Mukherjee, Bharati

▪ American author

born July 27, 1940, Calcutta, India

      Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer whose work reflects Indian culture and immigrant experience.

      Mukherjee was born into a wealthy Calcutta family. She attended an anglicized Bengali school from 1944 to 1948. After three years abroad, the family returned to India. Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and the University of Baroda (M.A., 1961). She then entered the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, earning an M.F.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1969. From 1966 to 1980 she lived in Montreal, which she found provincial and racist. She then moved to the United States in 1980 and began teaching at the university level. She became a U.S. citizen in 1989 and that year accepted a position teaching postcolonial and world literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

      Mukherjee's work features not only cultural clashes but undercurrents of violence. Her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter (1972), tells of a sheltered Indian woman jolted by immersion in American culture, then again shocked by her return to a violent Calcutta. Wife (1975) details the descent into madness of an Indian woman trapped in New York City by the fears and passivity resulting from her upbringing. In Mukherjee's first book of short fiction, Darkness (1985), many of the stories, including the acclaimed “The World According to Hsü,” are not only indictments of Canadian racism and traditional Indian views of women but also sharp studies of the edgy inner lives of her characters. The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) centres on immigrants in the United States who are from developing countries, which is also the subject of two later novels, Jasmine (1989) and The Holder of the World (1993). The latter tells of a contemporary American woman drawn into the life of a Puritan (Puritanism) ancestor who ran off with a Hindu (Hinduism) raja.

      Mukherjee's later works include Wanting America: Selected Stories (1995) and Leave It to Me (1997), which traces the journey of an American woman abandoned in India as a child and her return to her native land. Desirable Daughters (2002) attracted considerable acclaim for its intricate depictions of Indian caste relations and the immigrant experience of reconciling disparate worldviews. Mukherjee delved further into the family history of the characters from that novel in The Tree Bride (2004), broaching issues of the time-spanning ramifications of colonialism.

      With her husband, Clark Blaise, Mukherjee wrote Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), an account of their 14-month stay in India, and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987). Mukherjee also wrote several works of social analysis, including Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991), an assessment of leadership trends in West Bengal.

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