Quest For Identity And Self Revelation In Chitra Banerjee’s The Mistress Of Spices

Abstract

Writer and poet, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has won numerous honours for her work. She is an author from India, although she now lives in the United States. She makes up her mind to be adamant that women are oppressed in India and the United States. Therefore, her writings cover a wide range of topics, particularly emphasising the challenges faced by South Asian women immigrants. Divakaruni frequently incorporates elements of her own life and experiences into her fiction. Stories about women's lives as immigrants in India during the 1970s and 1980s predominatethe literary firmameter. The Mistress of Spices is one-of-a-kind since it combines prose and poetry in its writing style. This jubilant first novel by the award-winning writer Divakaruni creates an enchanting story on the schism in American identity between the individual and the collective, as noted by Laura Merlin in a review for World Literature Today. She specifically discusses the plight of immigrants, asking how they manage the "shifting stress of desire" inherent in trying to satisfy everyone's requirements (207). To tell her stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni creates a novel method. She chooses a magical realist storyline, which seeks to exploit the seeming contradiction inherent in the bringing together of seemingly disparate elements. Spice Queen, the Queen of Seasonings in her debut novel, Divakaruni blends magical realism with the emerging genre of culinary fiction and the still-simmering alchemy of Indian immigrant life in the United States. Women and the environment are often inextricably linked in cultural ecofeminism's view. It explores how women have a closer connection to the natural world under their biological make-up and social conditioning. As a result, cultural ecofeminism holds that participation in these groups makes women more aware of environmental issues, both sacred and desecrated.