Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian-born American writer who explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories and in novels like Jasmine, has died, aged 76.
Mukherjee attended schools in England, Switzerland and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism.
"The narrative of immigration is the epic narrative of this millennium," she wrote in an autobiographical statement for the reference work Contemporary Authors in 2005. In many of her novels and stories, a young woman – shaped, as she was, by a patriarchal culture – strikes out for the unknown, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. In the existential crisis that ensues, a new self emerges – or a series of selves, with multiple answers to the question "Who am I?"
In The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Mukherjee served up the immigrant experience in all its rich variety, told through the voices of newcomers from the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, all of them both daunted and intoxicated by the strange possibilities of life in the United States.
The title character and narrator of Jasmine (1989), a novel that quickly won a place on high school and college reading lists, is a poor Punjabi who makes her way to Florida and undergoes a series of transformations. Taking on a new identity and a new name as she moves from one job to the next, "greedy with wants and reckless from hope," she draws ever closer to the dream of shedding her old identity and achieving the American dream of self-definition.
Bharati Mukherjee was born July 27th, 1940, in Kolkata, where her father, Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, ran a successful pharmaceutical company and supported, in a large compound, an extended family of nearly 50 relatives. Her mother, the former Bina Banerjee, was a homemaker.
Bharati attended an English-style school until she was eight, when her father, after a falling-out with his business partner, took the family abroad. She studied at private schools in London and Basel, Switzerland, for the next three years. When the family returned to Kolkata, she was enrolled in Loreto House.
The world of her childhood was tightly circumscribed. When she left the family compound, she was escorted by bodyguards. Until she left for the United States, she had never attended a party with boys. At the same time, she roamed freely through the vast storehouse of Indian folk tales and epics and made a close study of the endless family dramas around her.
She earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master's degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an MFA in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa.
She married Clark Blaise, a fellow student, in 1963. Besides her husband, she is survived by their son, Bernard; two sisters, Mira Bakhle and Ranu Vanikar; and two granddaughters. "From those years I evolved a credo: Make the familiar exotic (Americans won't recognise their country when I get finished with it) and make the exotic – the India of elephants and arranged marriages – familiar," she wrote in Contemporary Authors.
In 1966 Mukherjee and her husband moved to Montreal, where she taught at McGill University. They moved to Toronto in the late 1970s, but, fed up with the racial tensions she encountered there, they moved again, in 1980, this time to the United States, with Mukherjee firing a parting shot in a blistering essay, "An Invisible Woman," published in the magazine Saturday Night.
By then she had published her first two novels. The Tiger's Daughter (1972), and Wife (1975), taking as her main character a young Bengali woman who rebels against her arranged marriage after moving to New York.
With the story collection Darkness (1985), Mukherjee began to attract critical notice for her discerning portraits of immigrants struggling to cast off the bonds of tradition and remake their lives. In Jasmine, her breakthrough novel, she painted a portrait of a character dear to her heart.
Mukherjee was hired in 1989 to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She then embarked on a series of expansive novels, with multiple plots and generations, starting with The Holder of the World (1993)
Desirable Daughters (2002), which traced the different fortunes of three sisters from Kolkata, was the first in a loosely joined trilogy of novels, the others being The Tree Bride (2004) and Miss New India (2011). Throughout, the restless, hopeful surge of immigration, and the mutability of cultures, gripped her imagination.