Beauty and the Limits of National Belonging in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

Does beauty come under the jurisdiction of the nation-state?

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

Halfway through Jasmine (1989), Bharati Mukherjee's seminal immigrant novel about becoming American, the eponymous, illegal immigrant heroine stumbles upon an underground transnational beauty economy—the importing and sorting of rural Indian village women's hair. Jasmine watches as her guardian, Professorji, measures and sorts the switches of hair in a restaurant basement in a South Asian immigrant ghetto in Flushing, New York:

The hair came in great bundles from the middlemen in villages as small as Hasnapur [Jasmine's home village] all over India. . . . Every weekday Professorji sat from eight o'clock till six on a kitchen ladder-stool in a room he rented in the basement of the Khyber Bar BQ measuring and labeling the length and thickness of each separate hair.

Junk hair he sold to wigmakers. Fine hair to instrument makers. Eventually, scientific instruments and the U.S. Defense Department. It was no exaggeration to say that the security of the free world, in some small way, depended on the hair of Indian village women.

(151-52)

Indian women's hair is exportable as an ingredient for either feminine beauty products (wigs) or the technologies of U.S. national security. Synecdoches of Indian village women's bodies, the bundles of hair figure as racialized and gendered fetishes in the transnational trafficking of bodies and goods between India and the U.S. The hair circulates between a dominant U.S. economy and an Indian economy about to enter into market neoliberalism during the final years of the cold war.¹ Professorji observes that this transnational economy vitally depends upon Indian village women's allegedly more naturally beautiful hair. He tells Jasmine that Indian women's hair—free of "shampoos, gels, dyes, and permanents" (153)—contains a "virginity and innocence" (153) that American women's hair lacks.² Professorji then invites Jasmine, once an Indian village woman, to sell her hair to him. Doing so would allow Jasmine to purchase a forged green card so that she could seek employment and "feel safe" in the highly policed immigrant space of Flushing (148).

The promise of feeling safe, however, contains an ironic twist. On the one hand, the prospect of selling her beautiful hair offers Jasmine a way of securing economic and legal (resident alien) status within the U.S. during the anti-immigrant fervor of the 1980s.³ On the other hand, Jasmine's observations about the Defense department point to her recognition that the beautiful hair of Indian women also helps to secure U.S. national borders against the illegal immigrants whose labor, body, and body parts are required for such fortification. Thus while Jasmine's beautiful hair might afford her a provisional feeling of freedom and mobility within the nation, it might also serve, quite literally, as the raw material for the imperial nation-state's biopolitical surveillance. The valorization of Indian female beauty in this scene constellates a set of tensions around migration, mobility, citizenship, and belonging for Jasmine. These tensions and contradictions exceed the critical framework of liberal multicultural inclusion within which Jasmine, as a representative text of late-twentieth-century South Asian immigrant experience, is often positioned.⁴

This essay argues that Jasmine repeatedly encounters the material limits of Indian and U.S. national belonging through a set of encounters with her beauty. Even in the absence of a narrative explicitness around her beauty, Jasmine's national status depends upon her gendering, racialization, and sexualization such that these categorizing processes cannot be disaggregated from her categorization as beautiful. Through various attachments to forms of national inclusion and exclusion, racialized beauty in Jasmine complicates a dominant post-Enlightenment view of beauty. In this view, beauty is regarded solely as a redemptive force which, for those deemed lucky enough to possess it, facilitates social advancement through its alignment with liberal democratic ideals such as empowerment and freedom. Such liberal ideals traffic in a fetishistic logic of beauty, since the conferral or possession of...