ABSTRACT
Bharati Mukherjee has insisted on being read not as an Indian, or expatriate, writer, but as an immigrant writer, whose literary agenda is to claim the America that is being improvised by newcomers from the Third World. The struggles of immigrant women corresponding to the figure of Jasmine are ultimately misrepresented, for both the consciousness and the trajectory of Mukherjee's heroine have their origins not in peasant Punjab but in an elite postcolonial India. Mukherjee makes much of the fact that Third World immigrants are able to live and compress in one lifetime the development of centuries: hurtling through time, they move from a feudal village to the global metropolis. The latter consciousness also characterizes Mukherjee's memoir Days and Nights in Calcutta, which records, with ironic distance, the painful experience of negotiating identities across various borders of alienation. It is the success of Mukherjee's own investments, literary and otherwise, in America, that Jasmine registers through the narrative consciousness of Jane.
