Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee
Speaking at the US Ambassador's residence in Israel, June 11, 2004
Born	(1940-07-27) July 27, 1940 Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Professor, novelist, essayist, short story writer, author, fiction writer, non-fiction writer
Nationality	India, United States, Canada
Genre	Novels, short stories, essays, travel literature, journalism.
Subjects	Post-colonial Anglophone fiction, Asian American fiction, autobiographical narratives, memoirs, american culture, immigration history, reformation and nationhood in the '90s, multiculturalism vs. mongrelization, fiction writing, autobiography writing, and the form and theory of fiction.
Notable works	Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee (born July 27, 1940) is an Indian-born American writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She later travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and subsequently earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.

After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night. Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). They also wrote the 1987 work, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182).

Career

In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley.

Mukherjee has gone on record that she considers herself an American writer, and not an Indian expatriate writer. In a 1989 interview with Amanda Meer, Mukherjee said: "I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America."

Bibliography

Novels

• The Tiger's Daughter (1971)
• Wife (1975)
• Jasmine (1989)
• The Holder of the World (1993)
• Leave It to Me (1997)
• Desirable Daughters (2002)
• The Tree Bride (2004)
• Miss New India (2011)

Short story collections

• Darkness (1985)
• The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
• A Father
• The Management of Grief

Memoir

• Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977, with Clark Blaise)

Non-fiction

• The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987, with Clark Blaise)
• Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991)
• Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992)

Awards

• 1988: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Middleman and Other Stories).

See also

• Indian English literature

Related Novels

The Tortilla Curtain – T.C.Boyle

Further reading

• Abcarian, Richard and Marvin Klotz. "Bharati Mukherjee." In Literature: The Human Experience, 9th edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006: 1581–1582.
• Alter, Stephen and Wimal Dissanayake (ed.). "Nostalgia by Bharati Mukherjee." The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories. New Delhi, Middlesex, New York: Penguin Books, 1991: 28–40.
• Kerns-Rustomji, Roshni. "Bharati Mukherjee." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, Vol. E. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006: 2693–2694.
• Majithia, Sheetal. "Of Foreigners and Fetishes: A Reading of Recent South Asian American Fiction", Samar 14: The South Asian American Generation (Fall/Winter 2001): 52–53.
• New, W. H., ed. "Bharati Mukerjee." In Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002: 763–764.
• Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.). "Bharati Mukherjee: The Management of Grief." Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005: 91–108.

External links

• India: In Word and Image
• Bharati Mukherjee entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia

Biographies

• Voices from the Gaps
• Emory
• BBC World Service
• Edwardsly
• AMSAW
• Biography by Jaideep at the Wayback Machine (archived October 27, 2009)

Interviews

• PBS Interview with Bill Moyers
• Jouvert Interview
• Beatrice Interview 1997
• Powells Interview (April 2002)
• A conversation with Bharati Mukherjee (February 2003)
• Global India Newswire interview (January 2012)
• Meer, Ameena: Bharati Mukherjee. (Fall 1989)

Misc.

• BBC World Service
• A Declaration of Independence
• Further links