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 ).
Author
Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-born award winning American writer who explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories and in novels like Jasmine and Desirable Daughters. Ms. Mukherjee, a native of Calcutta, attended schools in England, Switzerland and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa. After years of short-term academic appointments, Ms. Mukherjee was hired in 1989 to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Bharati Mukherjee died on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Manhattan. She was 76.
