“America keeps sending these ambiguous messages,” and Jane Ripplemeyer—also known as Jasmine and Jyoti Prakash—keeps trying to decipher them. So, through her, does the reader. The narrator of Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee’s first book since The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is, like her author, a newcomer to the United States. Immigrants from India, both gaze at this country through the kinds of eyes not commonly found in American literature.

Jane, in fact, believes herself endowed with special ocular advantages. At the age of seven, in her native village of Hasnapur, Jyoti (whose name means “light” in Punjabi) slips and falls headfirst after hearing an astrologer prophesy widowhood and exile. She emerges with a permanent star-shaped wound engraved on her forehead.

“It’s not a scar,” she tells her sisters, “it’s my third eye.” With the aid of that third eye, the twenty-four-year-old narrator tells the reader how, “greedy with wants and reckless from hope,” she moves from the Punjab to Florida, New York, Iowa, and California. Jasmine recognizes intimations of a reality beyond physical vision. She describes her attraction to future husband Prakash Vijh as a case of “love before first sight.”

Born in a mud hut without water or electricity, the seventh of nine children, Jyoti is almost strangled by her mother to spare her daughter the anguish of nubility without a dowry. She chafes against a feudal patriarchal upbringing by insisting on an education. At the age of fifteen, she marries Prakash Vijh, a brilliant young electronics student who wants a modern, liberated spouse and renames her Jasmine. The couple’s dreams of business and marital partnership explode in the Sikh terrorist bomb that kills Prakash. Jasmine journeys to the United States, with the intentions of a traditional widow, to immolate herself on the campus of Florida International Institute of Technology, where, at the urging of his mentor Devinder Vadhera, Prakash had planned to study.

An undocumented alien raped by the repulsive sea captain who smuggles her ashore, Jasmine first sees an American landscape devoid of anything as inspiring as the Statue of Liberty; sneaking off the boat near a graceless nuclear power plant, she wades “through Eden’s waste: plastic bottles, floating oranges, boards, sodden boxes, white and green plastic sacks tied shut but picked open by birds and pulled apart by crabs.” Her first American food is from Dairy Queen, and her first American job, after fleeing a claustrophobic Hindu household in Queens, is as an au pair girl with an attractive faculty couple in Manhattan. She becomes an American, she tells us, in an enlightened household across the street from a Barnard College dormitory. When the husband, physicist Taylor Hayes, becomes attracted to her, she flees to Iowa.

Bud Ripplemeyer, a fifty-three-year-old banker in Elsa County, Iowa, abandons his wife Karin to live with the plucky Asian vagabond, whom he prefers to call Jane and would like to marry. Bud and Jane adopt a Vietnamese refugee, Du Thien, who, like his new mother, is part of that vast, motley, and otherwise invisible army of modern wanderers that Mukherjee is keen on making her reader see: “We are the outcasts and deportees,” says Jasmine, “strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines, landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly, barely wakened customs guards await their bribe.”

She also defamiliarizes the landscape of rural middle America, where desperate natives kill themselves and one another. Jyoti- Jasmine-Jane carries Bud’s baby as she nurses his paralyzed body, victim of a local farmer gone berserk. “The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave,” a resentful Karin believes, and Jasmine remains on the second half of that divide, American enough to be forever ready, like Huck Finn, to light out for the territory ahead.

Jasmine abandons linear chronology in telling her story, as if to embrace a Hindu worldview in which time is illusory and human effort inconsequential. The novel’s circular form almost seems an endorsement of the theories of reincarnation enunciated by Mary Webb, an Iowa woman who is eager to tell the Indian emigre’ about her own out-of-body experiences. Yet, when her future is foretold, accurately, seven-year-old Jyoti resists, and she refuses to acquiesce to the static village society into which she is born. Jasmine is her story, but much of the power of that story derives from its ambivalence over the role of individual initiative. Jasmine is a dutiful daughter and wife and a passive, sheltered presence in the Queens apartment—an Asian cocoon insulated from the turbulence of New York life—over which “Professor” Devinder Vadhera presides. She suffers considerable violence:

She witnesses the murder of her husband, and, on her way to join him in death, undergoes rape with the detachment of someone inured to the inevitability of horror.

Jasmine does strike back at her beastly assailant, however, proving herself forceful and resourceful enough to kill him and dispose of his corpse. Suffocating with Indian food, Indian music, and Indian languages, she walks out of Devinder Vadhera’s domestic sanctuary into the uncertain streets of New York City. Moreover, mistrustful of her own happiness in the presence of the impossibly handsome, intelligent, and benevolent Taylor Hayes, she goes off alone to Iowa. The reason she gives for choosing that unlikely destination is that she had heard that the birth mother of Duff, the Hayes’s adorable adopted child, came from there. Jasmine is like an eighteenth century foundling in search of the mysteries of her birth.

She is present in their Iowa farmhouse when the father of the baby she carries is marched outside and shot. Jasmine ponders whether she might have averted the devastating attack. Is she responsible for the fact that rugged Bud Ripplemeyer, a respected leader of the community, will be forced to spend the rest of his life dependent on others to bathe his inert limbs? Might she have acted more opportunely to save Darrel Lutz from the self- destruction he was signaling to her? Mukherjee creates a universe in which human happiness is fragile and individual responsibility is moot. The violence that abruptly shatters Jane’s domestic tranquillity in Baden, Iowa, is symmetrical with the unexpected murder of Jasmine’s young husband Prakash in a sari shop in Hasnapur, as though, sub specie aeternitatis, India and Iowa are indistinguishable and any progression from one to the other is illusory. Devinder Vadhera cultivates the impression that he has become an important professor in America, but Jasmine discovers that, in reality, he goes off each day to a menial job of sorting human hair.

“I feel at times,” says Jasmine, “like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on. Down and down I go, where I’ll stop, God only knows.” Yet, though time might be a chimera, there are other times and other feelings. Jasmine does master English, well enough to articulate her experiences in lucid, shapely prose. When the reader last sees her, Jasmine is bound for California, submitting to Taylor’s dreams for her, though that submission is in turn an act of rebellion against Bud. An astrologer may have the first words in the book, but Jasmine has the last, and they express her lively ambivalence over whether fate can be outwitted, whether we can ever be the authors of our own lives. Jane lives by her wits and learns at least to control her own words, which is perhaps to control her life. Yet, to the extent that life seems a meticulously designed spectacle beyond her contrivance, the ways of the world come to seem inscrutable and inexorable.

Jasmine leaves its readers with a freshly reimagined world—the sensual thrill felt by a Third World alien “touching a tap and having the water hot-hot, and plentiful” or the word “Bubba” heard by ears expecting “Baba.” It presents an America teeming with non-European immigrants whose urban landscape is “an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens” and whose physical principles are entropic: “Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate.” Yet Mukherjee’s concentrated prose is, from start to finish of this picaresque novel, defiantly energetic and indelible.

Written in a playful and racy style, punctuated with the vernacular of the island, the story develops an ironic perspective on the problem of emigration and assimilation. Mukherjee uses the limited omniscient third-person point of view to make Jasmine the center of consciousness in the story. Throughout the narrative, the focus is on the actions, thoughts, feelings, and inner workings of Jasmine’s mind. Although she herself does not speak much in the story, the entire process of emigration and assimilation is seen from the viewpoint of this starry-eyed optimist. Through this narrative technique, the author makes the reader aware of Jasmine’s class consciousness, her sense of superiority over the Daboos, her effort to deceive the Moffitts in inventing a suitable story of her home and family, and her subliminal desire to usurp the Moffitts’ marriage with a view to building a family of her own.

The author also uses Jasmine’s wide-eyed naïveté and her ignorance about the American way of life to develop an ironic perspective on the process of Americanization. Jasmine’s knowledge about the United States is limited to stories she heard about other Trinidadian girls who had gone there. As such, even her working conditions with the Daboos seem to her like a good deal, although Loretta sees her as nothing more than her father’s drudge. Similarly, she thinks that her job with the Moffitts as mother’s helper is as good as anyone’s, but the narrator undercuts her view by parenthetically inserting that “Americans were good with words to cover their shame.” Again, when she calls herself the flower of Ann Arbor, not Trinidad, as she surrenders her body to Bill, the omniscient narrator comments that “she forgot all the dreariness of her new life and gave herself up to it.” Thus, the narrative technique allows Mukherjee to celebrate what she calls “the exuberance of immigration,” the process of Americanization with all of its gains and losses.

The Partition Riots
Jasmine, the title character and narrator of Bharati Mukherjee's novel, was born 18 years after India's Partition Riots, or approximately 1965, in a rural village called Hasnpur. The time of her Indian birth would have been one of political and social upheaval. Two wars between Pakistan and India were fought that year.

The Partition Riots, which play such a key role in Jasmine's family's plight, were an attempt to create separate Muslim and Hindu States. More than 200,000 people died as Hindus fled their homes in Pakistan and Muslims theirs in India. The province of Punjab was divided between India and the newly-created Pakistan. It became the home to many Hindus.

Jasmine's family, like many Hindus at the time, left behind relative riches in exchange for squalor during the Partition Riots. It was a time of violence and upheaval. Families abandoned not only material wealth, but established roots. The Muslim-Hindu religious divide continues to be a source of tension in India. Nearly 80 percent of Indians are Hindu, and Muslims constitute 11.4 percent of the population.

The Sikhs are a religious group that made up about two percent of India's population in 1991. After India gained independence in 1947, virtually all Sikhs wound up on the India side of Punjab. They have a social identity separate from other Punjabis. The new Punjabi-speaking Punjab, established in 1966, had a Sikh majority. In Jasmine, there would have been natural tensions between Sukhwinder, the Sikh extremist, and Prakash Vijh.

The Green Revolution
Punjab, like many Indian states, cherishes its own subnational identity, including its own language. A Punjabi would possess a much different cultural identity and characteristics than, say, a Bengali. India has some 46 officially listed mother tongues, seventeen of which have achieved the status of recognized languages. Of these, Hindi is spoken by the largest number of people, though not by a majority. Jasmine spoke Punjabi, Hindi, and, of course, English. The first two were natural to her culture and the other made possible, in part, by pre-Independence British influence and rule.

Punjab is a largely agricultural province, much like Iowa is to the United States. The majority of India's wheat is grown in Punjab. During Jasmine's childhood, rapid technological advancement was being made in the agricultural sector. She says, ‘‘When I was a child, born in a mud hut without water or electricity, the Green Revolution had just struck Punjab. Bicycles were giving way to scooters and cars, radios to television. I was the last to be born to that kind of submission, that kind of ignorance.’’

The Green Revolution of the late 1960s brought in some gains in productivity and made the country self-sufficient in food grains. Poverty, however, remains a chronic problem in India. As of 1991, approximately forty percent of the nation's 800 million people were classified as poor. Life expectancy was 54 years and the annual per capita income approximately $300 U.S., ranking India among the very poor countries of the world. Paradoxically, India also possesses a sophisticated scientific, technical, and financial infrastructure.

This paradox is embodied in Jasmine's family. Though they lived in a mud hut with no electricity or plumbing, her brothers attended technical college and later repaired scooters. Television, which first came to India in 1959, was becoming a common household item in Jasmine's Hasnpur.

Women's Position in Indian Society
India, during Jasmine's childhood and today, is a male-dominated society. Men hold economic and political power. Dowries have been officially banned, but in reality the practice of giving them remains a prevalent practice. The debate over the wisdom of dowries is discussed openly in newspapers and in government. A dowry is money or property brought by a bride to a husband at their wedding. Essentially, a dowry acts as an incentive package to entice prospective husbands. The better the dowry, the better the husband, at least in theory. Jasmine entered young womanhood in the late 1970s, when her family would have been expected to offer a dowry to her perspective husband. For somebody like Jasmine, whose little family money would go to the older four daughters, the future seemed grim.

A Hindu wife, indeed, saw her role as subservient to her husband. When her friend Vimla burns herself after her husband's death, she is following a now-illegal Hindu practice called sati, or suttee. The widow cremates herself on her husband's funeral pyre in order to fulfill her true role as wife. Jasmine intended to follow the same ritual after Prakash's death. She brought his suit to America in order to make a pyre.

She says, "I had not given even a day's survival in America a single thought. This was the place I had chosen to die, on the first day, if possible. I would land, find Tampa, walking there if necessary, find the college grounds and check it against the brochure photo. Under the very tree where two Indian boys and two Chinese girls were pictured, smiling, I had dreamed of arranging the suit and twigs. The vision of lying serenely on a bed of fire under palm trees in my white sari had motivated all the weeks of sleepless, half-starved passage, the numbed surrender to various men for reward of an orange, a blanket, a slice of cheese."

Divorce in India is becoming more common, but it is highly stigmatized.

Setting
In Jasmine, the time, place, and culture of the action constantly shifts. The narrator tells of events that happened in the past (thus the use of the past tense), but not in chronological order. Some events happened in a distant past, some in a more recent past. The reader understands the order of events partly in relation to place. Events in Hasnpur, Punjab, happened during Jasmine's childhood, and references to Lahore indicate events that happened before her birth. When the setting shifts to Florida, the reader knows the action is set during Jasmine's first weeks in America. Scenes in Flushing, New York, precede scenes in Manhattan, just as scenes in Manhattan come before scenes in Iowa.

To what purpose does the narrative timeline shift back and forth? There is a sense of urgency in the Iowa scenes because Jasmine's life is moving forward, possibly in the direction of monumental change. The past events are critical to the reader's understanding of Jasmine's dilemma, but they are not as urgent. The narrative strategy, then, is to maintain this sense of urgency through the Iowa story line, while working in all the important people, places and things from prior times.

Foreshadowing
This device, used in literature to create expectations or set up an explanation of later developments, is used frequently throughout Jasmine. The astrologer's forecast of Jasmine's widowhood and exile operates in this way. It alerts the reader to future events. Viewed in hindsight, Prakash's death seems linked to this forecast. Were it not for foreshadowing, however, the reader would not make the connection between the theme of fate and the death.

In other instances, foreshadowing is used to build tension. Jasmine says, "That day I found the biggest staff ever, stuck in a wreath of thorny bush. I had to crawl on stony ground, and of course thorns bloodied my arms, but the moment my fist closed over the head of the staff, I felt a buzz of power.’’ The strong imagery and language—the blood, the thorns, the fist—clue the reader into the importance of this scene. It insists that the reader wonder, ‘‘What's she going to do with that staff?’’ In due time, Jasmine kills the mad dog with the staff.

The knife Jasmine receives from Kingsland operates in the same way. There's an old adage that if a writer puts a gun into the story, then he or she better make the gun go off later. That's because a weapon, like the knife, signifies great danger and makes the reader expect future violence. In other words, it foreshadows danger. Jasmine's knife goes off, so to speak, when she kills Half-Face.

Symbolism
A symbol is something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Mukherjee uses symbols to help readers understand a complex fabric of ideas.

Jasmine grasps a drowned dog in a stench-filled river and as she does it breaks in two. The reader accepts the literal action, the breaking apart of the dog. Given Mukherjee's treatment of the theme of identity, the reader must also associate the broken body with the splitting apart of life. The dog becomes two parts from one, just as Jyoti splits into Jasmine and Jyoti.

One symbol repeats itself throughout the novel. The narrator explains that when a pitcher breaks, the air inside is the same as outside. The author returns to this symbol when Vimla sets herself on fire, and in a discussion of Jasmine's father. "Lahore visionaries, Lahore women, Lahore ghazals: my father lived in a bunker. Fact is, there was a difference. My father was right to notice it, and to let it set a standard. But that pitcher is broken. It is the same air this side as that. He'll never see Lahore again and I never have. Only a fool would let it rule his life."

Another, more subtle, symbol is the small crack in the television set at the Flamingo Court hotel room. A reader detects symbols due to their placement and importance in the context of a scene. The highly charged rape scene, on Jasmine's first day in America, shows an ugly, imperfect aspect of the country. The television represents a medium of Hollywood fantasies and fables. The crack in the television, then, can be read as a crack in the American dream. That Jasmine's head causes the crack lends even more power to the symbol.

Irony
Irony is the use of words to express something different than and often opposite to their literal meaning. Mukherjee uses irony to show Jasmine's confusion with American culture.

Jasmine finds irony in the revolving door. "How could something be always open and at the same time always closed?" Also in the escalator. "How could something be always moving and always still?"

Metaphors
A metaphor is a figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object.

Sukkhi's appearance in the Manhattan park terrifies Jasmine. The image of him behind the hot dog cart stays with her even after she moves to Iowa. She says, ‘‘Sukkhi, the New York vendor, pushes his hot dog cart through my head.’’ The reader does not think that there's an actual hot dog cart in Jasmine's head. Rather, the reader understands that Sukkhi, and all the violence and fear he represents, constantly invades Jasmine's thoughts.

A persistent metaphor derives from Taylor, "Just pull down the imaginary shade," he whispers, "that's all you need to do.’’ Again, Jasmine does not literally pull down a shade. Rather, she mentally blocks out all the outside influences that cause her fear.

Literary Heritage
Though not particularly interested in being known as an Indian writer, Mukherjee has placed herself in the long tradition of immigrant writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Bernard Malamud. She claims to have learned much from their fiction. She dedicated Darkness to her friend Malamud and even named one of her sons after him.

The predominant mode of American fiction in the 1980s was a minimalism exemplified by such writers as Raymond Carver. Minimalism used short sentences, understatement, and very little elaboration. Mukherjee positioned herself against this style, preferring instead a more elaborate one that allowed her to explore the layers of meaning and significance in the layered lives of her immigrant characters. She believes that a writer's status as immigrant gives her a great subject about which to write, and the subject deserves a great style.

Sources
Banerjee, Debjani, article, in Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Garland Press.

Lesser, Wendy, ‘‘United States,’’ in The Oxford Guide To Contemporary Writing, edited by John Sturrock, Oxford University Press, 1996,406-31.

Mukherjee, Bharati, ‘‘American Dreamer,’’ in Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 1997.

Vignission, Runar, ‘‘Bharati Mukherjee: an interview,’’ in Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, edited by Vijay Mishra, Number 34-35, 1993.

Further Reading
Chua, C. L., ‘‘Passages from India: Migrating to America in the Fiction of V.S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee." In her powerful depiction of clashing cultures and philosophies, Mukherjee has created an ambitious and impressively compact work. The writing is vivid and economical as the author moves easily between the Punjab and Iowa, Florida and New York City.’’

Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 51-61. Discusses Mukherjee and V. S. Naipaul's portrayal of Indian immigrants in North American, and their struggle to realize the American Dream.

Hofstede, Geert, Cultures and Organizations, McGraw-Hill, 1997. Provides a method for understanding cultural differences.

Kriefer, Joel, ed., The Oxford Companion To Politics of the World, Oxford University Press, 1993. Provides comprehensive coverage of international affairs and domestic politics throughout the world.

Lesser, Wendy, ‘‘United States,’’ in The Oxford Guide To Contemporary Writing, edited by John Sturrock, Oxford University Press, 1996,406-431. Explores the recent writing of various cultures, including the literary and cultural contexts for authorship in each area.

Mukherjee, Bharati, ‘‘American Dreamer,’’ in Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 1997. In this essay, Mukherjee clearly identifies herself as an American and rejects other, more limiting labels.

Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed., Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, Garland Press. Provides an assortment of critical essays on Mukherjee's work.

Vignission, Runar, ‘‘Bharati Mukherjee: an interview,’’ in Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, edited by Vijay Mishra, Number 34-35, 1993. Vignission's 1993 interview with Mukherjee where she explains her initial attraction to literature.