Jasmine

By Bharati Mukherjee and Mira Jacob

The renowned novel of a young Indian woman’s coming of age as her life takes her across Indian and the United States—with a new introduction by Mira Jacob.

A New York Times Notable Book

Following one woman through her numerous identities—from Jyoti in a small village in Punjab, to Jasmine in Jalandhar, to Jase in Manhattan, to Jane in Iowa—Bharati Mukherjee gives us an iconic character whose journey through shifting landscapes necessitates her shifting selves. What she encounters on this path, from India to America and from girlhood to womanhood, shows the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the journeys of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow.

When Jasmine was first published in 1989, the New York Times called it “one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.” Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the “Matriarch of Indian-American literature” (Literary Hub).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802196354

Bharati Mukherjee

Winner of a National Book Critic’s Circle Award, BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of eight novels, two story collections, and the coauthor of two books of nonfiction. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

Introduction to the 30th Anniversary of Jasmine

I was sixteen years old when my mother handed me Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. I want to say I knew from the start it would change my life, but the moment barely registered. My Mumbai-born mother was always handing me books she had found in her weekly scouring of the libraries in Albuquerque, New Mexico, trying to get me to peek through windows far beyond our South Indian household in a rural town, to imagine lives in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong. Sometimes, as with Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, they would tell me the history of the land my family had immigrated to, the bloody wars that had been waged before our arrival, on bodies that looked more like ours than the ones we saw on television. Sometimes, as with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, they might even contain an Indian woman, and I would instantly begin trying to locate our similarities, which was an unsatisfying process at best. Most Indian narratives in America feature light-skinned northern Hindus—a far cry from my dark-skinned southern Syrian Christian experience. Until Jasmine, I had never come across a story centered on the experience of a young Indian American woman, much less one written from her perspective, by an Indian woman. I had never, in other words, read about a life that felt truly, and authentically, like mine.

When I was growing up, the idea that I might need to see myself in the stories I read was framed as unsophisticated at best, narcissistic at worst. Yet, in America in the late 1980s, a good portion of the country was doing the exact same thing without ever acknowledging it. The frictionless-ness of whiteness—which is to say, the way white Americans could move through the world finding their every nuance reflected in music, literature, film, the fine arts, and media—ensured their belief that their experience was the one-size-fits-all of perspectives. I even believed it myself, or tried to, squashing my unease to better align myself with Mark Twain’s Huck Finn instead of slave Jim, with Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise instead of the cutest little Mexican girl he loves and leaves in On the Road.

I learned very early on to ignore the fact that certain characters never felt quite as real as others, that certain people with certain identities were cast in the peripheral roles of the story. Their interiors were dry and obvious, their needs basic, if they had needs at all. A dark young woman from India, for example, could only really ever exist in her usefulness to others—a daughter, a nanny, a wife—and her place in the story was nearly always the sidebar on the way to a larger narrative. Even her internal life—what she wanted for herself—could not breach these borders, when she was imagined by white bodies, by male bodies.

Reading yourself as a simple character over and over gives you two choices, both equally sad: One is to buy into your own lack of complexity. The other is to align yourself with whiteness so you can think of yourself as complex. Both of these are murder on a young brown woman’s mind, which is why finding Jasmine, in all her contradictions, felt like living for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Jasmine’s complexity is not what was highlighted on the original flap copy, which described her as a woman who seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village but then comes to America only to be greeted by a brutality as primitive as any she has known; one who meets a self-assured young couple in Manhattan and is confronted by the mysterious emotions of Occidental love. Of course, I knew what this meant. I had seen it so many times before, the coded language that lets readers know they are about to witness the transformation of a poor, unlucky immigrant into a good American, to be shown the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her—our new friends, neighbors, and lovers. Obviously, the writers of that copy had never once considered an Indian American reader, much less the fact that I could not simultaneously be myself as well as my own new neighbor. But did it matter? Not really, I told myself. Not in a way I could explain to myself or anyone else. So I settled behind the gaze the publishers assumed I had, watching myself like they watched me.

How strange it was to hold Jasmine at that cool distance, to set myself up for a story I had seen a thousand times before, then to crack it open and find my own face staring back at me. Sure, it was the story of Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane, a woman who shed names and identities to simply keep surviving every day in America. And yes, she was an undocumented immigrant while I had been born in the US, Hindu where I was Christian, twenty-two and pregnant to my sixteen and inexperienced. But that didn’t matter nearly as much as what I saw in front of me: a brown body stranded in the middle of the country, a dark spot on acres and acres of whiteness. A woman required to explain to neighbors, bank tellers, teachers, grocers, even children, where she was from, to endure their free associations about that place, to cook its food so that they might pride themselves on eating it. To keep telling herself that they were good despite all of this. To admit, in a single sentence that took my breath away the first time I read it: This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing (p. 29).

But where was the grateful immigrant the text promised? Where were the teachable moments provided by kind and benevolent Americans, and her admiration of those who had instructed her? They were not here. Instead there was Jasmine, observing in bold, indicting strokes why her lover changed her name from Jasmine to Jane: My genuine foreignness frightens him. I don’t hold that against him. It frightens me, too (p. 26). Nor was the simple immigrant naivete from the flap copy present in the darkly observant mind that tallies up the small hypocrisies all around her and quips about a Great Depression survivor that in the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable (p. 16).

She was funny, this Jasmine, and ruthless in ways both obvious and deft. She knew how to use a knife to defend herself and how to use her exoticism as its own weapon, the unknowability it offered her as protection against minds that would prefer to sum up and dismiss her. She saw, as I did, what it would take to survive in America, and went about the daily business of doing it. She wanted, as I did, to be loved and seen by her country, but settled instead for its wavering tolerance.

What was it like, at age sixteen, to read something that finally addressed the truth of my life? To watch the always-supporting cast member step center stage, and tell her story? To see, in Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane’s constantly shifting names, all the portions of myself I’d had to leave behind entering American households, institutions, workplaces? To feel her intelligent and precise fury, the way she kept it at bay by reminding herself that those causing her pain were not trying to do so, to feel how so much of that daily practice hinged on her having no other viable options? It was like putting on a shirt and seeing, for the first time, the shape of my own invisible body.

And then, almost as quickly as it came, my moment of recognition dissolved into this passage:

There are national airlines flying the world that do not appear in any directory. There are charters who’ve lost their way and now just fly, improvising crews and destinations. They serve no food, no beverages. Their crews often look abused. There is a shadow world of aircraft permanently aloft that share air lanes and radio frequencies with Pan Am and British Air and Air-India, portaging people who coexist with tourists and businessmen. But we are the refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer.

We are the outcasts and deportees, 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. We are dressed in shreds of national costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage. We ask only one thing: to be allowed to land, to pass through, to continue. (pp. 100–1)

Reading these two paragraphs loosed a strange, troubling dissonance in me. Where just moments before I was sure that this was my book, that it was my story, I now felt myself bumped from it again, in a direction I hadn’t known existed. Was it really possible that this hidden world of human freightage existed in parallel to the public one I had grown accustomed to navigating? That shadow airlines filled the sky with people who were so intent on getting to a place that they let go of the idea of ever going home? That I had, by nature of my nationality, and class, and passport, managed to live almost until adulthood without even once glancing in the direction that they had emerged from? Decades later, we would have words for this, the privilege of my ignorance, the entitlement of my citizenship, but right then, in that moment, I could only register it as fear. Fear of the magnitude of a struggle I had never even had to contemplate, and, if I’m honest, fear of the desperation that drives a person to take that kind of voyage, to risk their own life for the promise of a better one.

What was it like, at age sixteen, to understand that as much as I had not been seen by my country, I had also been blinded by my own American-ness? To begin to realize that to live in my body would be a constant unraveling of my own hypocrisies? To recognize that my oppression and freedom worked in lockstep, two sides of a coin that would always be twirling midair? I probably would not have said it then, staying up so many nights in a row trying to accommodate the new realm of feeling Jasmine gave me, but now, at a time when our country has built concentration camps at the southern border, when our president encourages white Americans to view the rest of us as undeserving outsiders, I can tell you it was a gift, the kind that very good literature offers us. It is the gift of being allowed to see ourselves in all our inconsistencies, to reckon with what it means to be an insider and outsider at the same moment. To understand our oppressions and exertions of power. To build our hearts so they might always reflect, like Jasmine, what it means to carry what is fraught and scared and dismissive and hopeful and wild inside us, and choose love.

Mira Jacob

August 2019

1

LIFETIMES ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears—his satellite dish to the stars—and foretold my widowhood and exile. I was only seven then, fast and venturesome, scabrous-armed from leaves and thorns.

No! I shouted. You’re a crazy old man. You don’t know what my future holds!

Suit yourself, the astrologer cackled. What is to happen will happen. Then he chucked me hard on the head.

I fell. My teeth cut into my tongue. A twig sticking out of the bundle of firewood I’d scavenged punched a star-shaped wound into my forehead. I lay still. The astrologer re-entered his trance. I was nothing, a speck in the solar system. Bad times were on their way. I was helpless, doomed. The star bled.

I don’t believe you, I whispered.

The astrologer folded up his tattered mat and pushed his feet into rubber sandals. Fate is Fate. When Behula’s bridegroom was fated to die of snakebite on their wedding night, did building a steel fortress prevent his death? A magic snake will penetrate solid walls when necessary.

I smelled the sweetness of winter wildflowers. Quails hopped, hiding and seeking me in the long grass. Squirrels as tiny as mice swished over my arms, dropping nuts. The trees were stooped and gnarled, as though the ghosts of old women had taken root. I always felt the she-ghosts were guarding me. I didn’t feel I was nothing.

Go join your sisters, the man with the capacious ears commanded. A girl shouldn’t be wandering here by herself. He pulled me to my feet and pointed to the trail that led out of the woods to the river bend.

I dragged my bundle to the river bend. I hated that river bend. The water pooled there, sludgy brown, and was choked with hyacinths and feces from the buffaloes that village boys washed upstream. Women were scouring brass pots with ashes. Dhobis were whomping clothes clean on stone slabs. Housewives squabbled while lowering their pails into a drying well. My older sisters, slow, happy girls with butter-smooth arms, were still bathing on the steps that led down to the river.

What happened? my sisters shrieked as they sponged the bleeding star on my forehead with the wetted ends of their veils. Now your face is scarred for life! How will the family ever find you a husband?

I broke away from their solicitous grip. It’s not a scar, I shouted, it’s my third eye. In the stories that our mother recited, the holiest sages developed an extra eye right in the middle of their foreheads. Through that eye they peered out into invisible worlds. Now I’m a sage.

My sisters scampered up the slippery steps, grabbed their pitchers and my bundle of firewood, and ran to get help from the women at the well.

I swam to where the river was a sun-gold haze. I kicked and paddled in a rage. Suddenly my fingers scraped the soft waterlogged carcass of a small dog. The body was rotten, the eyes had been eaten. The moment I touched it, the body broke in two, as though the water had been its glue. A stench leaked out of the broken body, and then both pieces quickly sank.

That stench stays with me. I’m twenty-four now, I live in Baden, Elsa County, Iowa, but every time I lift a glass of water to my lips, fleetingly I smell it. I know what I don’t want to become.

2

TAYLOR didn’t want me to run away to Iowa. How can anyone leave New York, he said, how can you leave New York, you belong here. Iowa’s dull and it’s flat, he said.

So is Punjab, I said.

You deserve better.

There are many things I deserve, not all of them better. Taylor thought dull was the absence of action, but dull is its own kind of action. Dullness is a kind of luxury.

Taylor was wrong. Iowa isn’t flat, not Elsa County.

It’s a late May afternoon in a dry season and sunlight crests the hillocks like sea foam, then angles across the rolling sea of Lutzes’ ground before snagging on the maples and box elders at the far end of ours. The Lutzes and Ripplemeyers’ fifteen hundred acres cut across a dozen ponds and glacial moraines, back to back in a six-mile swath. The Ripplemeyer land: Bud’s and mine and Du’s. Jane Ripplemeyer has a bank account. So does Jyoti Vijh, in a different city. Bud’s father started the First Bank of Baden above the barbers; now Bud runs it out of a smart low building between Kwik Copy and the new Drug Town.

Bud wants me to marry him, officially, he says, before the baby comes. People assume we’re married. He’s a small-town banker, he’s not allowed to do impulsive things. I’m less than half his age, and very foreign. We’re the kind who marry. Going for me is this: he wasn’t in a wheelchair when we met. I didn’t leave him after it happened.

From the kitchen I can see the only Lutz boy, Darrel, work the ground. Darrel looks lost these days, like a little boy, inside the double-wide, air-conditioned cab of a monster tractor. Gene Lutz weighed nearly three hundred pounds and needed every square inch.

This is Darrel’s first planting alone. The wheels of his tractor are plumed with dust as fine as talcum. The contour-plowed fields are quilts in shades of pale green and dry brown. Closer in, where our ground slopes into the Lutzes’, Shadow, Darrel’s huge black dog, picks his way through ankle-high tufts of corn. A farm dog knows not to damage leaves, even when it races ahead after a weasel or

Reviews for Jasmine

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel of trifurcation follows a young woman from a tiny Punjabi village to Florida, Manhattan, and a farm in Baden, Iowa. When her husband Prakash is murdered by a terrorist's bomb in a sari shop, seventeen year old widow Jyoti manages to gather enough false documents and funds to become contraband on a cargo ship out of Amsterdam. Landing penniless in the Florida Keys, she kills the rapist ship captain and is rescued by a kind stranger who helps Jyoti to chop off her hair to pay for a green card. In Manhattan, she morphs into Jasmine, au pair to a Columbia professor, a book editor, and their young daughter. When Jasmine thinks she sees the terrorist from her hometown selling hot dogs in a city park, she leaves the family and flees across country. In Iowa, Jasmine becomes Jane to her boss, a middle aged married bank manager who falls in love and divorces his wife to marry her. And this is a mere outline of all the events in her story. Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane is a dreamy survivor and I reveled in the lyrical, sometimes difficult to follow, non-linear passages and in the dramatic conclusion.Quotes: "An astrologer cupped his ears, his satellite dish to the stars, and foretold my widowhood and exile."

[brangwinn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sad haunting story that has come back to me as I try to sleep, hoping that Jane (as she is last known in the story does have a happily ever after life. Her bravery in leaving India where she had no future to come to America is to be cheered as is her determination to make it.

[klburnside · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There was nothing spectacular about this book. At certain moments, I kept thinking, "oh, now it is going to get good.." but if just never panned out. Granted, I read most of it while simultaneously watching inauguration day coverage, so I wasn't fully paying attention to it.

[niquetteb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jasmine takes on a different name wherever she goes. From India to Iowa. I do enjoy Indian writers. I have to admire her for all she's lived through and her nomadic life. I can identify with the moving and I think I long to be able to pick up and move, only under better situations.

[paulagraph · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a novel that I had placed in my discard pile, but retrieved to re-read after a friend told me she had really liked it. Almost all the way through I was happy to be reading this book again & thinking that I would keep it after all. Acutely post-colonial (as we called such novels 15 years ago) in its point of view, it seems very up to date in its insider understanding of the often bizarrely complex interior and exterior lives of many immigrants, particularly illegal ones from poor countries (an immigrant arriving today from India might be a very different kind of person, with very different life story & motivation, however). I particularly liked Jasmine's thinking about and interaction with Du, her Iowa "husband" Bud's adopted Vietnamese teen age son. The chapter in Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed in which she lives & works with illegal immigrants working as hotel maids in Florida came to mind, as Jyoti Vigh aka Jasmine aka Jase aka Jane Ripplemayer arrives in the U.S. by way of Florida, after a squalid boat voyage, rape by the boat's captain in a seedy motel & the murder (by knife) of said rapist. She is rescued by a Quaker woman who helps her on her way to New York City for a couple of years of a dream life working as a "Day Mummy" for Taylor (a physicist & professor at Columbia), Wylie & their precocious & perfect adopted daughter Duff. After Wylie leaves Taylor, Jasmine continues to live with Taylor & Duff until one day she sees her Indian husband's (her first love & lover Prakash) murderer in Central Park & decides to flee to Iowa (where Duff was born). It's here that we find her as the novel opens & where we leave her as she is about to take off for California (newly retrieved by Taylor & Duff). In the meantime she has become the pregnant wife(in all senses other than the legal one) of a small town (Baden, Elsa County) banker, Bud Ripplemayer, during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. [I am wondering, of course, whether Mukherjee once attended the Iowa Writers Workshop] For the past 2 years, Bud has been paralyzed from the waist down after a desperate farmer shot him in the back before blowing his own brains out.
I had a love/ hate response to this book. I really liked it & then finally resented its narrative seduction (drive to conclusion). I wasn't satisfied with the ending. Taylor & Duff arrive. Jasmine is in love & leaves Bud (right after Du has also left for CA). She has told us that Bud was a great guy. Now, he's a cripple (politically incorrect word but useful here) & 30 years older than she is & would be a dead end for Jasmine. What about the baby she's carrying? There's not even a mention of the right or wrongness of taking that baby away with her (it's not yet born). I don't buy the Taylor fantasy. He does little for me. Bud is a better person. Which is not to say that Iowa & Bud make sense for Jasmine, but that she perhaps lets herself off the hook a bit too easily, just as she did when she first became involved with Bud (Karin, Bud's ex-wife asked her then why she never thought to ask Bud if he was married. Jasmine treats this question as irrelevant, since it was Bud who fell in love with her & not her who pursued him. But the question seems quite relevant to me. It's as if Jasmine's own story (poverty, lack of education, murdered husband, rape, murder) allows her (or the author) to rationalize some dubiously ethical decision-making.

[bookczuk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

HAd it not been for the Stanford Book Salon, I probably would not have picked this book up to read, despite my interest in Indian culture. Until the reading list came out, it had flown completely under my reading radar. The group was asked to keep in mind the question, "To what extent is Jasmine, or anyone for that matter, in control of his/her destiny?" while reading the book. Having been involved in one too many destiny versus free will discussions in my lifetime, I conveniently let that slip from my mind, slipping instead into the world of Jasmine.Born in that strife torn part of India, where the trauma of the Partition remains a wound today, Jyoti's (who is given the name of Jasmine by her husband) story starts "Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an asrologer cupped his ears--his satellite dish to the stars--and foretold my widowhood and exile. " The language of this story swept me away. I could so easily visualize her sisters, "slow, happy girls with butter-smooth arms or hear the humor and love in Taylor's voice, talking to his young daughter, later on in New York. The novel follows young Jyoti through a decade of her life, from 14 to 24. In each phase of her life, she is given a new name by different men who are pivotal in her world at that point: Jasmine, Jase, Jane, Mom. When the astrologer proved correct, and she is widowed at age 17 in an act of political violence, her exile, as an illegal immigrant to the United States is not far behind. Her entrance to that country is heralded by a horrifically brutal act, but she survives, able to compartmentalize her life as easily as she is to slip into another name. How she gets from a rural village in Punjab to Baden, Elsa County, Iowa is a journey of more than miles. The poetic language and soft humor woven in the telling are what kept me reading, uncertain until the very last page the next trajectory of this young woman's life.

[kairosdreaming · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel was not what I expected. When I first picked it up I had thought it would be about a woman's life in India. And to an extent it was, however, it took a twist and brought the woman to America.The main character is a woman named Jasmine. Throughout the story she goes by several other names including Jane, Jyoti, and Jase. Each name she has seems to bring its own life with it and she has several different periods of time in her life.She starts out as a young girl in India where she marries at fifteen. When her husband is murdered in a bombing, she travels to America with the intent of committing suicide at the college campus he was to go to. However, she is stopped by a fierce determination to live after a hardship befalls her.Without giving away too much of the novel I don't want to give greater detail to the events of her life. She lives with several people performing different tasks at each and this storyline flits back and forth with one of her final stays, with a handicapped man whose child she is carrying.I was impressed with this novel. While I originally wanted to dislike it for not being what I expected I found that it told an impressive story. One might not think much of the hardships of one woman, but this book made you care about her and at the end I was rooting for her to take a certain path in life.The language is clear and doesn't get overly wordy. Even though a lot of the concepts are from India Mukherjee makes them easy to understand. Overall, it was a great story.JasminePublished in 1989241 pages

[lizzy2x · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Jasmine had depth, but it was too depressing for my tastes. One of its biggest weaknesses was the fact that it's a book about a very intelligent woman whose life is nearly completely steered by men. That really got to me.

[stunik_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jasmine has many names, many roles, many ways of relating to the world. Follow her on a journey from India to the US as she explores her identity and finds a place for herself.Adult situations (rape); parent permission required.