National Identity
About her own writing, Bharati Mukherjee has said that she is interested in rendering the national mythology of the post-Vietnam United States. In Jasmine, she also renders a nuanced recollection of post-partition India and the politically and religiously motivated violence taking place in Punjab in the 1980s. With her exploration of the idea of an "American character" inevitably comes criticisms of capitalism. Ghandi, a figure popularly regarded as a hero in the West, goes unpraised in Jasmine and instead is solely associated with his role in the partition of India, which many Hindu people in Jasmine's life blame for all of their misfortune and the slaughter of many innocent people.
Jasmine embodies the changing and multiple aspects of Indian national identity at the time. Jasmine recalls, "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 to cars, radios to television. I was the last to be born to that kind of submission, that expectation of ignorance" (229). Jasmine's first husband Prakash often ridicules the "feudal" conservative traditions of Hasnapur and of India in general. As a character, Prakash is strongly identified by his fascination with and mastery of electronics. Mukherjee associates this wave of new electronic and digital technology sweeping across India with a quelling of submission and ignorance; Prakash and his progressive politics and associations with technology thus serve as a microcosm of the greater promise of progress in India as a whole.
In Iowa, Jasmine references mother Ripplemeyer's inability to stomach her stories of India and the poverty she experienced as a child in Hasnapur, despite Mother Ripplemeyer having poverty stories of her own to share about America's Great Depression. Jasmine recalls, "I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not that she’s hostile. It’s like looking at the name in my passport and seeing “Jyo—” at the beginning and deciding that her mouth was not destined to make those sounds. She can’t begin to picture a village in Punjab. She doesn’t mind my stories about New York and Florida because she’s been to Florida many times and seen enough pictures of New York" (16). In this way, Mukherjee shows that even suffering is associated with a national identity, and the ability to empathize can be obstructed by a sense of foreignness like that felt by Ripplemeyer, even if the experiences are similar.
When Jasmine arrives in the United States, it is to the southern coast of Florida. The driver Half-Face rapes her in an abandoned motel. Lillian Gordon intercepts her and takes her to her house nearby. Years later, Kate tells Jasmine that a developer bought Lillian's house and the motel and the nearby barracks and was turning it all into an expensive resort. "A sanctuary transformed into a hotel," Jasmine says. "Hell turned into paradise—to me this seems very American" (138). She continues, "It is by now only a passing wave of nausea, this response to the speed of transformation, the fluidity of American character and the American landscape. I feel at times 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" (138-139). Mukherjee demonstrates here how the force of capitalism so rapidly steamrolls evidence of trauma and injustice.
Finally, Jasmine explores the idea of national identities through Du's experience immigrating to the US from a refugee camp. She recalls a PTA meeting during which a history teacher at Du's school in Baden, Iowa said that he tried speaking a little "street Vietnamese" on Du, but he froze up. She recalls her horror at hearing this instance of casual and ignorant cruelty: "This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing. How dare you? What must he have thought? His history teacher in Baden, Iowa, just happens to know a little street Vietnamese? Now where would he have picked it up? There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams" (29). This teacher either doesn't care or isn't cognizant of the way which his use, as a white Iowan man (and probably a former American solider in Vietnam), of Du's first language, the language of his national origin, can only conjure past trauma related to colonialism in Vietnam.
Personal Identity
Besides investigating the notion of developing national identities, Jasmine is highly concerned with questions of personal identity, especially if not exclusively in regard to its eponymous protagonist. She says, "I have had a husband for each of the women I have been. Prakash for Jasmine, Taylor for Jase, Bud for Jane. Half-Face for Kali" (197). Though each of these men marks a different and separate chapter in Jasmine's life, and though they each, in some way, dictate the terms of her transformation, Mukherjee is careful to represent Jasmine's agency in each of these relationships. In a New York Times review of Jasmine from 1989, a critic writes that "It's not easy, as Jasmine lights out for the territories once more, to view her abandonment of Jane Ripplemeyer's responsibilities with the complacency the novel seems to call for" (Gorra). However, this might be the point. Jasmine must resist her expected "obligations," especially to the men in her life and especially to a white, Iowan banker who is, if compassionate and loving on a personal level, after all afraid of hearing her stories from India and representative of the capitalist system steamrolling over small farmers.
When Jasmine recalls being first given the name Jasmine by Prakash, she explicitly explores the moment as a transference of identity. "To break off the past," she says, "he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, 'You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume.' / Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities" (77).
Mukherjee also explores the concept of reincarnation as a way for Jasmine to describe her transference of identity. When she lunches with Dr. Webb, she reaches the conclusion that "Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duff's day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan; that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer having lunch with Mary Webb at the University Club today. And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?" (127) Each of these identities ceases to exist in the presence of another. Mukherjee was ahead of her time to explore the ideas of what's now referred to as "code-switching," speaking and acting differently around different groups, channeling different cultural norms and ways of relating in order to avoid drawing unwanted and/or discriminatory attention to oneself. This is most evident when Lillian Gordon teaches Jasmine how to adjust her mannerisms like the way she walks and steps onto escalators to "seem more naturally American."
Trauma and Repression of Trauma
Related to the theme of transference of identity is the theme of trauma and repression. This theme most obviously applies to Jasmine's and Du's characters, Du often being the vehicle by which Jasmine is able to explore her own desires and trepidations around sharing and acknowledging the trauma she's experienced. She writes of Du's transition to American culture and school, "Du’s doing well because he has always trained with live ammo, without a net, with no multiple choice. No guesswork: only certain knowledge or silence. Once upon a time, like me, he was someone else. We’ve been many selves. We’ve survived hideous times. I envy Bud the straight lines and smooth planes of his history" (214). Clearly there's crossover between themes of identity and trauma, and Du, like Jasmine, has to be able to become someone new in order to live past their tragedies.
Jasmine compares this mode of operating to that of American "intellectuals" and scholars: "For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted. For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill" (33). Intellectuals want to mine and pick apart experiences; a luxury in which they don't have to experience the grizzly realities of, for example, a refugee camp or a covert passage to Florida from Suriname.
The detriment of nostalgia is recognized and a moratorium enforced by Lillian Gordon, of whom Jasmine recalls, "The Kanjobal women in her house had all lost their husbands and children to an army massacre. She forbade all discussion of it. She had a low tolerance for reminiscence, bitterness or nostalgia. Let the past make you wary, by all means. But do not let it deform you," (131). Thus the past is rendered a violent force, capable of warping the form of she who engages it.
Technology
The idea of technology looms over the world of the novel as a promise of hope, progress, and new frontiers. The allure of electronics attracts Prakash, Du, and in a more estranged, "American," capitalist sense, Darrel, who dreams of selling the family farm and opening up a Radio Shack franchise store somewhere in New Mexico. Of her first husband, Jasmine recalls, "That’s what excited Prakash about electronics. It was a frontier, especially in India, and no one was staying back to service the goods that were flooding in. A good repairman would eventually make a fortune, even in Jullundhar. And an inventive one could devise electronics using native skill and native resources and designed for native conditions" (88).
This recurring use of the word "native" ties electronic technologies to a national identity in regard to the fluidity of their use potential depending on where they're being used. When Jasmine observes Du making hybrid electronics to serve his own unique desires and build his "ideal" environment where, say, a dimmer switch on the wall can tune a radio on his desk, or an alarm clock communicates with the lighting fixture in his ceiling, she compliments his ingenuity and aptitude for engineering. He responds, “It’s not engineering. It’s recombinant electronics. I have altered the gene pool of the common American appliance" (156). Du's language explicitly ties electronics back to this idea of nativeness, ethnicity, and genetics.
The way Darrel wields his interest in technology is almost purely economic. He wants to open a Radio Shack franchise store, thus replacing the manual labor of farming with the commercial/retail job of managing a store whose merchandise might be considered through a reductive lens as the "opposite" of agriculture. Where farming and raising livestock is the earliest mark of civilization, Radio Shack is a new frontier, with shelves upon shelves of gadgets and gizmos meant to entertain or otherwise make lives easier and more automated. By offering to employ Du, or "Yogi," as he's known by many of the Iowans in Baden, Darrel is in a way attempting to reduce Du's inventiveness to an economic unit from he will ultimately benefit as his employer.
Education
For Jasmine, education is something hard-won. For a woman in India, and especially in a village setting like Hasnapur at the time of her upbringing, she isn't expected to advance her education beyond what's conducive to functioning as a wife and mother. But Masterji recognizes the injustice of this in Jasmine's case, because he sees that she's capable of using her mind to advance her place in society. He teaches her English books and English literature, and even makes an appeal to her father to allow her to stay in school three years longer than her sisters. He says, "in hot-weather countries Mother Nature is too fecund. That is why it is important that modern ladies go for secondary-school education and find themselves positions. They are not shackling themselves to wifehood and maternity first chance. Surely you know, sir, that in our modern society many bright ladies are finding positions?" (50).
Masterji's lessons obviously permeate Jasmine's outlook; later in the novel when she's interested in courting Prakash, she first has to learn whether or not he speaks English, saying, "I couldn’t marry a man who didn’t speak English, or at least who didn’t want to speak English. To want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world" (68). Her voracious appetite for knowledge is expressed further when she begins working at Columbia University. She says, "When I flipped through the General Studies catalogue, I saw a thousand courses I wanted to take, in science, in art, in languages. There was nothing that seemed too exotic, nothing that did not seem essential to my future" (180).
Motherhood
Motherhood emerges as a major theme of Jasmine, always working in the background to elucidate cultural differences between India and the United States, the complexities of Jasmine's relationship with Bud, nuances of her supposed "obligations" to her various love interests, and of course her own perspective on motherhood and being a mother.
The reader knows from the first scene in Baden that Jasmine is, for the duration of the narrative, pregnant with her and Bud's child. Bud wants her to marry him and feels that her pregnancy makes marriage an obvious choice. While sitting in the waiting room at the OB-GYN office, Jasmine encounters a grad student from the University in tears over an unplanned pregnancy. The student seems convinced that she wasn't meant to be a mother, while Jasmine with her wide, "exotic" hips and foreign brown skin is somehow more "naturally" equipped for motherhood. The scene subtly demonstrates the backhanded racism present in academia.
The pregnancy is a fulcrum of Jasmine and Bud's relationship upon which the power dynamic balances and sways. Relying on artificial insemination procedures, she recalls that "Bud was very nervous... [He] said he’d watched the inseminators do their job a thousand times, but he never thought he’d be so intimately involved" (35). Bud refers here to the insemination machines used on livestock. His joke, while probably meaning no harm, is problematic for the way it positions Jasmine as the livestock in the analogy, as if her body were simply a vessel to reproduce more economic units.
When Jasmine lives with Wylie and Taylor, it is clear that the maternal instincts in Hasnapur differ from those common to Wylie's world. Jasmine says, "When I said to Wylie once that my mother loved me so much she tried to kill me, or she would have killed herself, she pulled Duff, their daughter, a little closer to her" (52). Wylie cannot conceive of a reality where she would consider her child better off dead than alive, and certainly, as she later demonstrates, doesn't value her own freedom and wellbeing any less than Duff's. The concept of fate plays a role in shaping Jasmine's perspective on motherhood and child-raising. She holds dear the idea that every life has some central mission, however small it may seem. Perhaps it is to move a potted plant from one spot to another at the age of fifty-two, but whatever the mission may be, there's the possibility that it somehow keeps the universe fixed to the course intended for it by the almighty. To be pregnant is to carry such a mission, such bearing on the fate of the world. She says, "An early ice crusts potholes and crisps the shrubs in our yard. My stomach domes under my skirt. A whole new universe floats inside me. I must not sink," (235).
Clearly Jasmine's conception of motherhood is also fluid and responsive to her experiences. Upon learning that Duff is adopted, she thinks, "I could not imagine a non-genetic child. A child that was not my own, or my husband’s, struck me as a monstrous idea. Adoption was as foreign to me as the idea of widow remarriage," (170-171) the irony of her statement being that she goes on to raise an adopted child and maintain a relationship with Bud that is much like a marriage.
Orientalism in Academia
This notion of orientalism in academia emerges in the waiting room of the OB-GYN office where Jasmine encounters a grad student from the University in tears over an unplanned pregnancy. The student seems convinced that she wasn't meant to be a mother, while Jasmine with her wide, "exotic" hips and foreign brown skin is somehow more "naturally" equipped for motherhood. The scene subtly demonstrates the backhanded racism present in academia and the assumptions that "learned" people make under the auspices of inquiry. Earlier in that same scene, Jasmine guesses that the woman is "an older student, or a professor." She observes, "Educated people are interested in differences; they assume that I’m different from them but exempted from being one of 'them,' the knife-wielding undocumenteds hiding in basements webbing furniture" (33). Jasmine recognizes a kind of clubhouse mentality among academics, that somehow academia separates immigrants from an experience they might encounter on the news, like the story Jasmine references of the INS raid in a Texas furniture factory.
Jasmine also recognizes a general tendency to group and other any place or experience outside of America or comfortably Western perspectives among Mother Ripplemeyer and a lot of the Iowans who are not a part of the club of academia. Mother Ripplemeyer talks about how far the American dollar might go "out there" in feeding the needy, and Jasmine questions what she might mean by that phrase, "out there." She thinks, "Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now" (21).
