Violent and timely, contemporary and historical, true and fantastical, Bharati Mukherjee's work has been a windstorm sweeping up the major flavor of her times. Born into a wealthy, traditional Calcutta family in 1940, Mukherjee was raised and schooled in India, Great...
[more]Violent and timely, contemporary and historical, true and fantastical, Bharati Mukherjee's work has been a windstorm sweeping up the major flavor of her times. Born into a wealthy, traditional Calcutta family in 1940, Mukherjee was raised and schooled in India, Great Britain, and the U.S. (where she has lived since the 1980s). She defines herself as an American writer who works with themes of migration, immigration and the alienation that often attends it, and Indian women's struggles.
Mukherjee's work is intensely plot-driven, and her writing is both concise and rich. Over the course of her career her novels have shifted from an outsider-immigrant perspective to a North American point of view. The 1975 novel "Wife," for example, concerns a traditionally raised Bengali woman's isolation in New York City and her subsequent descent into madness, murder, and suicide. By contrast, "The Holder of the World" (1993) plays with time and culture from an opposite perspective. Here, a young American woman becomes enmeshed in the life of a seventeenth-century relative. She travels to India to track her ancestor, a Puritan American woman who ended up the mistress of an Indian king. This detective/love-story plot uses legend as a trope to address the issues of colonialism and war -- it ambitiously crisscrosses the historical and the contemporary cultures of India and the U.S.
With "Leave It to Me" (1997) Mukherjee further entwines many of the contentious issues that have appeared in previous works. The novel follows the journey of a young American sociopath who has rejected her adoptive parents and is seeking her roots with a vengeance. Mukherjee weaves together Hindu and Greek mythology to explore her character's complex drive to find who she is or, rather, to "become someone else." Her journey charts the battlegrounds between reality versus fantasy, and Eastern versus Western cultures. The densely layered novel also takes on the complexities of mother-daughter relationships and the irresolvable blight of the Vietnam War.
Mukherjee received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. In the '60s she lectured at American universities, then later moved with her husband, Canadian writer Clark Blaise, to Montreal to teach at McGill. After enduring the anti-Asian bigotry and violence that overtook Canada in the '70s, Mukherjee and her husband returned to the U.S. in the '80s. She is a winner of the National Book Critics' Award for fiction.
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