Bharati Mukherjee

Critical Perspectives

Emmanuel S. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351980739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The twelve essays that form this book, first published in 1993, interpret Bharati Mukherjee's oeuvre from a variety of critical perspectives. The authors' approaches range from the biographical to the poststructuralist, from cultural analysis to comparative commentary to deconstructive reading. Such diversity in the contributors' theoretical stances and interpretive strategies enables this collection of essays to serve a key purpose: to offer not only multiple but conflicting perspectives on Mukherjee's art and achievement.

Creating, Preserving, Destroying: Violence in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Samir Dayal

There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself.

Jasmine (29)

How should one understand the violence in which Bharati Mukherjee’s fictional universe is steeped? It is a gross truism and simplification to suggest, as some readers have done, that it is a “reflection” of what is after all a violent world. The functionality of violence in Mukherjee’s recent novel Jasmine is complex and ambivalent, as it is in her earlier The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife, The Middleman and Other Stories, and even in the nonfictional Days and Nights in Calcutta. That complexity and that ambivalence, it may be argued, coincide with the contradictions of postcolonial subject-formation, as I show in this reading of Jasmine.

The protagonist of the novel is both a victim and an agent of violence and she is not the only such figure. Violence is the other face of power; gaining an understanding of it involves grasping the play—and the staging—of power structures, particularly in the postcolonial diasporic context. Moreover, violence manifests itself not only in social and political but also in psychosexual and psychosocial realms. The novel is an account of Jasmine’s coming into her own as a woman, killing in order to live.

Jasmine’s journey of self-discovery, taking her from a feudal condition to her migrancy and exile in the West, is marked by violence. The syntax of her self-articulation is a parable for the social transformation of the Indian postcolonial. As if by parabolic symmetry, the ongoing transformation of postcolonial India is punctuated by eruptions of sectarian violence. The obverse of the euphoria of Independence was the horror of Partition. The horror has continued in the unceasing violence between Muslims and Hindus, the bloody fighting in Bangladesh, the unresolved Kashmir problem. Before Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” quelled it, the Maoist Naxalite violence in Bengal was another formidable chapter in postcolonial Indian history. The violence associated with the militant Sikh factions agitating for a new Khalistan in Punjab refuses to disappear and in fact is the matrix of Jasmine’s emancipatory struggle. As India moves toward modernity, it threatens to crack, if not “Balkanize” itself. At the level of ethnic nationalism, where the debate between tradition and modernity is most luridly apparent in modern India, India’s progress toward the twenty-first century is nothing if not violent.¹ But for the characters in Mukherjee’s novel, the West to which Jasmine goes is equally violent, in different ways. Not only as an epiphenomenon of modern life, and not only as what Fredric Jameson might call a national allegory, violence is a central theme of the novel.

The important characters in Jasmine are hyperconscious of a species of entropy and seek not so much the fantasy of escape from entropy but, ironically, some form of acceptance, or embrace, of it. That embrace is often the occasion for radical self-transformation, even destruction of “self,” but the transformation is exothermic, generating a tremendous energy—an expression of elan vital.

It is not a contradiction, then, to suggest that in accepting violence as somehow ineluctable, Mukherjee’s characters are also in search of a heightened sense of self mapped at the moment that the geometry of their entropic universe is negotiated. A wholly apt epigraph from James Gleick’s Chaos inducts the reader into the world of Jasmine: “The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined.”²

The self, in such a universe, undergoes an abyssal of identity. In an early short story called “The World According to Hsu” the female protagonist, traveling rootlessly abroad, among a “collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects,” reflects paradoxically that “[n]o matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.”³ Jasmine, having constantly to acknowledge that she is never “at home” and is instead perpetually a nomad, finds her differential sense of who she “is” complicated by a compulsion to return obsessively to some putative “original” or vestigial Indianness.

Her husband, Prakash Vijh, is her prime mover, encouraging her to recognize herself as a victim of a “feudal” power structure, so as to emancipate herself from it. Jasmine’s more or less conscious struggle out of this feudal structure is homologous with the struggle of postcolonial subject-formation. The simple village girl Jyoti may have harbored the illusion of fixed identity. But as a woman—as Jasmine—she learns to resist a final or simple reversion to the ossified stereotype of the feudal Indian wife and to subvert the West’s desire to territorialize her, to render familiar her strangeness.

That Jasmine is marked for violent transformation is evident in the first words of the novel, which describe a scene of foretelling: an astrologer predicts her early widowhood and subsequent exile. Jasmine’s description of herself at seven as “scabrous-armed” (3) echoes the words of the book’s epigraph. By contrast, her sisters, whose arms are “butter-smooth” (4), are unprepared to undergo the processes of radical change. When she mockingly rejects the astrologer’s prediction, the astrologer chucks her hard on the head, and she falls. Her forehead is marked with a star-shaped scar, which her sisters see only as a liability. Jasmine, however, shouts defiantly that it is her “third eye” (5) that enables her, like sages, to see the invisible. The bleeding stigmata portends her endless selftransformation: it “glows, a spotlight trained on lives to come” (21).

The astrologer’s prediction (which turns out to be accurate) introduces the theme of the debate the Third World incessantly conducts with itself—the debate of tradition versus modernity. Prakash, Jyoti’s husband, considers himself modern and citified and rejects many traditional values, but traditionalists, such as her friend Vimla, are alarmed at such subversion. Prakash, confident that he can defeat entropy and control the chaos, is determined to be an engineer and wants to go to America, in order to defy fate and to escape mediocrity. Prakash, Jyoti/Jasmine’s Professor Higgins, tries to redeem her from her fatalist complacency. He cautions her against the feudal mentality which he feels is the reason for India’s malaise; he argues that it is the women of India who will ultimately redeem the nation from its “backwardness.”

Jyoti/Jasmine notes acidly that Prakash’s nonviolence was a principle he observed at home as well as preached publicly: she acknowledges that he never hit her. The point takes its edge from the staggering rates of domestic violence in India, where, as Elisabeth Bumiller observes, many men take it as a “prerogative” that they may, in certain circumstances, beat their wives.⁴ Prakash and his friends are emancipated—political (Nehruvian and Gandhian) idealists, disrupters, and rebuilders (77)—but they are thin voices against the lost, violent souls that threaten to introduce anarchy. The Nehruvian or Gandhian tenets of nonviolence have not prevailed over internecine violence in India.

Sukkhi, his imagination inflamed by the separatist rhetoric of khalsa, or “purity,” preached by the Sikh leader Sant Bhindranwale, rejects the rational peacemaking counsel of Prakash. He and his fellow separatists, the Khalsa Lions, terrorize and dominate the area. The most lucrative local activity in Hasnapur is smuggling liquor and guns (49). The village men’s talk that Jyoti/Jasmine overhears revolves around the violent politics of her surroundings; the Sikh militants, she realizes, are terrorizing the area. Even Masterji, her progressive teacher, meets a violent reward for his mild, enlightenment advocacy of peaceful change toward modernity. Sukkhi and his fellow revolutionaries scoff at his rationality: they chop off his beard and pump bullets into him.

Jasmine’s father, Pitaji, imagined he could see death coming from far off—that he would die calmly and with dignity. Instead, he dies “horribly,” gored by a bull he never saw coming. A Lahori friend tries valiantly to elaborate what Jasmine later admits is a “soft” if traditional eschatology to explain this death: that life is merely an elaborate illusion. Young Jyoti buys into this fatalist eschatology, often vilified in Orientalist descriptions of the Eastern mind, to give meaning to apparent absurdity: she figures that perhaps her father’s accidental death was merely a part of god’s plan to facilitate her falling in love with Prakash and expedite her departure to the United States. But here Jyoti is also refusing to capitulate to despair, to the almost unbearable excess of reality (43). She seeks hope in the ordinary and control, however trivial, over chaos. For example, she goes to her friend Vimla’s house to play with the electric switch. By turning the light on and off at will, she feels “totally in control” (44).

Her desire for “control” is remarkable in her stiflingly patriarchal situation. In the Hasnapur gender hegemony, women were not to participate in the filthy world of commerce; but men, the purveyors of that economy, are sustained as well as soiled by it (50). Encouraged to seek an education by Masterji, she even declares her scandalously unladylike ambition to become a doctor. This is regarded, naturally, as a symptom of madness by her father and by her father’s mother, Dida, who blames Jasmine’s insanity on her relatively freethinking mother and on the imminent end of the world—for was this not what scripture described as Kali Yuga, the Age of Chaos, of Violent Destruction? (51-52). Because Jasmine’s mother, Mataji, was supportive of her daughter, she of course was beaten by her husband but in the morning she assures Jasmine that she should continue to dream of becoming a doctor. But Mataji remains always faithful to her husband, prepared to go to the traditional extreme of trying to commit sati.

In rural Hasnapur, violence is almost a necessary element of a woman’s life. Girls, even at birth, are regarded as “curses,” signs of divine displeasure. Jasmine was one of several daughters; when the midwife brought her out, she “had a ruby-red choker of bruise around [her] throat and sapphire fingerprints on [her] collarbone” (40). In New York, when she relates this incident to Taylor and Wylie, the liberated, sophisticated Western woman “misses the point,” and “shriek[s] at my ‘foremothers’” (40). “My mother,” she explains, “was a sniper. She wanted to spare me the pain of a dowryless bride. My mother wanted a happy life for me” (40). The woman’s lot, when not mitigated by a man’s benevolent intervention and “protection,” is bleak: “bad luTck dogged dowryless wives, barren wives. They fell into wells, they got run over by trains, they burned to death heating milk on kerosene stoves” (41).

The transformation of the “feudal” wife Jyoti into the modern, English-speaking Jasmine, inevitably, involves a violent baptism in Prakash’s blood. A Khalsa Lion bomb kills Prakash on the eve of the young couple’s scheduled departure for the West, for that other paradise. Transformed into a bloodthirsty woman, Jasmine demands the assassin Sukkhi’s death from the police.

The novel’s association of violence with transformation is its leitmotif: “[t]here are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams” (29). Violence demystifies stability and identity for Jyoti, eventually disabusing her of her craving for security. It steels her for a heroic self-destruction as a feudal wife and for her remaking abroad: in violent destruction may lie the seeds of creation.

The imperative to control her life justifies, in Jasmine’s mind, her pragmatic readiness to use violence; in fact, she views recourse to violence as an affirmation of the will to live. Discovering a thick staff while out gathering wood in Hasnapur, she recognizes it as a weapon in what is tantamount to an act of selfredefinition; she closes her fist over the top of the staff and she feels “a buzz of power” (54). Faced with a rabid dog when out with the women of the village, she kills it with a single stroke. But this is an act of self-defense: she has projected onto the dog her fear of the always imminent rapist.

And perhaps the apocalyptic moment of Jasmine’s self-assertion occurs on the occasion of her actual violent rape by Half-Face, on the threshold of the New World. In killing Half-Face, she experiences an epistemic violence that is also a life-affirming transformation: “For the first time in my life, I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human.… It was a very simple, very clear perception, a moment of truth, the kind of understanding that I have heard comes at the moment of death” (116). In that act of violent self-transcendence, she becomes Kali, the goddess who drinks (evil) men’s blood: “I extended my tongue, and sliced it. Hot blood dripped immediately in the sink” (118). Demonized into Kali, she becomes “Death incarnate” (119); but the culmination of her emancipatory journey toward self-assertion will involve other demonizations, requiring an accession to a ghostliness and a disillusionment with reified selfhood.

Murdering to create, Jasmine learns she must also be something always already different—a necessity Gloria Anzaldua describes:

For centuries now,… it has always been a world of the intellect, reasoning, the machine. Here women were stuck with having tremendous powers of intuition experiencing other levels of reality and other realities yet they had to sit on it because men would say, well, you’re crazy. All of a sudden there’s a reemergence of the intuitive energies—and they are very powerful. And if you apply them in your life on the personal and political plane then that gives you a tremendous amount of energy—it’s almost like a volcano erupting.⁵

Jasmine instinctively understands the link between violence and the dissolution of identity. Although she is deeply ambivalent, she recapitulates the Eastern figuration of self as nothing; but that negativity is c...