A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
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A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine - Gale
11
Jasmine
Bharati Mukherjee
1989
Introduction
Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, the story of a widowed Punjabi peasant reinventing herself in America, entered the literary landscape in 1989. The same year, Salman Rushdie published Satanic Verses. Rushdie, also an Indian writer, received international attention for his novel when a fatwa (an Islamic legal judgment) was issued against him. The fatwa essentially proclaimed it a righteous act for any Muslim to murder Rushdie. Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, Jill Ker Conway's The Road to Coorain, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Condition, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines were all published during this period. Each of these writers works in the genre of postcolonial literature. Although there is considerable debate over the term postcolonial,
in a very general sense, it refers to the time following the establishment of independence in a former colony, such as India, which was a colony of Great Britain until the midtwentieth century. The sheer extent and duration of the European empires and their disintegration after World War II have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature.
Partly because of the abundance of such postcolonial works, some critics suggested Jasmine was part of a fad. The New York Times Book Review, however, named it one of the year's best works. It is available at bookstores and online in a 1999 Grove Press paperback edition.
Mukherjee's time as a student at the University of Iowa's acclaimed master of fine arts program, the Writers' Workshop, almost certainly informed the setting of Jasmine. Iowa City is a small college town, and the state as a whole is 95 percent farmland. In the 1980s, when Jasmine is set, many family farmers on the outskirts of Iowa City faced the same dilemma as Darrel Lutz, a character in Jasmine. The hard life of farming coupled with tough economic times persuaded many farmers to sell out to large corporate farms or to nonagricultural corporations. Other farmers struggled on, determined to save the farm their parents and grandparents had built up, as well as to preserve this unique way of life.
Author Biography
Mukherjeewas born on July 27, 1940, into an elite level of society in Calcutta, India. ABengali Brahmin (a high caste, or social grouping), Mukherjee grew up in a house cluttered with extended family, forty to forty-five people by her own count. In a 1993 interview with Runar Vignission in Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Mukherjee said she had to drop inside books as a way of escaping crowds.
Mukherjee was educated as a proper Indian girl of a good family: she spoke Bengali her first three years, then entered English schools in Britain and Switzerland. She returned to India in 1951 and attended the Loretto School, run by Irish nuns. She subsequently studied at universities in Calcutta and Baroda, where she earned a master's degree in English and Indian culture. She immigrated to the United States in 1962 to attend, on scholarship, the Writers'