ABSTRACT
The functionality of violence in Bharati Mukherjee's recent novel Jasmine is complex and ambivalent, as it is in her earlier The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, The Middleman and Other Stories, and even in the nonfictional Days and Nights in Calcutta. Jasmine's journey of self-discovery, taking her from a feudal condition to her migrancy and exile in the West, is marked by violence. Moreover, violence manifests itself not only in social and political but also in psychosexual and psychosocial realms. The novel is an account of Jasmine's coming into her own as a woman, killing in order to live. The important characters in Jasmineare hyperconscious of a species of entropy and seek not so much the fantasy of escape from entropy but, ironically, some form of acceptance, or embrace, of it. That Jasmine is marked for violent transformation is evident in the first words of the novel, which describe a scene of foretelling: an astrologer predicts her early widowhood and subsequent exile.
