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143
Chapter IV
The Diasporic Pulse of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
In the globalization era everyone wants to move out of his or her
native soil for a better living. Indian engineers, doctors, computer
scientists and other professionals migrate to various parts of the world
for better prospects. Indian diasporic writers like
Uma Parameswaran, Gita Hariharan, V.S. Naipaul, Shauna Singh
Baldwin, Jumpa Lahiri, Bharathi Mukherjee, Sashi Tharoor,
Amitav Ghosh, Meena Nair and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni are not an
exception to this. Though settled in far off countries, their love for
their motherland remains deep-rooted.
Alienation, adoption, assimilation, despair, discontentment,
death, nostalgia, marginalization, re-adjustment and rootlessness are
some of the features of the diasporic writing. The gap between home,
i.e., the culture of origin and world, i.e., the culture of adoption
remains unbridged and the boundaries are often in conflict.
The migrant existentiality that determines a specific aesthetics is
faced with two centres, the external colonial or modernist centre
filtering into a personal identity.
144
The chief feature of the poetics of exile is the trial during which
it deals with these centres, sometimes rejecting and sometimes
accepting them. Edward Said’s words are the best example for this
trial. In The Politics of Dispossession, Said says, “The whole notion
of crossing over or moving from one identity to another is extremely
important to me, being as I am -- as we all are, a sort of hybrid” (122).
In his popular essay, “Culture and Imperialism” Said, elaborates
the journey of the exile from his homeland to the globe in three phases
such as tender, strong and perfect. Tender is the phase in which
homeland alone is sweet; in the strong phase every soil is as sweet as
his native; perfect phase looks at the entire world as a foreign land.
On the other hand for Homi Bhabha, it is not the nation but the
culture which is the focus of attention. He recommends a hybridity
which is not found in hierarchical or binary structures. The poetics of
expatriate elaborates itself without centres in the writings of
Homi Bhabha. In his celebrated essay, “Dissemination, Time,
Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Bhabha projects
culture as hybrid from the side of migrant and subaltern. This double
inscription or two references is to live on borders. Bhabha employs
the term “liminality” (139-140) which means tension of differences;
the difference of historical past and the present, and of the subjecting
and the subjected clashing or meeting in a capital now; which in other
words is called as “disjunctive temporality” (140).
145
Bhabha’s disjunctive temporality is analogical to Salman
Rushdie’s notion of broken mirrors. Rushdie generalizes the
excitement of the homeless in Imaginary Homelands, when he says;
“Human beings do not perceive things whole. We are not gods but
wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable of fractured perceptions”
(122). This according to Bhabha is “the twilight existence of the
aesthetic image” (15). Writers like Rushdie mythologize history
whereas writers like Uma Parameswaran re-mythologize history, epics,
legends and myths of the native land. This passionate desire and the
existential need to relocate the philosophy and vision of the homeland
in the midst of the alien culture is one of the features of diaspora as
William Safran expresses in his essay “Diasporas in Modern Societies:
Myths of Homeland and Return” in Diaspora II (85).
V.S. Naipaul, a Caribbean writer in his works, tries to transform
his sensibility to a perpetual homelessness and uprootedness.
Neil Bissoondath, an Indo-Caribbean writer, rejects the
homogenization of ethinicity and projects immigration as essentially
about renewal, about change. Bharathi Mukherjee prefers to be called
as an American writer. She advocates Mongrelization -- a mixing and
mingling of two races. She wants the immigrants to take deeper roots
in the foreign soil and become global or international citizens. As a
literary member of diaspora, A.K. Ramanujan feels closer to his fellow
Indians of the South than to fellow Americans. He entertains a hope
that diasporic consciousness is an intellectualization of a barren
146
condition that is made better by an imaginary homeland to which one
hopes, one will return someday.
As an Indian immigrant to the United States of America,
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, tries to break free from stereotypes and
uses her past experiences and the desire to communicate the plight of
Indian women in America, as the driving force behind her writing.
Her writings constitute an attempt to re-connect her, emotionally and
physically to her immigrant status. She has explored the force of
tradition of her native country as well as the challenges faced by the
immigrants in her adopted country. Divakaruni turns to her inner
consciousness to develop a new narrative, which highlights not only
the oppressive force exerted over women in both their native and
non-native cultures, but how transposed traditions survive and
mutate on foreign soil. Divakaruni has once said, “I am a listener, a
facilitator, a connector of people” (qtd. in Miri 83).
Literature of diaspora affords the area of critical studies in
themes, forms, modes, characters and techniques. The focus in
literature before 1950 was on the centre, the colonizer and the
political domination. The cynosure of attraction after 1950 in
literature is on the oppressed, the colonized and the indigenous.
The most affected and oppressed are those who are criticized as the
second sex; and they have been treated as the wretched of the earth.
Homi Bhabha in his The Location of Culture has affirmed that the
contemporary literary tradition concentrates on those who
147
“have suffered the sentence of history” (15). He further observes that
“there is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of
social marginality transforms our critical strategies” (15). Women are
treated as the wretched of the earth since time immemorial and hence
the recent trend is to focus on the gender issues.
Locating the site has become a narcissistic pre-occupation with
the immigrant writer. Exiled by choice or circumstance, the
immigrant finds himself displaced from his roots, his antecedents and
his centre. The quest motif seems the archetypal pattern in the
literature of the predominant mainstream culture. Literature not only
reflects persistence and change in society but can lead society into a
better appreciation of its multicultural and etho-centered fabric.In the
novels of Divakaruni, the social and psychological development of the
non-western immigrant and the culturally displaced European
transplant can be explored.
The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni’s first novel “stirs magical
realism into the new conventions of culinary fiction and the
still-simmering cauldron of Indian immigrant life in America”
(MS 4). Divakaruni inculcates American societal notions that women
should remain silent, particularly immigrant women. Divakaruni has
succeeded in conveying a marginalized woman’s message.
Divakaruni’s adroit encroachment into the territory of culinary fiction
facilitates the transmission easier. Divakaruni combines the
unfamiliar -- the female Indian immigrant experience with the familiar
148
-- urban life in America blending the two into a narrative that relates a
gifted young woman’s plight as an outsider in Southern California.
The spice Bazaar in Oakland, California run by Tilotamma,
becomes the locus foci for the expatriate and immigrant Indians who
go there not only to buy spices that they need for their pilaos and
kheers, but also for that magic spice that will grant them their desires.
Tilo, “a bent woman with skin the colour of old sand”, is the
“architect of the immigrant dream”, the one who “can make it all
happen, green cards and promotions and girls with lotus eyes”
(MS 28).
Though Tilo cannot step into the world outside that world steps
into her shop and makes constant demands on her. She is torn
between her mistress code of detachment and her empathy with the
people who turn to her for help. The struggle gathers momentum
when Raven walks into the shop. The conflicts that she must resolve
between her real self and her outer, aged, powerful self which keeps
her on strictly imposed limits, are a re-working of the very same
conflicts that all exiles experience.
Tilo’s journey through the re-definition of self in exile is an
extension of the conflicts that Indian women experience in
establishing their identity and self-hood. The insider and outsider
dichotomy seems the natural, inherited condition of the Indian
woman. As Geeta’s grandfather remarks, “Even from birth a girl’s real
149
home is with her future husband’s family only” (MS 88).
Sudhir Kakar’s observation in his book The Inner World also echoes
the same.
. . . as a guest in her home . . . Her real family is her
husband’s family. Whatever her fortunes, when she
marries, an Indian girl knows that, in a psychological
sense, she can never go home again. (73)
Moreover the templates, the role-models who mould, inform and
define an Indian woman’s sense of identity -- Sita, Draupadi, Savithri
or Damayanti are also archetypal exiles.
The dialectic of power and control is apparent in the custom
whereby Indian women are enjoined to take on themselves the
well-being and safety of those whom they love. For example, a wife
will regularly fast for her husband, for his welfare. Likewise, Tilo is
kept in check by the implied threat of destruction to those whom she
loves lest she violates the mistress laws. The images of power and
confinement recur throughout the novel, exemplified by the powerful
spices contained in jars. One of the symbols that have dominated the
landscape of the Indian woman’s mind is that of the Lakshmanarekha,
the white protective line that Lakshmana drew around Sita but which
she crossed and in doing triggered off the events of The Ramayana.
In The Mistress of Spices, this symbol can work contrapuntally: it
150
either restricts a woman, keeping her within bounds, or defines her by
her act of rebellion. Tilo repeatedly chooses to rebel.
During her spell on the island of spices Tilo lives in a gynocracy
of sister mistress apprenticed to the benign and caring First Mother --
a period of learning and empowerment i.e., in direct contrast to her
earlier unhappy existence. This recalls the traditional set up of
girlhood in India, where every “female is born into a well-defined
community of women” and where the “experience of apprenticeship
and the activities that transpire in this feminine sphere are
independent of the patriarchal values of the outside world”
(Kakar 2004: 61).
In seeking to establish the territoriality of her self, Tilo is forced
to find recognizable cognates that span both cultures. The novel
teems with such refractions and reflections. For example, Tilo shares
a “legacy of power” (MS 203) with Raven, whose grandfather was a
curandero; the burning village, at the start of the novel when Tilo is
born, mirrors the city in flames at the end of the novel when she is
reborn: “I know what burning smells like. I have not forgotten the
death of my village . . . A city would be different. But the smell of
charred flesh is the same everywhere” (MS 313).
True to her rebellious nature filled with life-lust, Tilo oversteps
the lines that she willingly drew around herself. She sets about
making inroads into the world outside going a little further each time
151
from the first hesitant steps she takes to admire Haroun’s new car
parked in front of her shop to her trip to the supermarket and to
Geeta’s office block, to finally speeding out of Oakland, fleeing the
earthquake, and crossing the “final bridge” (MS 31). The earthquake
is the spatial equivalent of the psychological upheaval that Tilo has
faced.
Tilo decides to go back instead of travelling in search of the
earthly paradise that she and Raven had hoped to find. By returning,
Tilo has seized the freedom to go back. Tilo is convinced that it is her
rejection of the mistress life that has caused the earthquake: “I made
it happen”, she says (MS 313). It is a statement on the dual nature of
exile and immigration. Just as the landscape of the immigrant mind
has been irrevocably altered by the new homeland, the immigrant
dramatically alters the landscape of the new country.
The underlying principles in the Indian quest for self realization
are dharma and karma, duty and action, not only towards others but
also towards one’s own self. The exile’s quest for a new identity
dovetails with the traditional, although world view of the individual
juggling past, present and future lives in order to realize his self.
Tilo is forced to choose between her grandeur, mythic destiny of
spice-mistress and that of ordinary mortal. Tilo consummates her
relationship with Raven and returns to the shop to commit what can
only be regarded as the mistress equivalent of Sati, only to find that
152
nothing untoward takes place. Having accepted death and therefore
mortality, she has redefined the territoriality of herself in time.
I, Tilo, am no goddess but an ordinary woman only.
I admit it, this truth I have tried to escape all my life.
And though once I thought I could save the world,
I see now that I have only brought brief happiness into
a few lives. (MS 298)
The reduction in Tilo’s sense of destiny is the corollary of the
inevitable sense of loss that accompanies the act of letting go and of
stepping into life, of discovering what it is to be a mortal human being,
unpowered by magic, but empowered by self-hood.
Tilo goes through a bewildering succession of personae:
Nayantara, the dark-skinned, ugly baby who refused to die and the
clairvoyant; Bhagyavati the pirate-queen and the novice; Tilo the
old-young spice-mistress; Tilotamma, the aspara of one night with
“goddess-face free of mortal blemish, distant as an Ajanta painting”
(MS 279); and finally Maya -- “not particularly young or old.
Just ordinary” (MS 306). Sudhir Kakar observes: “. . . the Indian
body-image stresses an unremitting interchange taking place with the
environment simultaneously accompanied by ceaseless within the
body (2004: 235).
Tilo’s image is invested with a sense of self which is porous: she
feels invaded by the problems and anguish of her customers; at night,
153
she says, “When I lie down, from every direction the city will pulse its
pain and fear and impatient love into me” (MS 60). Although mirrors
are forbidden to mistresses, Tilo is constantly confronted by reflective
surfaces that send back a dim and vague reflection of her.
Significantly, one of the first things that she buys when she decides to
“step over the threshold of prohibited America” (MS 132), is a mirror
that she keeps veiled until she is ready to confront her new image.
One of the most enduring and pervasive archetypes of the
Indian woman is Sita; several elements of her story flicker between the
lines of the novel The Mistress of Spices. Just as Sita was born of
the earth, and by the dictates of dharma, she was required to go
through the agnipariksha (the test by fire) twice, in order to prove her
purity and to assume her rightful place beside Rama, Tilo was placed
face down on the earth but refused to die; twice Tilo is required, by
the dictates of the mistress-laws, to step into Shampati’s fire. Just as
Sita was lured by Ravana to step over the protective Lakshmanarekha,
Tilo is lured by Raven and steps over the threshold of the protective
shell of the shop.
The one-to-one relationship between Tilo and Raven, with its
implications of love and romantic attachment deviates significantly
from the traditional Indian concept of mythic, male-female
complementarity as embodied in the Rama and Sita story. This is
perhaps the ultimate Laksmanarekha, the final limit that can be
crossed by an Indian woman. Divakaruni exploits this idea to
154
establish gender role models such as that of inter-marriage and that
of the older woman and younger man as when the old Tilo is courted
by the young Raven. Tilo and Raven share a vision of an earthly
paradise a place “high up in the mountains, pine and eucalyptus,
damp odour of redwood, bark and cone” (MS 199). After the
earthquake, they head out in search of this almost mythic primeval
space and in a reversal of the customary female role, Tilo refuses.
She has learnt to say “NO, that word so hard for Indian women”
(MS 81). Tilo decides to return to Oakland, and Raven follows her.
Tilo’s re-created self will always be marked by her cultural
inheritance, just as Raven’s self will carry the stigmata of the legacy of
which he has been deprived. Raven was brought up by an
American-Indian mother who totally cut herself and her family off her
origins. Raven, the immigrant, born and brought up in the United
States of America and Tilo, the visible immigrant, are both Indians
moving from the polarities of east and west towards the precarious
balance of being American. Together they personify the Janus -- face
of exile and what Rushdie calls “the Indian talent for non-stop
self- regeneration” (1994: 16).
Divakaruni is at her best in the depiction of cross-cultural
conflicts and how her heroines take control over their destinies.
The heroines endeavour for self-realization and move towards
liberation. Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices reveals the
predicament of the immigrant Indians in America, with an Indian
155
spicy touch. All Divakaruni’s heroines find themselves within the
confining boundaries of their cultures and religions. She presents the
disruptiveness of change and the power, beauty, strength and validity
of re-defining one’s individual identity within a broader universal
context.
Divakaruni is able to offer an authentic perspective on the social
constraints placed on the immigrant women. Divakaruni fully
explores the themes of cultural oppression, racial discrimination,
cultural assimilation and the discovery of voice, through a multitude
of both male and female characters. Divakaruni portrays a list of
smorgasbord of personalities and their corresponding tales: Ahuja’s
wife Lalita who strains to evade her husband is in search of the power
to confront mental abuse. Geeta, who refuses to marry a man
selected by her Indian family preserves a stoic silence in order to
maintain freedom. The stories of Tilo and Raven are rebellious.
Their love and discrimination combine to form the backbone of the
narrative.
The last section in the novel The Mistress of Spices, which
deals with Raven and Tilo, knits together the many themes that run
as separate strands throughout the book. It also vividly illustrates
many of the complex conflicts that multi-ethnic groups experience in
America. Quite apart from the convincing blend of fantasy and
realism Divakaruni succeeds in presenting to us a balanced picture of
the world of immigrants in America.
156
Divakaruni has taken literary risks in the novel The Mistress of
Spices. She has bridged the purely realistic world with the mythical
one; she has extended her subject matter from dealing exclusively
with the Indian-American community to include three other ethnic
groups living in the inner city – Latinos (Hispanic), African Americans
and Native Americans. She has tried to bring together the language of
poetry and prose. Divakaruni deals with identity and self-definition in
her works. She is more traditional and re-inforces the binary
opposition of the east and the west. Divakaruni presents a picture of
pain and transformation which is breathtakingly descriptive in her
tale of the mistress of spices.
The Mistress of Spices brings together a panoramic view of
socio-cultural experiences of the characters in India and America.
It is also a novel about the quest of the characters in search of
stability. Sister of My Heart revolves around the dizygotic bondage
between Anju and Sudha. The book draws heavily on Divakaruni’s
own experiences as an immigrant. The book carries on the theme
capturing the dilemmas and opportunities confronting women with
one foot in traditional Indian society and the other in the modern
world.
Sister of My Heart is written in the realistic mode and
describes the complicated relationships of a family in Bengal. In this
novel Indian discrimination against women stands exposed.
The cousins Anju and Sudha consider themselves inferior because
157
they are women. Divakaruni’s purpose is to write about a
female-centric theme in a South Asian setting. The novel is her
perception of an utter lack of emphasis on women’s independence in
South Asian literary genres. Influenced by her grandfather, who told
stories from South Asian epics like The Ramayana and
The Mahabharata, Divakaruni has woven those childhood folktales
into her novel.
In San Francisco Examiner article, Divakaruni declares that in
South Asian mythological stories,
. . . the main relationships the heroines had were with
the opposite sex: husbands, sons, lovers or opponents.
They never had any important friends. Perhaps in
rebellion against such thinking, I find myself focusing
my writing on friendships with women, and trying to
balance them with the conflicting passions and
demands that come to us as daughters and wives,
lovers and mothers. (Feb. 1999)
Divakaruni shares the emotions of her protagonists and finds in them
a mode of feminist expression. Though Sister of My Heart is set in
Calcutta, Divakaruni admits that the rest of the story is not
autobiographical and is based on observation and imagination.
Anju and Sudha are intelligent, independent and pragmatic.
More than just a linear tale of the two women, the novel explores the
158
backgrounds of the mothers and their adventuring husbands.
We learn about Indian culture. We are given just a taste of the
women’s future in America, when Sudha and her daughter move in
with Anju and Sunil. Divakaruni’s review of Indian culture both in
India and in America is full of insights. The novel is both a lesson and
in the present scenario a jaunt through Indian society and culture.
Divakaruni is a master storyteller, who weaves elements of everyday
life and dreams into an engaging, seamless tapestry, which are
truth-filled as they are complex, wonderful, captivating and beautiful.
Kapil Kapoor has identified seven elements, which are used to
investigate or recognize diasporic consciousness. They are memory,
return, strangeness, desire to integrate, transience, desire for
permanence, a sense of belonging and embedding (qtd. in Kirpal 50).
Divakaruni has employed these elements in her novels. Almost all the
women characters in the novels of Divakaruni co-operate with other
women to achieve their rightful, equal and independent status. It is
indeed a goal directed activity -- to liberate women from the
dependence attitude and to establish a society without discrimination
including gender inequality.
The conflict in every woman between the desire to please the
people around as taught in childhood and the desire to fight for justice
as a reaction to the existing situation has been pictured well through
Sudha’s life. This conflict within her explains her delay in taking a
decision. The marital disharmony that is common in the modern age
159
has been highlighted through Sudha-Ramesh relationship. The entire
social system comprising religion, myth, education and other social
norms focuses on training women to be secondary. Women have to
endeavour to come out of these shackles created and maintained
carefully through generations. Sudha’s feminist thinking overtakes
her and she realises the meaninglessness of her mechanical life with
Ramesh through arranged marriage.
Sudha’s decision to get separated from Ramesh is not an Indian
woman’s way of life. Her behaviour shows that a marriage bond will
have meaning only if there is mutual love and respect. Otherwise it
would be a mechanical existence. Sudha has successfully wriggled
herself out of the stifling influences of tradition and has started to
think about living her life for herself and her daughter Dayita.
She has planned to soar up high into the heavens of fulfillment as a
woman.
Divakaruni points out that, “As a girl, I was not encouraged to
ask questions. Women in my family were not expected to work
outside the home, except perhaps to teach” (qtd. in Sarvate 33).
Instead of writing from the perspective of a minority influenced by an
invading culture in her homeland Divakaruni elucidates the struggle
of the minority in the homeland of the dominant majority.
The strength of Divakaruni lies in uncovering the struggle that female
immigrants face when dealing with the cultural mosaic of a twentieth
century United States of America.
160
Divakaruni has interceded and reworked the study of feminism
in her writings. Feminism in her works has something of what
Caroll Smith Rosenberg argues is “the emotional segregation of women
and men, which led to the development of a specifically female world”
(qtd. in Miri 90). Divakaruni advocates many facets of feminism
encompassing agitation for equal opportunity, sexual autonomy and
right of self-determination. This brings her closer to her contemporary
women writers like Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya,
Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
Gita Hariharan and Bharathi Mukherjee. Divakaruni feels that
limitations placed on women’s activities result in profoundly
destructive effects.
The plot of Sister of My Heart focuses on the relationship
between the two young girls, Anju and Sudha, from the shared
experiences of their youth to the varied experiences of their married
lives. The simplicity of the plot allows Divakaruni explore thoroughly
the themes of womanhood, such as the limits of the female, social and
economic freedom as a wife in and outside of India. Sudha reflects,
In my husband’s house, I am always the first to wake.
. . . And as long as I join in my mother-in-law for
morning tea so that we can go over the day’s plans,
she’s satisfied. (SM 111)
161
Anju and Sudha together experience the joys, pains and
mystical tales that accompany growing up in a traditional Indian
house in Calcutta. Their exceptional bond remains the core of the
novel and throughout the work we are acutely aware of how strong
their affection for each other shapes their lives. Till recent times,
women have been assessed by male standards and have been forced
to play subordinate roles as the obedient wife, the self-sacrificing
mother and the dutiful woman. Divakaruni’s fiction explores women
searching for their identity as human beings independent of their
traditional role as a daughter, wife or mother.
In the ever changing and evolving reality of life, the status of
women has undergone rapid and phenomenal changes. The woman’s
past has been a pathetic one governed and dictated by male
standards. Today, changes brought about by education and economic
freedom enables her to emerge from the cocoon of the suffering and
sacrificing self. Women, moving towards the new millennium make
rapid strides in all walks of life. Women have succeeded to a great
extent in breaking the fetters of their servility and oppression and
prove their worth to the world.
The Vine of Desire continues the story of the friends the two
young women at the centre of Divakaruni’s novel Sister of My Heart.
They re-kindle their friendship in America and demonstrate the female
independence that Divakaruni celebrates, although such
independence is not achieved without trauma and pain.
162
Divakaruni suggests that women can assert themselves as
individuals who set their own boundaries with their partners only
through the importance given to education in their lives. Unlike other
immigrant narratives, Divakaruni conceives the Indian women’s
immigration to the United States of America as a journey from
oppressed conditions to freedom and discovery of the self with the
inspiration of western influence.
In The Vine of Desire, the union of the friends is challenged
when Sudha and Sunil become dangerously attracted to each other.
Sudha experiences a nightmare of guilt and she exiles herself from
America. In Anju’s life the black comedy is her friend’s deception, and
her role as the devoted wife is fragmented, but Anju privileges their
individualities and gets on with life. Their love for each other
surpasses all obstacles; their silences, invisible vibrations and
emotional bonding encircle them in critical moments. Sunil has no
qualms of disintegrating his home and prioritizing his personal need
for Sudha who in a way sacrifices security for herself and Dayita,
because her inherent conscience would not validate it. Simon de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex writes, “Once a woman is self-sufficient
and ceases to be a parasite, the system based on her dependence
crumbles; between her and universe there is no longer any need for a
masculine mediator” (689).
Emboldened by her own strength Sudha opts to lead a
meaningful life of her own and for her daughter. It becomes necessary
163
that women must achieve their own individuality for a purposeful
survival. Sudha and Anju fight against these forces within society
which do not allow them to be themselves. Realisation dawns on
them that if they have to progress for the better and march towards
freedom, they have to wrest from men what they do not want to give:
control, power and privilege. They are no more passive agents; they
have become activists who have taken steps to remove many of the
misconceptions imposed on them in the family as well as in the
society.
The family that Divakaruni portrays in The Vine of Desire
constitutes both men and women who are both strong and weak.
In the domestic sphere, the patriarchy has been encountered with
strong intelligent and sensitive women, who have taken certain
unprecedented decisions and emerged as women with well-defined
self-hood. The novel The Vine of Desire discusses both innovation
and conservation. It makes difficult Sudha’s position as a fatherless
child, a divorced woman and as a mother in love with her cousin’s
husband. The complex intersections of identity marker govern the
narrative of the novel.
In The Vine of Desire, the most interesting aspect is how Anju
and Sudha deal with their increasing westernization. Divakaruni has
beautifully observed the creeping onset of this cultural change.
The emotional detachment of each is noted in detail. Sudha receives
an important letter from India and yet spends hours cleaning and
164
tidying the apartment before sitting down to read the missive.
This emotional coldness is in direct contrast to the lives of Sudha’s
and Anju’s mothers in India who lead an open lifestyle, discussing
their daughter’s lives, offering advice and speculating on how the
situation can be improved.
In an interview with Robbi Clipper Sethi, in They Forgive My
Fiction Divakaruni says “I come from a traditional family.” A novel to
Divakaruni, is a tapestry to be woven continuously.
Divakaruni experiences that friendships among immigrants,
particularly women have been important to her immigrant status.
She has also commented that “living in the United States is a complex
experience” (Sethi 9). Divakaruni does not expect to treat her
characters as Indians or Americans, but to feel for them as people; she
aims at scattering stereotypes.
Quest for self-definition and search for identity are the main
features of the characters portrayed by Divakaruni. They are caught
in the flux of tradition and modernity. Divakaruni highlights the fact
that women meet with different problems which they cannot solve
unless they have knowledge of their inner strengths. In Queen of
Dreams, Mrs. Gupta is a first-generation Indian Immigrant. She is
the queen of dreams. Mrs. Gupta’s daughter, Rakhi is a
second-generation immigrant. Rakhi is born and brought up in the
United States; yet she has a longing for India. Rakhi’s obsession with
165
India is only for its myths and mystery intertwined with her mother’s
unspoken past.
Mrs. Gupta dreams for herself and for others. She predicts the
future of her customers. Mrs. Gupta is totally involved in her
dream-telling technique. This dream technique is familiar to an
Indian. It is exciting for the westerner. Contrary to the western
concept of analysis the dream-telling of Mrs. Gupta is viewed with an
eye of suspicion by Rakhi.
Expatriate writing occupies a significant position between
cultures and countries. Cultures travel and take root or get
dislocated. Individuals internalize nostalgia or experience amnesia.
There is a need to realize the significance of the cultural encounter
which takes in diasporic writing, the bi-cultural pulls and the creation
of a new culture which finally emerges. It is important to understand
the dynamics of reception at both the ends for reception is also rooted
in cultural contexts.
Tilo, is not the elderly woman that she appears to be.
Trained as a mistress of spices, she evokes the magical powers of the
spices of her homeland to help her customers. These customers
mostly first or second-generation immigrants, are struggling to adapt
their old world ideals to the unfamiliar new world. Though trapped in
an old woman’s body and forbidden to leave the store, Tilo is unable to
keep the required distance from her patrons’ lives. Her yearning to
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join the world of mortals angers the spices, which she administers to
her immigrant customers and Tilo has to face the consequences of her
disobedience.
Anju and Sudha have travelled away from their home city of
Calcutta to California. California is so foreign to their native culture
and traditions. Through them Divakaruni presents the challenges
and freedoms of modern day America with the issues, both personal
and cultural. Anju seeks the help of her friend to enable her to cope
up with the dissatisfaction with her husband, Sunil. Sudha is both
comforted and suffocated by her life as an escapee from her past and
becomes a servant in her cousin’s household. At the same time the
friends have to acknowledge Sunil’s unspoken but obvious attraction
to Sudha.
The sisters are Indian-born girls. When they mature into
womanhood, they are torn between two cultures. They are both
liberated and trapped by cultural changes on both sides of the ocean.
These women struggle fiercely to carve out an identity of their own.
Sudha is forced into a divorce, because she has refused to abort a
female foetus. She travels to America to visit her cousin Anju and her
husband Sunil. Sunil has not got overcome his infatuation for Sudha
which he had developed at the time of their double marriage.
This fetish feeling in Sunil drives him to betray his wife. But more
important, it paves the way for a gradual realization on the part of
both the friends although in very different ways, of their independence
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from the traditional expectations that have been laid upon them.
Anju realizes her identity through writing her stories seriously.
Sudha comprehends her identity through the awareness that the
desire for her beauty on the part of Sunil, her first love Ashok, and a
new love Lalit, is only a trap that she must be on her own before she
can give herself again.
The women find that thay cannot live a life dependent on men.
They begin their separate searches for independence. As both women
gain self-respect through autonomy, the price seems to be a loss of
humour and joy. Women can evolve different strategies to assert their
individuality and act independently with a sense of freedom and
conviction. Women should become self-reliant and fearless to
articulate their own independence. So it is clear that the woman’s
path to authentic individuality is full of thorns and unexpected
pitfalls. It is in the woman’s power to extricate herself and find her
own happiness.
Divakaruni has cleverly imbued each character with not only
personal disappointments and shortcomings, but public ones as well
as those that are nearly irreconcilable within the orthodox Indian
community: divorce, single parenthood, childlessness and adultery.
There is a balanced view of facts in Divakaruni’s fiction. The fact that
Sudha determines to go back to India shows the hope and trust that
she has towards her native land. Her homeland also plays a
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significant role in her redemption and renewal. Culture can be
defined as a,
total of non-biologically inherited patterns of shared
experience and behaviour through which personal
identity and social structures are attained in each
generation in a particular society, whether ethnic
group or a nation. (Miri 15)
The characters portrayed in the novels of Divakaruni experience
cultural shock because they cannot forego their native tradition to
adopt to the American culture. Their native Indian culture needs a
transition. Indians believe that the meaning of being human is found
in interpersonal relationships, since no human being exists alone.
The American system compels an individual to make his or her own
realization in order to comprehend its system. Tilo, in The Mistress
of Spices, realizes her individuality and moves towards emancipation
by falling in love with a Hispanic named Raven. Tilo is an example of
the amalgamation of traditional culture as the mistress and the
modern culture when she emerges to break the mistress laws.
Homecoming indirectly exhibits Sudha’s thirst for identity.
Her alienation and segregation from her native land engulfs her with a
sense of loss. This sense of alienation is the outcome of her social
background. She belongs to the traditional Chatterjee family of
Calcutta where women are instructed to be submissive and accept
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their arranged roles as a daughter, mother, and wife and in-laws.
She is married into the Sanyals family again where submissiveness is
insisted upon. As an obedient daughter of the Chatterjee family, she
trains her mind to be a good daughter-in-law and a wife. But when
her individuality is shaken, she walks out of the Sanyal household in
order to give birth to the female child and bring up the child.
Sudha’s education enables her to decide her next course of
action. She goes to America to live with Anju and Sunil. She is not
able to escape the fetish feeling of Sunil. One day she becomes a prey
to Sunil’s emotions. In succumbing to Sunil’s advances, Sudha has
betrayed Anju. This sense of guilt urges Sudha to leave Anju and take
up a job of a caretaker in an Indian family. The grandfather in the
family slowly develops affection for Dayita and Sudha. The three of
them come back to India.
In Sudha, there is a sense of loss, particularly for her roots and
her bond with her motherland. This provokes in Sudha, a search for
identity. There is a sense of homelessness and a feeling of insecurity
in Sudha. In order to hide her agony and the sense of feeling lonely,
she journeys to America, in search of security. Contrary to her
expectations, Sudha neither finds solace in Anju’s apartment nor feels
secure. Sudha searches for a personal, social and human identity
and hence she personifies the history of her cultural transition.
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In the modern context people strive to belong to a group, to a
nation, to a religion or a community. Conformity to a group results in
a loss of individual identity. An individual clings on to the centre to
forge an identity. One of the most powerful of group identities is that
of the nations. Identifying oneself with one’s nation empowers the
individual. The loss of a nation’s identity results in alienation and
isolation which paves the way for diasporic studies.
The diasporic writers in their attempt to restore a centre either
remain static in the parent culture or totally embrace the alien
culture. Both these attempts end up in an estrangement. This is the
root cause for the alienation and rootlessness of the diaspora.
The characters do not realize that this quest for identity does not
dawn on them suddenly. There is plethora of tension evolved during
this journey to re-invent as is evident in the characters of Anju and
Sudha.
Divakaruni says that her books are partly based on experience
and partly on social observation (Bauer: 1993) Divakaruni strives to
weave such observations with the Indian culture alongside
contemporary American culture. Divakaruni tries to fuse Indian
culture and the daily realities of immigrant life. Mrs. Gupta, a
first-generation Indian immigrant to America is the queen of dreams.
Her daughter Rakhi is born in the United States. Mrs. Gupta has fled
India to escape from the gift that she has been blessed with and to
experience passion and motherhood. The gift of dream-telling proves
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to be inescapable, causing her to help many persons but to remain
distant from her husband and daughter.
Mrs. Gupta dies in a strange accident, bringing the daughter
and father together. The father and the daughter attempt to translate
and understand the dream journals. The paternal love and affection
resolves the indifference found in Rakhi’s relationship with her
musician husband, Sonny. The terrorist attack of 9/11 reveals Rakhi
that her own daughter has the dream-telling gift like her grandmother
and so she must reconcile with that as well. Rakhi is comfortable in
her American life, but she feels a strong connection with her
Indianness.
Rakhi’s love and loyalty weigh in favour of her country of birth,
America. After the death of Mrs. Gupta, the ashes in the urn are
taken to be dissolved in the river. This makes Rakhi profess the
hidden American identity inside her, wrapped in an enticing imagined
India. Rakhi expresses her feelings in the following lines.
If I’d died, I too, would want my remains to become a
part of this land, this water, because there’s a way in
which the geography of one’s childhood makes its way
into one’s bones. (QD 133-34)
In another instance when she sees a group of Indians coming to her
shop she feels she does not belong to them. Rakhi says,
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“The word foreign comes to me again, though I know it’s ironic.
They’re my country men. We share the same skin colour” (QD 194).
A search for identity is manifest in the characters of Divakaruni.
Though born and brought up in India, Anju and Sudha emerge as
independent women. Mrs. Gupta retains her identity as a
dream-teller till her death. Mrs. Gupta creates a space of her own
where none can trespass. Tilo disdains immortality and courts
mortality. Divakaruni’s concern is with the contradictions which her
characters encounter and that which surfaces repeatedly throughout
her novels. In fact, America becomes a symbolic place for the working
out of paradoxes and contradictions that her characters are faced
with.
The female characters of Divakaruni inevitably experience
exclusion and alienation in search of identity. The fragmentation and
alienation of the women characters can well be the result of
Divakaruni’s own immigrant sensibility. The immigrant experience
may be a perennial transplantation in America in which she has lived
in, moved around and has used as backdrops for her fictitious places.
The striking feature of the writings of the Indian diasporic
writers like Divakaruni is alienation, rootlessness, despair, nostalgia,
marginalization, readjustment, assimilation and adoption.
Among these the basic feature of diaspora is the uprooting of the self
from the native land and of settling down elsewhere. Tilo runs a store
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of Indian spices in America. Anju migrates to America in search of a
different lifestyle, which she thinks will offer her freedom and which
will permit her to be herself. In India, in the Chatterjee household,
the Indian culture is practised earnestly; the Indian culture which
always offers women the secondary position. Mrs. Gupta travels to
America in order to continue her dream-telling technique.
These aspiring and ambitious characters uproot themselves from their
cultural moorings and migrate to countries which promise them better
living conditions and comforts.
In the diasporic writings, the journey motif also predominates.
There are journeys over continents, between countries, cities and
localities within the same city. In The Mistress of Spices, Tilo
journeys from the Island of spices to America; Haroun travels back to
India, as America cannot offer him a respectable life; Geeta’s
grandfather travels to America in order to get his granddaughter
married through an arranged marriage. In Sister of My Heart, Anju
journeys to America to live with her computer scientist husband.
In The Vine of Desire, Sudha travels to find peace and solace in
Anju’s apartment in America. In The Queen of Dreams, Mrs. Gupta
travels to America in order to guard her ability of dream-telling.
Home for all these characters is not a quest for spatial identity but a
search for roots. It is also a hunt for self in a world arbitrarily divided
into the white world which is progressive and developed and the
coloured world which is backward.
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Caught between the two worlds -- the one which the immigrants
forsook because it holds a bleak chance and the other which has
failed them, the immigrants stay on as marginal nowhere people,
trying to find solace in the new country of adoption and unable to
discard their home country. This tension is evident in the diasporic
writings of Divakaruni.
The first-generation Indian-Americans are acutely aware of the
apparent cultural differences. For Lalit and Geeta, in The Mistress of
Spices, the family becomes a battlefield, where modernity clashes
with tradition where the Indian culture of Geeta’s grandfather clashes
with the American culture of Geeta and where theory clashes with
practice. American culture becomes the basis for interactions outside
home. At home the first-generation Indian-Americans attempt to
preserve their cultural and religious heritage and expect to live
according to the Indian cultural values. For example, women are
expected to do all the domestic chores as well as seek job to share the
economic burden of the family just like Sunil expects of Anju in
America. However the hierarchies of age and gender patterns based
on traditional Indian values are broken along the lines of compromise:
Sunil allows Anju to bring Sudha from India; single mothers like
Sudha find a living in America; Rakhi, a divorced mother, can also
enjoy the comforts offered to her daughter by her divorced husband
Sonny.
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For second-generation Indian Americans like Geeta, Lalita,
Raven and Rakhi, the awareness of being the in-betweens is
particularly accentuated. They compartmentalize their lives according
to the family and the society in which they live. At home and within
the local community they are governed by the compromised Indian
lifestyle. Conflicts typically arise from the cultural clash between
American Individualism and Indian communitarianism. For example,
Lalita, a second-generation Indian American cannot pursue her
sewing classes; Geeta is pulled up for coming home in the late hours;
Rakhi can neither understand her mother nor her husband because of
the diasporic experience.
The characters portrayed by Divakaruni in the selected novels
undergo the expatriate experience. On analysis it is clear that there is
a search for requirements, traditions, a struggle for cultural conflicts
and a search for identity. There is a voluntary and forceful movement
from their homelands and a search of a lost home. There is a feeling
of rootlessness, alienation and marginalization on the part of the
characters like Tilo, Lalita, Jagjit, Haroun, Geeta, Raven, Anju, Sudha,
Singhji, Sunil, Lalit, Mrs.Gupta, Rakhi, Belle and Rakhi’s father.
These are the predominant characteristics found in the novels of
Divakaruni and this constitutes the diasporic experience of the
novelist.
Being an immigrant herself, a sense of exile gains not only the
perspective which allows Divakaruni to see her home clearly, but she
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also has immediate and pressing comparisons to make. Her novels
deal with the real life question of finding balance. Divakaruni takes
full advantage of her position within the cultural borderlands of India
and the United States to portray the diverse life experiences of South
Asian Americans.
Divakaruni exemplifies the distance between the originating
culture of immigrant parents and the daily lives of their children
raised in America which is part of the second-generation experience.
Divakaruni explores the idea of marriage through such characters like
Anju, Sudha and Geeta. Marriage loses its significance in the evolving
culture of the South Asian Americans. For Sudha it is a choice of
arranged marriage over a love- match; for Geeta it is a choice of
love-match over an arranged marriage. It is one of the most important
examples of the choice of one particular cultural practice over
another. Divakaruni portrays both types of marriage in her novels but
ultimately favours neither. Marriage is a complicated manipulation
between the traditional expectations of immigrant parents of Geeta
and the desire of the second-generation Geeta.
Ramesh and Sudha’s (Sister of My Heart) marriage reveal that
any cultural prerogative about the permanence is discarded in favour
of divorce. Divakaruni’s fiction that features arranged marriage, as in
the case of Anju and Sunil demonstrate how cultural connections
indeed can be sufficient to keep the couple together. Inspite of Sunil’s
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deceit, Anju continues to live in the same apartment, until finally
Sunil leaves the apartment.
Divakaruni in her novels explores the complexities inherent in
the formation of cultural identity for the second-generation immigrant
families in the United States. She underscores the unique situation of
this generation of South-Asian Americans: equally at home and at the
same time homeless. They must navigate the cultural borderlands
between the United States and India and consciously examine their
cultural inheritance.
Divakaruni also reveals the transience of these cultural
borderlands for it is only the second-generation who live in a world so
deeply influenced by the culture of their parent’s homelands while
also so firmly entrenched in the American way of life.
Divakaruni thus anticipates the prevalence of a global identity that
relies upon neither nationality nor ethnicity but personal prerogative:
an identity to be forged by the third-generation and beyond when it
emerges.