Bharati Mukherjee

• Born: July 27, 1940
• Birthplace: Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India
• Died: January 28, 2017
• Place of death: New York, New York

Identification: Indian-born American teacher and author

Significance:A writer, professor, and forceful speaker on immigration, Mukherjee was best known for her fictional works about Indian immigrants in North America. Through 2011, she published eight novels, several collections of short stories, and a number of nonfictional essays and books, many of which touch on immigration issues.

Born in India in 1940, Bharati Mukherjee was the daughter of a pharmaceutical chemist. At an early age, she demonstrated literary ability. She could read and write by the age of three and decided to be an author by the age of ten. Life in Calcutta meant sharing a home with her father’s extended family, with as many as fifty relatives living in one establishment. In 1947, her family emigrated to the United Kingdom, where she lived for more than three years. After returning to India, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and ancient Indian culture in her home country. She then became an immigrant again, when she went to the United States to earn a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and a doctorate in English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. In 1963, she married Canadian writer Clark Blaise after a two-week acquaintance.

After completing her doctorate in 1969, Mukherjee immigrated to Canada, where she became a naturalized citizen in 1972. Many of her writings describe her years in Canada as a time of discrimination, as she found Canadian citizens generally antagonistic toward Asian immigrants. This view can particularly be seen in her first collection of short stories, Darkness (1985), which echoes the occurrences of ethnic division she observed and underwent while living in Canada.

In 1980, Mukherjee moved to the United States, where she became a permanent resident. She regarded her immigration status in the United States as triumphant and embraced the “melting pot” philosophy that allowed her to become an American citizen in 1987. In becoming a citizen of the United States, she eschewed the idea that she was an “Asian American” or an “Indian American” as racist. Instead, she called herself an American with Bengali Indian origins. Her book of short stories, The Middleman and Other Stories, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988. In 1989, the same year that she published her third and often most-beloved novel, Jasmine, which tells the story of a widowed young Indian woman who makes a new life for herself in the United States, Mukherjee accepted a post in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mukherjee’s work, which includes novels such as The Holder of the World (1993), Leave It to Me (1997), Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004), has often been criticized for its inclusion of immigration issues, and she has challenged the stereotypes of immigrants that she has often seen reinforced in academic and publishing realms. Although her characters are typically female immigrants who have experienced discrimination in some form, her stories provide a powerful survival theme as their characters overcome the handicaps of their foreign backgrounds, experiences, and sorrows to find new directions.

In an attempt to break the stereotype that all Indian immigrants come from the same cultural background, Mukherjee stressed the individuality of each of her characters, rather than the overall immigrant experience. Moreover, rather than allowing herself to be absorbed into the postcolonial tradition, her objective in writing was not only to show that a person can be influenced by past experiences, culture, and beliefs, but also to demonstrate that the present experiences, culture, and beliefs play an integral part of who one will become in the future. To show the realistic span of ideas about immigration, Mukherjee incorporated characters from a range of immigration experiences, including characters who behave as postcolonials and expatriates—holding onto their pasts with nostalgic fervor—as well as characters who embrace a new life despite their race or ethnicity.

In 2011, Mukherjee published her last novel, which is more of a departure from her previous work in its focus on the changes and modernization that have consumed her home country for several years. Miss New India explores the concept of a "new India" through the story of a young woman, Anjali, who leaves the backwater town of Bihar for bigger, promising adventures in the up-and-coming town of Bangalore. Critics largely praised the new work and celebrated the release of another novel from Mukherjee after seven years.

Mukherjee retired from her position at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013 and moved with her husband, Chris Blaise, to New York. She died on January 28, 2017, at the age of seventy-six, at a hospital in Manhattan following complications from rheumatoid arthritis and cardiomyopathy. She is survived by her husband, a son, and two granddaughters.

Bibliography

Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. Twayne, 1996.

Grimes, William. "Bharati Mukherjee, Writer of Immigrant Life, Dies at 76." The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/books/bharati-mukherjee-dead-author-jasmine.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

Kumar, Amitava. Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate. Routledge, 2004.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “American Dreamer. ” Mother Jones, Jan. / Feb. 1997, www.motherjones.com/politics/1997/01/american-dreamer. Accessed on 11 Oct. 2016.

Santhi, P. “Alienation to Assimilation: The Evolution of Bharati Mukherjee’s Writing.” Language in India, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 621–629.

Zhou, Xiaojing, and Samina Najmi. Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. U of Washington P, 2005.