When Bharati Mukherjee was eight,
her family moved to England. They stayed there for
three years before returning to Calcutta where Bina,
Mukherjee's mother, insisted that they have a home
of their own.
After getting her B.A from the University of Calcutta
in 1959 and her M.A. in English and Ancient Indian
Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961. Her
father then agreed that she could attend a two year
creative writing course in the States while he looked
for a good Bengali Brahmin bridegroom for her. He
considered writing to be a harmless activity and believed
that at the end of the two years, she would return
to an arranged marriage and a traditional life.
She came to the United States of America. Having been
awarded a scholarship from the University of Iowa,
earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and
her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in
1969
"My father had no idea, nor did I when got on
that plane to the states that my life would change
and that within a week in Iowa in a woman's dorm I
would find myself..... I had a 2 week courtship with
a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and
a 5 minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the
coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day.
And so I sent a cable to my father saying 'by the
time you get this daddy I'll already be Mrs Blaise!'
And then we had a son about ten months later and that
made up for everything."
Her first novels, The Tiger's Daughter (1971), Wife
(1975) and Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), depict
people caught between two worlds. In 1985 she wrote
Darkness and in 1987 Sorrow and The Terror. After
fourteen years in Canada, she found life as a "dark-skinned,
non-European immigrant to Canada" very hard,
so she moved with her husband to the United States
and took US citizenship. In 1989, Mukherjee won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Middleman
and Other Stories. She is also a winner of the New
York Times Notable Book of the Year award . She has
taught creative writing at Columbia University, New
York University, and and Queens College, and is currently
professor of English at the University of California
at Berkeley.
Major Themes
Mukherjee's works focus on the "phenomenon of
migration, the status of new immigrants, and the feeling
of alienation often experienced by expatriates"
as well as on Indian women and their struggle (Alam
7). Her own struggle with identity first as an exile
from India, then an Indian expatriate in Canada, and
finally as a immigrant in the United States has lead
to her current contentment of being an immigrant in
a country of immigrants (Alam 10).
Mukherjee's works correspond with biographer Fakrul
Alam's catagorization of Mukherjee's life into three
phases. Her earlier works, such as the The Tiger's
Daughter and parts of Days and Nights in Calcutta,
are her attempts to find her identity in her Indian
heritage.
"The Tiger's Daughter" is a story
about a young girl named Tara who ventures back to
India after many years of being away only to return
to poverty and turmoil. This story parallels Mukherjee's
own venture back to India with Clark Blaise in 1973
when she was deeply affected by the chaos and poverty
of Indian and mistreatment of women in the name of
tradition, "What is unforgivable is the lives
that have been sacrificed to notions of propriety
and obedience" (Days and Nights... 217).
Her husband, however, became very intrigued by the
magic of the myth and culture that surrounded every
part of Bengal.; These differences of opinion, her
shock and his awe, are seen in one of their joint
publications, Days and Nights in Calcutta.
The second phase of her writing, according to Alam,
encompasses works such as Wife, the short stories
in Darkness, an essay entitled "An Invisible
Woman," and The Sorrow and the Terror, a
joint effort with her husband. These works originate
in Mukherjee's own experience of racism in Canada,
where despite being a tenured professor, she felt
humiliated and on the edge of being a "housebound,
fearful, affrieved, obcessive, and unforgiving queen
of bitterness" (Mukherjee, qtd. in Alam 10).
After moving back to the United States, she wrote
about her personal experiences. One of her short stories
entitled "Isolated Incidents" explores the
biased Canadian view towards immigrants that she encountered,
as well as how government agencies handled assults
on particular races. Another short story titled "The
Tenant" continues to reflect on her focus
on immigrant Indian women and their mistreatment.
The story is about a divorced Indian woman studying
in the States and her experiences with interracial
relationships. One quotation from the story hints
at Mukherjee's views of Indian men as being too preoccupied
to truly care for their wives and children: "'All
Indian men are wife beaters,' Maya [the narrator]
says. She means it and doesn't mean it."
In Wife, Mukherjee writes about a woman named Dimple
who has been surpressed by such men and attempts to
be the ideal Bengali wife, but out of fear and personal
instability, she murders her husband and eventually
commits suicide. The stories in Darkness further endeavor
to tell similar stories of immigrants and women.
In her third phase, Mukherjee is described as having
accepted being "an immigrant, living in a continent
of immigrants" (M. qtd in Alam 9). She describes
herself as American and not the the hyphenated Indian-American
title:
I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian
origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not because
I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my
whole adult life has been lived here, and I write
about the people who are immigrants going through
the process of making a home here... I write in the
tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia
and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying
that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is
that can define myself in terms of things like my
politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My
affiliation with readers should be on the basis of
what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity
or my race. (Mukherjee qtd. in Basbanes)
Mukherjee continues writing about the immigrant experience
in most of the stories in The Middle Man and Other
Stories, a collection of short stories which won her
the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction,
Jasmine, and essays. These stories explore the
meeting of East and West through immigrant experiences
in the U.S. and Canada along with further describing
the idea of the great melting pot of culture in the
United States.
Jasmine develops this idea of the mixing of the East
and West with a story telling of a young Hindu woman
who leaves India for the U.S. after her husband's
murder, only to be raped and eventually returned to
the position of a caregiver through a series of jobs
(Alam 100). The unity between the First and Third
worlds is shown to be in the treatment of women as
subordinate in both countries.
Her latest works include The Holder of the World,
published in 1993, and Leave It to Me, published in
1997. The Holder of the World is a beautifully written
story about Hannah Easton, a woman born in Massachusetts
who travels to India. She becomes involved with a
few Indian lovers and eventually a king who gives
her a diamond know as the Emperor's Tear. (Alam 120).
The story is told through the detective searching
for the diamond and Hannah's viewpoint. Mukherjee's
focus continues to be on immigrant women and their
freedom from relationships to become individuals.
She also uses the female characters to explore the
spatiotemporal (Massachusetts to India) connection
between different cultures. In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee
tells the story of a young woman sociopath named Debby
DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who abandoned
her. The story reveals her ungrateful interaction
with kind adoptive parents and a vengeful search for
her real parents (described as a murderer and a flowerchild).
The novel also looks at the conflict between Eastern
and Western worlds and at mother-daughter relationships
through the political and emotional topics by the
main characer in her quest for revenge. Candia McWilliam
of The London Review of Books describes Mukherjee
appropriately as "A writer both tough and voluptuous"
in her works.
