MUKHERJEE, BHARATI

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. 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 stories, Darkness (1985), many of the stories, including the acclaimed The World According to Hs, 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) features Third World immigrants to the United States, 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 ancestor who ran off with a Hindu raja. Mukherjee's later works include Wanting America: Selected Stories (1995) and Leave It to Me (1997). 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).