Realism in Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Divakaruni’s The Mistress Of Spices: Two Renderings of Contemporary Asian American Immigrant Experience

The present article attempts an analysis of two novels written by contemporary South Asian- American writers: Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Both texts are literary explorations of an Indian immigrant experience in the US in the final decades of the 20th century, yet they do not render this experience in a strictly realistic fashion. This article is aimed to compare the two novels in terms of their realism, with a special emphasis placed on the roles which the departures from the conventionally understood realism play in the authors’ designs.