Negotiating feminine autonomy and identity: Diasporic anxieties in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's the Mistress of Spices

S, Swathi Krishna (2014) Negotiating feminine autonomy and identity: Diasporic anxieties in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's the Mistress of Spices. IUP Journal of English Studies. ISSN 0973-3728

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Abstract

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices (1997) explores issues of ethnic autonomy and feminine identity through its protagonist Tilo, an Indian immigrant in America, who is endowed with magical abilities to conjure the power of spices which she uses for healing people at her grocery store in Oakland, California. Tilo's fate comes to represent the complex socio-political debates surrounding cultural assimilation and racial othering in contemporary America on the one hand, and a woman's struggle against Indian tradition and patriarchy, on the other. In order to befit the gender roles prescribed by consumerist America, Tilo frames an exotic identity for herself selling mystical spices and practices from India and accordingly becomes the site of confluence of tradition and modernity in the novel. The chief problematic in the narrative, however, lies in the fact that in America while Tilo is free to help others transcend pain and seek autonomous identities, she herself remains confined by and rooted in Indian patriarchal culture and tradition which wield complete control over her mind and body. The present paper, by employing postcolonial and transnational discourses vis-à-vis diasporic femininity, attempts to explore how Tilo negotiates and subsequently attains an autonomous identity in Divakaruni's novel.

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