In the following brief review of Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, author Abha Prakash Leard writes that Mukherjee is offering the reader a unique, female Hindu bildungroman. As the novel's protagonist, alternately known as Jyoti, Jasmine, or Jane, travels from one circumstance and geographical location to another, so is her inner self travelling the journey of rebirth toward a higher plane.

Despite postcolonial readings of Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, Western critics have not placed in context the pivotal play of migrations, forced and voluntary, literal and figurative, found in the plural female subjectivity of the novel. With the connotations of both dislocation and progress within the tangled framework of the narrator's personal history, journey as metaphor in the novel stands for the ever-moving, regenerating process of life itself. In presenting a woman capable of birthing more than one self during the course of her lifetime, Mukherjee invests her novel...