Culture as a Determinant of Personality: A study of Identity, Gender, and Diasporic Transformation in the Selected Novels of Divakaruni

Abstract

This study examines in human life culture as a determinant of personality through the lens of identity, gender, and diasporic transformation in writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's selected novels. Author Divakaruni's fiction consistently portrays Indian women navigating the trauma between inherited cultural values and the demands one’s own demands of western life Making her work a rich site for exploring how culture shapes one’s selfhood. Drawing Novels such as The Mistress of Spices, Sister of my heart, Queen of dreams, oleander Girl, and Before we visit the God, The palace of illusion, this research investigates how one’s personality is not a fixed, innate structure but a fluid construct continuously negotiated through cultural context, migration, and generational change. This study organized three interlinked concerns.

The study first examines identity formation, looking at how characters internalize, resist, or reinterpret the cultural norms handed down through family, tradition, and homeland. It then turns to gender as a culturally constructed category, tracing how Divakaruni's heroines confront patriarchal expectations around sexuality, marriage, and autonomy — expectations that shift depending on whether the setting is Indian, diasporic, or hybrid. A third strand addresses diasporic transformation, drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and the third space, alongside Stuart Hall's account of cultural identity as production rather than fixed essence. Through close textual analysis, the study argues that Divakaruni portrays selfhood as culturally contingent and relational — shaped by the friction between tradition and modernity, homeland and host land, self and community.

Study argues that the diasporic people, in it women are not simply a victim of passive trapped between varied cultures. Instead, women portrayed as an active in every single individua who shapes their identity through memory, negotiation, and adaptation. Divakaruni's novels shows that identity is fixed not constantly evolving. By presenting culture, gender, and as fluid the self-changing, the research contributes to postcolonial feminist criticism and diasporic studies both. The study focuses on culture, personality, identity, gender, and diaspora.