Pre-Ordainment vs. Freewill (with some A-list Starpower)

            Picture this: Tom Cruise balances atop a speeding vehicle that is somewhere between Lexus and UFO, barreling along a high-rise through futuristic Washington, D.C.  Suddenly, the road hits a waterfall-like cascade and the heavy flow of Jetson-esque automobiles drops ninety-degrees downward.  Tom Cruise hangs on for dear life and somehow musters a daring leap off of the gravity-defying freeway, through a window, and into a yoga studio where contortionists hobble around like malformed tarantulas.  Cruise then scales a fire escape to elude airborne, jetpack-equipped cops, managing to “ride” one of them through a tenement ceiling, and escapes to find himself face-to-face with his nemesis: tattooed, cigarette-puffing Irish badass, Colin Farrell. 

Our beloved Scientologist car-surfs 2054 D.C.

If the scene I’ve just described seems in no way related to 20^th Century Feudalist India, prepare to be educated.  Phillip K. Dick and Spielberg buffs might recognize Tom Cruise’s epic high-speed chase as a clip from 2002’s Minority Report (a film by Spielberg based on P.K. Dick’s novel of the same name).   Such fans also might recall the theme of predetermination in the film, as Cruise’s character must escape Farrell to prove himself innocent of a murder that futuristic technology has wrongfully predicted he will commit.  This space-age legal system is a product of three precogs, or drugged-up human psychics, whose prophetic visions of murders-to-come are transmitted onto police computers to halt killers before they can carry out their crimes.  The film is a battleground for the classic face-off between freewill and fate, with the notion of man’s ability to shape his own destiny pitted against the idea that every event is predetermined.  Here’s where India comes in: while it lacks the action-packed car chases (and Colin Farrell), Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine similarly showcases a character’s struggle to decide her own fate in the face of traditions that preach a predetermined path. 

Mukherjee’s story tells of an Indian immigrant living in America and reinventing herself in stark contrast to the traditions of her homeland.  Jasmine’s conflict with fate stems from the heavily-traditional Indian structure into which she is born.  In the rural village of Hasnapur, the Hindu belief of preordainment hovers over residents, as every individual’s lifeline is seen as one minute puzzle piece in the grand masterwork of Brahma.  A seer tells Jasmine at an early age that she will be an exiled widow, and she spends much of her early life combating the notion that “what is to happen will happen.”  Pages 58-61 hold particular significance in the scheme of this argument, as Jasmine acknowledges both sides of the coin.  In conversation with New Yorker Taylor, Jasmine presents the Hindu theology:  “The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down.  When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment” (59).  Taylor dismisses this belief as archaic and discouraging, citing the feeling of “total futility” that occurs when considering a miniscule occurrence a person’s whole reason for living.  Jasmine, however, seemingly expressing confidence in the nay- saying astrologist for the first time in the novel, counters with a positive spin on preordainment.  “The incentive [of life]… is to treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God.  Everything you do, if you’re a physicist or a caregiver, is equally important in the eye of God” (61).

It’s important to note that the astrologer from the novel’s first pages seems to accurately predict Jasmine’s fate.  After marrying an ambitious Indian man and planning to move with him to the United States, Jasmine’s new husband is murdered by radicals in an Indian bazaar.  Rather than fester with grief in her mother’s village hut, Jasmine recruits her brothers to doctor false papers for her, and she leaves for America—her “exile.”  However, it is at this point, somewhere in transition between East and West, that Jasmine ceases to be a passive stepping-stool—an “assignment”—in the divine plan of a Hindu god.  Perhaps most telling are the words that open the novel in describing her encounter with the astrologer: “Lifetimes ago” (3).  Jasmine considers her experiences growing up in India the events of a different life.  In fact, her symbolic name changes (I count three) all seem to roughly mark new lives, as with each new identity she tightens her grip on the reigns that direct her course. 

As a child and teen in her home village of Hasnapur, she is Jyoti, the intelligent and rambunctious girl who only slightly defies the grain.  She is most certainly different within the context of the cattle-like way of life that women in Hasnapur live, as is evidenced by her ambition to become a doctor and her brave offensive against a rabid dog (51; 56).  However, Jyoti is still a product of rigid Hindu society, a submissive servant to man and to tradition.  Upon marrying Prakash, she is given the name Jasmine, and begins to assume his more modern values: independence, equality, empowerment.  Upon arriving in the United States, however, it is clear that she continues to deem her life’s path an “assignment,” as she decides against suicide in favor of fulfilling her mission after being raped.  When she falls in love with Taylor, she becomes Jase, and for the first time commits to change on her own.  “I changed because I wanted to.  To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, [is] to be a coward,” she wisely remarks (185).  This comment is in absolute contrast to the centuries-old structure that her Indian family follows, as she now sees diverting from tradition as a sign of strength.  She demonstrates this further in her active decision to leave Taylor and Manhattan, and move to Iowa.  Here she becomes Jane, partner of Bud Rippelmeyer, and further distances herself from the past.  She is more American than ever, and one would hardly deem her a “widow”—Jane is content, loved, and free, with nary a mention of Prakash.  She is free, dismissing the idea of acting in correlation with astrology and the cosmos. 

Whether or not Jane sees her life as part of the “vast scale of Brahma” is unclear.  Pages 58-61 certainly demonstrate the value she holds in treating every event in life as if it’s significant to God.  Personally, I find these pages to hold the novel’s strongest argument in favor of this way of thinking: “Why shouldn’t our mission be infinitesimal?  Aren’t all lives, viewed that way, equally small?  Only if we think of ‘assignment’ as an important mission, something historical, was Pitaji (Jasmine’s late father) a man unfulfilled” (60).  Jasmine learns to use predetermination as a positive rather than a limiting factor.  Unlike the shallow character Dada from her village, she does not study the stars or Hindu doctrines as courses of action.  Instead, she makes her own decisions, independent of anyone but herself, and achieves a lifetime (or lifetimes) rich with experiences that few, if any, of her fellow villagers dare to seek.  While Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report introduces the concept of pre-ordainment as a dangerous concept that can destroy society when people become obsessed with what’s “meant to be,” Jasmine simply focuses on living.  I wonder what Scientologists believe on the subject?