‘No Home’ and ‘No Host’ but a ‘Third Space’ for Jasmine

Abstract

In Jasmine, the conceptual understanding of Bharati Mukherjee’s protagonist Jyoti is often caught between two worlds and cultures. This is the story of a simple Indian village girl Jyoti’s journey from India to America. During her journey, her transformation and feminist role are significant to understand the cultural changes in her life. This article analyses Mukherjee’s Jasmine with the diasporic postcolonial theoretical framework. This article explores Jyoti’s struggles, assimilation and accommodation in the Third Space with scholars like Bhabha, Lin and Schwartz et al. The postcolonial concepts like a Third Space, identity transformation and acculturation process create a space to explore Jasmine’s journey. To conclude, her efforts to assimilate and identity construction attracts us to explore diasporic space in women’s life. This research finds a potential scope to explore the cross-cultural psychology of the female character in the novel to (re)present the diasporic journey from India to America. This research finds that Jasmine’s role as a diasporic figure creates a Third Space and acculturation.