rogers Brubaker (2005) says that, Diaspora is widening now. Most early discussions of Diaspora rooted in the concept of ‘homeland’. They were concerned with the paradigmatic case or a small number of care cases. The Jewish Diaspora is the paradigmatic case. Now a day there is a Diasporas in

Bharati Mukherjee’s female protagonists are immigrants and suffer cultural shock but they are anxious to establish their identity by undertaking their heroic journeys that is why Bharati Mukherjee received considerable critical attention from almost all the quarters of the globe in a relatively short period of just twenty five years. Even though she has been acknowledged as a voice of expatriate immigrants, sensibility, and a close observation of her novels reveals that she has written all the novels with predominantly feminist views. Mukherjee’s depiction of women and their different relationships portray the dominance of practical practices in traditional society, as well as the forms of liberation and empowerment which are available to women in their Diaspora’s situation.

Rabindranat Tagore, khushwant singh, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Arun Joshi Anita Desai, shashideshpande, Bharathi mukherjee, Nargis Dalal, R.K. Narayan, Anita Rau Badami are some of the famous writers who presented their novels by concentrating on the depiction of the women’s freedom and social reality of all the time many diasporic writers are in particular to emerge the cultural mix of times impacted by the globalization and the growth of many fields. Some writers are there like Karandesai, V.S.Naipaul, Harikunjru, Anita Desai used to write about the problems faced by the people in their nation home and native. These writers contest the difference between the culture in both east and west.

The Indian born writer Bharati Mukherjee is one of the most widely known immigrant writers of America. The immigrant writers in America can be divided into two categories. Firstly the ‘willing immigrant’ writers who settled in America from Europe and Asia and who have made it their home. The second category consists of the ‘unwilling immigrant writers’ with African origin whose forefathers were brought to America in some slave strip. But Mukherjee considered herself different from other European writers for a variety of reasons: “I am very different from other non-European writers in saying that, to me, the loss of old culture is exciting. Is exhilarating. Is a plus rather than a minus. Just describing the extraordinary wealth and comfort that was natural part of my childhood and which I would have inherited, in whatever damaged ways, if I had stayed on in India made me realize that I was thrilled to have the opportunity to give it up, to assume a new identity. That kind of Third World hierarchy where your opportunities are closed by caste, gender or family was horrendous to me.”

“In Calcutta in the ‘50s, I heard no talk of “identity crisis”—communal or individual. The concept itself – of a person not knowing who he or she is – was unimaginable in our hierarchical, classification-obsessed society” (Mukherjee, para 6). This quote portrays the strict upper-class caste system, and the confidence found in it. In the Indian culture, members rarely doubt uncertain their cultural identity along with their personal identities. Mukherjee had every intention to accomplish her father’s orders as a respectful daughter, and to fulfill her cultural identity. However, during her time of education she falls in love with a fellow student from Canada, and decides to marry him. The result of her marriage leads to a joining of two slightly different cultures.

Many a writers of Indian Diaspora have expressed their true emotions and fear through their writing in multifaceted ways. For the non resident Indian writers the struggle is everywhere, whereas the Indians trapped in the cultural conflict in their country itself endure a constant struggle which ends nowhere leads nowhere. The Man Booker prize winning Indian works Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, The Inheritance of Loss, and The White Tiger are written with an intention to discuss the inner struggles faced by various elements of the society in India and outside India. The cultural confusion naturally suffered in the displaced society is experience by the characters of the novels in some or the way. They are not able to get rid

The postcolonial writers may not achieve international success unless they address certain themes, or more established figures “discover” them, should be considered as well. Mahasweta provides a fruitful example: Mahasweta is an intensive and a social alert writer who showcases the rural realities as well as a broad narrative of the importance of the unprivileged or the people living on the extreme. While Mahasweta originally written in her native Bengali language, most of her works are translated into English and regional Indian languages. The credit for translating her works into English for the first time goes to Gayatri Spivak, who had translated Mahasweta’s “Draupadi” in 1981 and “Breast-Giver” (Stanadayini) in 1987. Since then many of her stories have been translated into English by other scholarly translators, and until now about a dozen translators have translated Mahasweta’s stories into English, among whom the foremost are Spivak and Bandyopadhyay. Mahasweta claims on translators capturing ‘the spirit’ of her work, which to her is more important than technical or even artistic perfection and she readily authorizes those translations of her fiction that have been faithful to the spirit of her fiction.

Among the living writers of India there is hardly any parallel to the formidable creative genius of Bhalchandra Nemade. He is a novelist, a poet and a distinguished critic. The impact of his original thinking and the force of his powerful argument on the contemporary literary and intellectual life of India is unparalleled in recent history. His greatest contribution to Indian literary criticism is his theory of Nativism. As a literary critic he has been passionately advocating it. As a creative writer he has demonstrated how theory can be brought into practice. Hence his novels like ‘Kosala’ ‘Bidhar’ ‘Hul’ ‘Jhul’ ‘Jarilaa’ and ‘Hindu’ can be best described as experiments in Nativism. Most of Nemade’s critical ideas have been

Language is a social artifact which gives symbolic representation to diverse experiences and works within a cultural boundary. Within linguistic-cultural landscape, literature takes place as a cultural phenomenon. English language has been internalized in the non-English speaking world in lieu of a 'universal linguistic heritage '. But how far this adapted language has been able to express Indian experience or to what extent native Indian writers have been able to cope with this is a matter of discussion. Indian literature is still in process to cope with the traditions of native English and to express Indian consciousness through native colouring of an alien language. It is like the growth of self-consciousness. To understand the present position of Indian English literature in relation with linguistic adaptations and appropriations, one has to make a comparative statement of the initial stages of our literature and the contemporary one. Indian English literature that is true, original, natural and conveys the present-time spirit is bound to be popular among the masses along with getting academicians’ response.

The British rule in India is known through history. The reasons why the British colonized India might have been economic interest that they had over it. Due to this, the British settled their administration and controlled the place. The British tent to create their own society in India and settled there, having all of the advantages. This settlement of the British in India, the way they ruled the colonized country, the way they behaved towards the locals and their living there, is best described in E.M Forster’s “A Passage to India”. It should be mentioned that “A Passage to India” is a novel that criticizes not only the British administration of India but as a sociological novel, as well, that discusses the obstacles that forbid the friendship between people belonging to different nations and cultures. The importance of the theme is that it explores an important question: Can people of different races be friends? The novel focuses on the English and the Indian races. The novel became famous for the reason that it elaborates quite a sensitive theme, and is considered as Forster’s most famous work. The purpose of this study was to analyze and describe the