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Theme Of Exile And Quest For Identity In Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

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Pain of Exile and Quest for Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine
Cesili Rani .J, M.Phil., Research Scholar, Nirmala College for Women, Coimbatore
Dr. Mary Neena .M, Assistant Professor, Department of English (UG), Nirmala College for Women, Coimbatore
Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is a story of a Punjabi rural girl from Hasanpur. The novel brings the gradual changes in the life of the Indian girl from the childhood to woman hood. She feels very sad while exile from Punjab to America. It vividly portrays the Indian girls who migrated themself from India to America. They have nothing of themselves, no human rights, no inherited property any individual identity as human beings; they have to get their names either from their parent’s side or from the husband’s side. The protagonist, Jasmine, also did not get her identity from anyone. So at lastshe attains her identity from herself.
At the age of seven Jyoti is “helpless, doomed” (4) by the shadow of a future which holds only “widowhood and exile” (3). Even in her childhood she is aware of the potency of power through which she can win all battles and establish a strong identity. In India, particularly in rural India, to be born as a female child is a great misfortunate misery. Though the birth of the female child is announced as the arrival of goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth but after the birth the female child is badly treated in the family and in the society. The novelist Bharati Mukherjee rightly says: “Village girls

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