bharati mukherjee 1940

8/6/2019 Bharati Mukherjee 1940

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Bharati Mukherjee 1940-

Indian-born American novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, and journalist. See

alsoBharati Mukherjee Contemporary Literary Criticism.

INTRODUCTION

Mukherjee's short stories, which explore the struggles of immigrants living in the United

States and Canada, have been compared to those of V. S. Naipaul and Bernard Malamud

for their ironic and penetrating literary style. Mirroring her own life as an Indianimmigrant to Canada and later the United States, many of Mukherjee's characters are

Indian women who are victims of racism and sexism, often driven to desperate acts of

violence after realizing they can fit into neither the culture of the West nor the Indiansociety they left behind. As Mukherjee's career has developed, her stories have expanded

to include the narratives of refugees and immigrants from other Asian countries as well as

the voices of long-settled European Americans and Canadians. Her later stories showincreasing optimism at the possibility of successful integration as her characters learn that

rebuilding their lives and identities allows them greater personal opportunities and a

chance to participate in fostering a more inclusive society and culture.

Biographical Information

In 1940, Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, India, to wealthy Brahmin parents, and was

brought up in a large extended household of over fifty family members. Mukherjee'sparents and their three daughters moved to London in 1948 to escape the civil unrest

brought on by India's independence and partition. There the girls attended school and

became fluent in English. In 1951 the family returned to Calcutta, and Mukherjeecontinued her English-language instruction at the Loretto Convent School, a missionary

institution run by Irish nuns. In 1959 she received a B.A. in English from the University

of Calcutta; two years later she earned a Master's degree in English and Ancient IndianCulture from the University of Baroda.

In 1961 Mukherjee received a scholarship to study writing at the University of Iowa's

Writer's Workshop, where she first earned a Masters of Fine Arts and then a Ph.D. While

at Iowa she met the Canadian writer Clark Blaise, whom she married in 1963 against thewishes of her Bengali family, who had arranged for her to be married to an Indian nuclear

physicist. In 1966 the couple moved to Montreal, where Mukherjee taught English at

McGill University. Three years later they moved to Toronto with their two small childrenwhere Mukherjee, now a Canadian citizen, began work on her first novel. The Tiger's

Daughteris a loosely autobiographical story about an East Indian immigrant who is

unable to adjust to North American culture, but who at the same time is painfully aware

that she will never again belong in the culture she has left behind.

In 1972, a year after publication ofThe Tiger's Daughter, Mukherjee and Blaise went to

live for a year in Calcutta, where they kept independent journals that were later published
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under the titleDays and Nights in Calcutta. Mukherjee's entries reveal her to be, like the

protagonist in The Tiger's Daughter, ambivalent about her return home after living in

the West for ten years: the innocence of her childhood is shattered, and she decries thelack of opportunity offered to women in her native land. The return to Canada was not

much better, however, and the personal hostility and racial prejudice Mukherjee

experienced there became material for her 1975 novel, Wife. Citing Canadian hostilitytoward Asian immigrants, Mukherjee and her family moved in 1980 to the United States,

a culture Mukherjee found to be less threatened by non-European newcomers.

Mukherjee's popularity as a writer increased dramatically with the publication of her first

volume of short stories,Darkness, in 1985. A second collection, The Middleman and

Other Stories, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1989 Mukherjee expanded

one of the Middleman stories into the critically-acclaimed novelJasmine, about an Indian

refugee who is empowered by the trials of assimilation. A fourth novel dealing withissues of immigration and resulting identity crises, The Holder of the World, was

published in 1993.

In addition to her fiction, Mukherjee has published several academic works on Indian

politics and society. In 1987 she and Blaise co-authored a second book, The Sorrow and

the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air Indian Tragedy, an examination of the horror

and latent racism exposed by the 1985 airline crash that killed hundreds of Canadian

citizens, most of whom were of Indian descent. Today Mukherjee teaches English at theUniversity of California at Berkeley where she remains a vocal proponent of the rights of

women and immigrants.

Major Works of Short Fiction

Mukherjee's first volume of short fiction,Darkness, is a collection of twelve short storiesabout the difficulties that Indian immigrants have in adjusting to life in Canada and the

United States. Not only must these outsiders deal with language issues and other culturaldifferences, they often become the victims of racial prejudice and violence that limit their

freedom and opportunity. Racism in Canada is depicted as severe and overt, but more

subtle racial discrimination in the United States leaves immigrants with similarly brokendreamsin Mukherjee's words, with broken identities and discarded languages. As the

title of the collection implies, the stories are bleak and offer an angry condemnation of

the hospitality of the West.

In her second volume of short fiction, The Middleman and Other Stories, Mukherjee

expands her narrative voice to explore not only the lives of immigrants but also those ofEuropean Americans who have been brought into contact with cultures about which they

have little knowledge. The tone of the second collection is clearly lighter than that ofDarkness. The characters in Middleman learn that it is an opportunity as well as a curse

to have to remake their lives and their personal identities, but they see also that they can

play an active part in the new culture that is slowly coming to accept them. The hopefuland often celebratory tone of these stories represents a marked development in the themes

of Mukherjee's immigrant tales.


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Critical Reception

The publication ofDarkness in 1985 earned Mukherjee far greater critical acclaim than

had either of her first two novels. Critics applauded Mukherjee's vivid and realistic

portrayals of Indian immigrant life. The portrayal of racial hatred and violence in Canada,

combined with Mukherjee's introductory comment that Canadian xenophobia had causedher to immigrate to the United States, received fire from Canadian commentators, who

declared that her optimistic portrayal of the United States was due more to her own

personal sense of assimilation than any facts about the racial climates in the twocountries. While some critics dismissed the stories inDarkness as vengeful attacks on

Canada that were most suitable for magazine publication, the majority of critics hailedDarkness as a rich exploration of homelessness and loss of identity in the tradition ofauthors such as Naipaul and Malamud. Her focus on female protagonists was welcomed

by women who recognized in Mukherjee's stories unusual empathy for the monumental

struggles faced by immigrant women.

The Middleman and Other Stories won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award forbest fiction and cemented Mukherjee's position as an important literary figure in the

United States. While some critics claimed that her privileged upbringing in India made

her unable to understand the plight of impoverished immigrants, most critics applaudedMukherjee's narrative expansion to include Caribbean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and other

minority voices from diverse social backgrounds. Several stories are narrated by

European Americans who are forced for the first time to adjust their own lives andtraditions because of relationships they form with foreigners. In all these stories

Mukherjee displays a keen ear for American vernacular and presents subtle and often

humorous descriptions of cultural barriers and misunderstandings. Critics were also

enthusiastic about the sense of hope that make the stories ofThe Middleman and Other

Stories distinct from those inDarkness, and these new stories have been called a literarybridge of understanding between North Americans and its newest Asian immigrants.

bharati mukherjee 1940

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