Rewriting the West(ern): Shane, Jane, and Agricultural Change in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

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  • MBMatt Burkhart
    Matt Burkhart
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Abstract
R e w r i t i n g t h e W e s t ( e r n ) : S h a n e , J a n e , a n d A g r i c u l t u r a l C h a n g e in B h a r a t i M u k h e r j e e ’s J a s m in e M a t t B u r k h a r t Early in Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel, Jasmine, the narrator, whom I’ll refer to as J, remarks that Shane (1949), one of the first English-language texts she encountered, is “about an American village much like Punjab” (40). This observation is but one of many details that invite reading Jasmine as a narrative of the New West, which, in this instance, can refer to an American West undergoing dramatic demographic changes or to the New Occident, in which diasporic movements from the so-called Third World are also causing substantial shifts in the cultural composition of occidental nations.1 Mukherjee’s references to Shane set up parallels between the traveling gunfighter’s interventions in the shifting nineteenth-century western American economy and J ’s experience as a witness to the late twentieth-century changes to her native region of Punjab, which was beset by Partition in 1947, then by prolonged droughts and the workings of U S agribusiness during the “Green Revolution” of the late 1960s. J ’s eventual move to Baden, Iowa, by way of Florida and New York City, allows her to develop rela­ tionships with rural Euro-Americans who are enduring the twilight of the American family farm as it falls prey to drought, predatory multina­ tional agribusiness, and ambitious developers who would prefer verdant golf courses and stylish condos to hogs and soybeans. Earlier critics of Mukherjee’s work, including Debjani Banerjee and Gurleen Grewal, have noted the intertextual significance of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations in Mukherjee’s novel, relegating mention of Shane to brief asides (Banerjee 167, 169, 170, Grewal 193).2 Further, Banerjee critiques Jasmine’s ahistoricity, stating that “Mukherjee’s failure to contextualize the historical and political events of India arises from her inability to perceive the complex workings of postcolonial and neocolonial forces” (Banerjee 162). Yet, through references to Shane and representations of agricultural communities in India and Iowa, Mukherjee invites us to read Jasmine as dramatizing the cultural impacts of globalization in ways that W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e 43.1 (S p r in g 2 0 0 8 ): 5 -2 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 reveal her measured incorporation of historical detail into a work of fic­ tion. Whether those effects are manifest in the social upheavals result­ ing from the Green Revolution in India or in the struggles of small U S farmers who are getting squeezed out by corporate agribusiness and by developers’ desires to transform American sites of labor and production into zones of recreation, Mukherjee’s novel represents how neocolonial forces, such as multinational corporations and the World Bank, are reshaping the planet to meet the desires of big capital. Further, her rep­ resentations of Bud Ripplemeyer, a rural banker facing tough decisions regarding which farming enterprises to finance, humanize the banking process, which might otherwise be rendered faceless and conspiratorial. Mukherjee’s references to Shane ultimately call attention to the ways that late twentieth-century agricultural “development” and migration are imbued with complexities unrepresented in the more starkly drawn worlds of Jack Schaefer’s 1949 and Shane’s 1889. Mukherjee’s intertextual appropriation of Shane invites readings by way of Mary Louise Pratt’s theories of “transculturation,” which indicate “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6). As Banerjee rightly points out, J ’s relative distaste for British novels...

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