EXISTENTIAL EXPERIENCE IN BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S NOVEL JASMINE: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee was a Calcutta born an Indian American Canadian writer and professor emeriti at the University of California, Berkely. She is one of the promninent and leading Indian women writers in English. Like Kamala Markandaya, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, she is well recognised as a diasporic novelist in the literary arena. She is a representative novelist of Asian immigrants. Her experience as an expatriate in America and Canada forms the main source of her creative writing and literary talents. Her oeuvre comprises novels, short stories, nonfiction prose, socio-political commentaries, journal articles and interviews. The present novel’s title, the character, Jasmine, continually sheds lives to move into other roles. She gets uprooted and re-routed thrice in a new world and establishes a new identity. Jasmine dislocates from Indian traditional conventional life and relocates with modern liberal American life. She is an innocent, diffident woman who has become a fighter, adapter and adventurous in America. Through her novel, Bharati Mukherjee presents Jasmine as a Phoenix who rises from her ashes again and again in the form of different names and characters. She clearly exhibits the life of an Immigrant Indian as well as woman and the obstacles. She needs to break for the transformation of her life in an alien land. The major theme is about Jasmine's love story and the minor one is about her struggle in life. This paper analyses the existential experience of Jasmine in the foreign culture.