The Quest For Self And Nation In The Novel ‘Jasmine’ By Bharathi Mukerji: A Postcolonial Analysis

Abstract

The issues and outcomes of a nation's decolonization are the subject of postcolonial studies. It questions about the political, economic, and cultural independence of people who were oppressed in the past. Poscolonialism offers a variety of scholarly resources and perspectives to investigate the social, cultural, and psychological effects of colonialism and imperialism. As a component  of post colonial studies , postcolonial literature recurrently address the themes like  Colonization, nationalism, cultural identity, family, the future and the past, slavery, migration, subjugation and resistance, discrimination, race, gender, and place. Bharati Mukherjee as a first generation diasporic writer investigates the theme of immigration, emigration, identity, alienation, gender differences and transformation of culture in her works. The decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity through cultural interactions between various identities-personal, cultural, national, ethnic, gender-based, and class-based. An identity crisis is when people examine themselves and their perceptions of themselves. The identity crisis emerged as a result of the postcolonial conditions and difficult circumstances that newly freed nations and countries faced in their search for and formation of self-identity. in recent times Diaspora literature is considered part of postcolonial literature. Hence Diaspora writers tends to write about the problem of quest for identity in their writings.  The broad objective of this paper is to examine how Mukherjee's "Jasmine" addresses themes of personal and national identities, in addition to themes of alienation, multiculturalism and the love story and struggles of the protagonist. The research's specific objective is to demonstrate that these themes are postcolonial. The analytical method is used by referring to primary and available critical resources by well-known authors.