Magical Realism in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

Abstract

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is an Indian novelist, who is settled in America. She is a Co-founder and former president of Maitri, a helpline founded in 1991 for South Asian Women dealing with domestic abuse. Divakaruni's first novel, The Mistress of Spices (1997) is distinct in that it blends prose and poetry. Most of Divakaruni’s works are autobiographical. Set in the background of Bay area of California, her novel deals with the immigrant experience which is an important theme in today's world. In The Mistress of Spices also, she focuses on the problems of the immigrants.  Divakaruni's first novel, The Mistress of Spices, is an experiment in magical realism which combines Hindu myths, fables and superstitions with contemporary American social problems including inter-racial tension, ethnic identity, immigrant assimilation, spiritual emptiness in the lives of rich Indian, teenage rebellion, and angst, forbidden inter-racial romances and abusive and broken marriages. The term "Magical realism' was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, who considered magical realism as an art category. To him, it was a way of responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality. In The Mistress of Spices, there is the mingling of the reality and fantasy and then the time shifts now and then between distant past of Tilo in a far away distant world and the present modern America where she leads her life as a mistress. Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically magical realism is illustrated in an inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural and western and indigenous. It is also seen in The Mistress of Spices because Tilo who is born in a remote village in India then lives in Oakland, California. Thus, western and indigenous also come along with that. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing and change. In the novel also, one can see the mixing of the past and the present, and reality and fantasy. One can also see a change in the life of Tilo from the world of fantasy to the world of reality.