racism, they are still able to provide food, shelter,
and love for their children and to give them every
opportunity to pursue their dreams.
Anne BahringerJasmine Bharati Mukherjee (1989)
Released the year following the author’s National
Book Critics Award–winning book The MIDDLE-
MAN AND OTHER STORIES, Jasmine revisits aspects
of the immigrant experience charted and inter-
rogated within her critically celebrated collection
of stories, though this time brought to the reader
through the first-person narration of her protago-
nist—Jyoti/Jasmine/Jase/Jane. Jyoti, the daughter
of peasant farmers in Hasnapur, Punjab, India,
was born 18 years after the Partition Riots, the
fifth daughter in a family of nine. Without a dowry
or appreciable professional prospects, Jyoti learns
English and finds solace in education. As she notes:
“I couldn’t marry a man who didn’t speak English,
or at least who didn’t want to speak English. To
want English was to want more than you had been
given at birth, it was to want the world” (68). Thus,
once her brothers bring home their friend Prakash,
Jyoti finds an immediate affinity with his political
progressiveness and autodidactic tendencies, espe-
cially as manifested by his ambitious plan to leave
India to attend a technical university in the United
States. Jyoti and Prakash marry, effectively ending
the first part of her life as Jyoti when she adopts
the name Jasmine, a name proposed by Prakash to
symbolize her break from the social remnants of
feudalism and the caste system.
However, at the time of their marriage, local
religious and ethnic conflicts escalate in re-
sponse to an India where “Beggars with broken
bodies shoved alms bowls at suited men in au-
tomobiles” and “shacks sprouted like toadstools
around high-rise office buildings” (80). In other
words, Westernization provided visible competi-
tion for more traditionalist notions of religion
and culture. When a homemade bomb explodes
in the sari shop, killing Prakash and leaving Jas-
mine a widow, she then determines to set off on
her own, as “Prakash had taken Jyoti and created
Jasmine, and Jasmine would complete the mission
of Prakash” (97). Yet, her flight from India to the
United States even further changes the 16-year-old
Jasmine, as she must endure stringent racism on
the European continent, slip through immigration
and customs checkpoints with a fake passport and
visas, and make the cross-Atlantic voyage stowed
beneath tarps, largely exposed to the elements and
other passengers.
Once she reaches Florida, Jasmine does not find
instant safety or comfort; rather, the captain of the
ship brutally rapes her, precipitating her murder-
ous revenge with a penknife and subsequent road-
side pickup by Lilian Gordon, a Floridian woman
who, along with Jasmine, helps a number of im-
migrants and refugees to hide from the Immigra-
tion and Naturalization Service and to acclimate
themselves to the United States. From Florida,
Jasmine travels to New York, first staying on with
an Indian immigrant family known by her late
husband, then as a “caregiver” to the daughter of
a Columbia University physicist, Taylor, and his
wife, Wylie. With Taylor, Wylie, and their daughter
Duff, Jasmine takes on the name Jase, which even
further signifies the changes she has undergone as
a result of her immersion in American culture and
identity-in-flux. Though Jase loves both Taylor
and his daughter (Wylie has left Taylor for another
man), she abruptly leaves New York after seeing
her husband’s killer selling hot dogs in Central
Park. Starting yet another life in Iowa as a bank
teller and companion to Bud Ripplemeyer, Jase
becomes Jane, a further permutation of self that
refracts and reflects her perpetual in-betweenness
as a cultural and social outsider, no matter where
she finds herself geographically.
Structurally the novel shifts between past and
present almost seamlessly, as the narrative voice
remains constant while at the same time navigat-
ing between identities and multiple selves. The re-
sulting narrative performs a type of fragmentary
consciousness that BHARATI MUKHERJEE appears
to link not only to late-20th-century American
culture but also to an increasingly global world in
which entire peoples and cultures interact across
national boundaries. F. Timothy Ruppel makes a
similar observation, remarking: “Jasmine is a novel134 Jasmine