Cultural Context in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine Chitra V Nair College

Described as “the foremost chronicler of the multicultural New America”, Bharati Mukherjee constitutes her works with the life of South Asian expatriates/immigrants in the United States and Canada. Her novel, Jasmine, explores the process of acculturation and assimilation from different perspectives. T. S. Eliot says, "The culture of the individual is dependent upon ... society to which that group or class belongs. Therefore, it is the culture of the society that is fundamental". The protagonist of the novel, Jasmine, experiences cultural conflict both in and out of her own culture. Right from the beginning, Jyoti rebels against her cultural inscriptions by excelling in education as it gives her a way to distinguish herself from other girls of her age and shape an identity that questions the patriarchal hegemony. She tries to move and think beyond the obsolete rural society where she lives.

Jasmine’s family is affected by a sense of loss and displacement after the partition which made them leave their comfortable, upper-middle class lifestyle in Lahore. They were forced to lead the rest of their lives in a village of flaky mud huts in Hasnapur. Her parents are haunted and plagued by the loss of their homeland as Jyoti narrates,...