Understanding Bharati Mukherjee

UNDERSTANDING

BHARATI MUKHERJEE

UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

Also of Interest

Understanding Martin Amis, by James Diedrick

Understanding John Edgar Wideman, by D. Quentin Miller

Understanding Louise Erdrich, by Seema Kurup

Understanding Diane Johnson, by Carolyn A. Durham

Understanding Edward P. Jones, by James W. Coleman

Understanding Vladimir Nabokov, by Stephen Jan Parker

Understanding Gloria Naylor, by Margaret Earley Whitt

Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, by Greg Johnson

Understanding Adrienne Rich, by Jeannette E. Riley

Understanding Susan Sontag, by Carl Rollyson

Understanding John Updike, by Frederic Svoboda

UNDERSTANDING

BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Ruth Maxey

© 2019 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-64336-000-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-001-0 (ebook)

Front cover photograph © Miriam Berkley

www.miriamberkley.com

For Olly, one in 7.5 billion

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Understanding Bharati Mukherjee

Chapter 2

India versus America: The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife, and Days and Nights in Calcutta

Chapter 3

Canada in Mukherjee’s 1980s Work: Darkness and The Sorrow and the Terror

Chapter 4

Immigration to the United States: The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine

Chapter 5

Mukherjee’s 1990s Writing: The Holder of the World and Leave It to Me

Chapter 6

Novels for the Twenty-First Century: Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride, and Miss New India

Notes

Bibliography

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.

As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, "the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed." Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.

In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have completed this book without the research leave granted me by the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham, U.K. I would also like to acknowledge the intellectual and emotional support given to me by several colleagues and friends: Celeste-Marie Bernier, Susan Billingham, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Paul McGarr, Judie Newman, Helen Oakley, Gillian Roberts, Maria Ryan, and Robin Vandome. I am grateful to Hugh Stevens for originally suggesting I write this book, and to Sinéad Moynihan for encouraging me to approach the University of South Carolina Press. In May 2016 I was privileged to speak at the History, Memory, Grief conference at McMaster University in Canada. This exceptional event, commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Air India Flight 182 bombing in June 1985, was organized by Chandrima Chakraborty; and it provided vital inspiration for chapter 3.

I am very thankful to my mother, Carole, and to my sister, Margaret, for their love and moral support. I reserve particular gratitude for my father, Robert, who really went the extra mile to help me: reading the manuscript, making valuable editorial suggestions, helping with the bibliography, and offering crucial advice at difficult moments in the writing and research process. Finally, I wish to thank my beautiful children, Rebecca and Joe, for all the joy and love they have given me since I began writing this book; and my husband, Olly, a wonderful man whose love and belief in me over the past twenty years have made all the difference in the world.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee was an important, bold, pioneering American writer. Born in Calcutta, India¹ on July 27, 1940 to Sudhir Lal Mukherjee and Bina (née Chatterjee), a Bengali Brahmin couple, the young Bharati—the middle of three daughters—enjoyed a privileged early life. Mukherjee’s father was a biochemist who ran a successful pharmaceutical company and supported a wide network of some fifty relatives all based within the same house in Ballygunge, south Calcutta. A precociously intelligent child, Mukherjee was always highly literate, stimulated by her parents to read and study. Consuming books in a quiet corner was often a refuge from the claustrophobic demands of traditional Indian joint family living, and she began writing stories as a young child. Mukherjee was inspired by the storytelling of her paternal grandmother and her mother. Indeed, she consistently paid tribute to Bina, who proudly defended and encouraged Mukherjee and her two sisters, Mira and Ranu, against a patriarchal backdrop of ridicule from Bina’s older, female in-laws for having borne Sudhir no sons.

Mukherjee and her immediate family moved to London in 1948, living there and also in Liverpool and Switzerland until 1951. When they returned to Calcutta they lived apart from the extended family; and Mukherjee attended the exclusive Loreto House convent school, receiving a traditional Anglophone education in which she was taught by Irish nuns to dismiss her Indian heritage in favor of European and specifically British cultural models. She attended the University of Calcutta, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1959, before getting an M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961. That same year Mukherjee arrived in the United States and studied at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she produced a thesis titled The Shattered Mirror, a collection of short stories about Calcutta inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) with each tale carefully arranged as to epiphanies.² In a career spanning more than forty years she went on to produce a total of eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and articles.

Sudhir—often described by Mukherjee as a benign patriarch—believed his beautiful, talented daughter would return to marry a Bengali Brahmin groom of her father’s choice and indulge in genteel scribbling from within a seemly traditional marriage. But Mukherjee dared to defy his expectations, marrying Clark Blaise (1940–) in 1963, following a whirlwind romance. Blaise was a fellow student at Iowa, a white Canadian of American upbringing who also went on to become a respected writer. Theirs was both a creative meeting of minds and a long and devoted union that produced two sons, Bart Anand (1964–2015) and Bernard Sudhir (1967–). The marriage ended with Mukherjee’s death at the age of seventy-six in January 2017.

Mukherjee earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa in 1969, having taken up an academic post at McGill University, Montreal, in 1966. Her doctoral dissertation concerned the use of Indian mythology in two novels: E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922). In the 1970s, the Blaises lived in India on two occasions: in Calcutta from 1972 to 1973 and in New Delhi from 1976 to 1977. During this decade Mukherjee produced two novels, The Tiger’s Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975), as well as the memoir, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), cowritten with Blaise. Mukherjee stayed in Canada, where she became a citizen, until 1980 when the strain of white Canadian racism toward its so-called visible minorities or communities of color became too great for Mukherjee. This racial discrimination impacted Mukherjee, especially after the family’s move to Toronto where Blaise joined York University. Mukherjee explored these distressing experiences in her autobiographical essay, An Invisible Woman (1981). Happily settled in Canada by then, Mukherjee’s uprooting her family and leaving behind the professional and financial security of her Canadian life was a brave and painful move. It was also richly formative for Mukherjee. Although it resulted in a precarious lifestyle of short-term teaching posts at a range of U.S. universities and colleges, and periods of separation from her husband and sons, it also liberated Mukherjee to pursue her true material creatively³: non-European immigration to the United States, following the historic moment in 1965 when immigration legislation was liberalized. In the United States, Mukherjee attempted to do justice to the drama and excitement of that wave of migration, publishing two short story collections, Darkness (1985), and The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)—for which she won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, the first naturalized American citizen to do so. Blaise and she also coauthored The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, a nonfiction study published in 1987. In 1989, Mukherjee’s third novel, Jasmine, was published. She became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, adopting San Francisco as her main American home and not retiring until 2013. New York City also became a long-term base.

Mukherjee published five more novels—The Holder of the World (1993), Leave It to Me (1997), Desirable Daughters (2002), The Tree Bride (2004), and Miss New India (2011)—and a range of nonfiction that often covered political and autobiographical material. Despite her ambitious and fearless imaginative vision, Mukherjee continued to rehearse the same themes across her essays: the details of her early life as they led to marriage, motherhood and her academic and literary career in North America; and the browning of America or what she called the steady de-Europeanization of the American population, post-1965.⁴ She continually revisited the personal trajectory that took her from India to the United States to Canada and then back to the United States, along with its wider political implications. In her self-presentation as a writer, she proudly created a narrative for her life through the periodization of her life and work into discrete discursive and literary phases: her privileged Indian childhood and youth; her marriage to Blaise; her experiences as expatriate (in Canada) and immigrant (in the United States); her love affair with America; and her writing techniques.

But other areas were more private and sacrosanct: for instance, the lives of her two sons or the depression she most likely suffered in the years before and after her return to America in 1980. At times she was more open about the losses as well as the gains of migration and a consequent ambivalence she felt about her North American status. In 2011 she admitted: I … still haven’t accepted social demotion as a consequence of immigration.⁵ She died from complications of rheumatoid arthritis and takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a stress-induced heart condition; and it seems likely that the tragic loss of her elder son only two years earlier to myotonic muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease he inherited from Blaise’s side of the family, was a major contributor.⁶ But Mukherjee lived more than thirteen years longer than she was astrologically intended to do, according to traditional Hindu belief.⁷ She may even have felt she was living on borrowed time. As she writes in the essay, Destiny’s Child (2003), I’ve always known that I would die at 63 … The year of my death was foretold in my horoscope … I would marry a blue-eyed foreigner totally outside the Brahmanic pale of civilization … I would cross the oceans and settle far from home—and I would die between July 2003 and July 2004 … I came to believe that all of my horoscope would come true.⁸ For this reason, she always believed in the importance of treating every moment with reverence as part of a larger cosmic design.⁹

Mukherjee is often regarded as the first major South Asian American writer. Her prestigious status can be linked to the rise of South Asian diasporic writing in the Anglophone world over the past four decades. Influenced by V. S. Naipaul early in her career, Mukherjee later openly admired Salman Rushdie. Despite the impact of such existing literary role models, she steadfastly contended that when she began writing, American literature lacked fiction about the nation’s South Asians. Throughout her career, Mukherjee expressed views on India and the United States—often in a fervent, didactic, opinionated fashion—that frequently proved controversial, especially among commentators of Indian descent. Perhaps this was because in the 1980s and 1990s, Mukherjee’s attitude toward the country of her birth could seem dismissive, while the love she professed for America verged on the zealous. Such ideas about South Asia shifted in her post-2000 fiction, where she drew crucial inspiration from India. In fact the rapid rise of India to global economic power in recent years invests Mukherjee’s late writing with real contemporary relevance.

Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic. Pico Iyer, a fellow Indian diasporic writer, has since Mukherjee’s death stated that she was one of the first to intuit the new mongrel cultures that were forming across the world in the age of collapsing borders and cross-cultural unions … She thus becomes more essential than ever, as a seminal, essential and ventriloqual 20th century voice for what has become our dominant 21st century reality.¹⁰ Some of her fiction occupies a canonical position, especially Jasmine, which gained an unusually wide readership for South Asian diasporic writing in the United States and remains the most widely taught—at both high school and college level—and the most heavily researched of any of Mukherjee’s works. Although some texts have gone out of print—for example, The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Darkness, and The Sorrow and the Terror—her work has also enjoyed popular appeal, with her fiction sometimes achieving bestseller status and international acclaim. Her novel Jasmine, for example, has been translated into multiple languages.¹¹ Mukherjee’s short stories and essays have been anthologized in such key collections as The Best American Short Stories 1985, The Best American Short Stories 1989, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, while her writing has been reviewed in a wide range of publications in the United States, Canada, India, and Britain. She was also interviewed on many occasions. Mukherjee received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts award; and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2002, she lectured abroad on behalf of the U.S. State Department; and in 2006, she was committee chair for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Whether or not one agrees with Mukherjee’s beliefs about ethnic and identity politics, gender and religion, assimilation and acculturation, immigration and multiculturalism—and her position on all these subjects altered over the years—her writing broke new ground, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, it paved the way for the success experienced by later South Asian American writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni, who have spoken about her importance and especially the role of Jasmine. Divakaruni has recalled "reading, re-reading and underlining passages in … Jasmine … I am grateful to her for giving me the confidence that stories about Indians in America were worth telling."¹² Lahiri’s historic Pulitzer Prize win in 2000 for her literary début, Interpreter of Maladies—the first such triumph by an Asian American in the fiction category—was arguably enabled by the literary breakthrough achieved by Mukherjee’s writing, particularly in the late 1980s. Lahiri has noted that I was aware of writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Anita Desai. I think they were the only ones, really, who had written about the Indian immigrant experience, but from the perspective of having been born and brought up in India, and then coming here and having to negotiate it all.¹³ Writing about the Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation exhibit that ran from February 2014 to August 2015 at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Washington, D.C., Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan noted that Mukherjee is included in a section on ‘Ground Breakers’ [which] profiles pioneers in different fields … The individuals are ‘firsts’ in their respective domains, which is why, for example, Mukherjee is listed and not the better-known writer Jhumpa Lahiri.¹⁴ Srinivasan’s matter-of-fact assessment of the two writers assumes—accurately, I believe—the now greater mainstream recognition of Lahiri. Mukherjee nevertheless remains the central figure in South Asian American letters from the early 1970s until the dawn of the twenty-first century: the writer who, early on, showed Indian Americans an image of themselves on the page and acted as a literary mother for aspiring young South Asian American women writers.¹⁵

To focus simply on the effect of Mukherjee’s writing on later South Asian American authors would, of course, be to underestimate its scope and ambition. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee therefore aims to extend beyond narrow ethno-racial definitions into a much broader discussion of Mukherjee’s position within post-1960s North American letters where, as her obituary notices show, she was admired by a wide range of writers including Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, and Amy Tan. Russell Banks, Robert Olen Butler, and Richard Ford have also publicly expressed their admiration for her work.¹⁶

Several monographs on Mukherjee have been published since the mid-1990s: Fakrul Alam’s Bharati Mukherjee (1996); Andrea Dlaska’s Ways of Belonging: The Making of New Americans in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee (1999); Nagendra Kumar’s The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective (2001); Sushma Tandon’s Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction: A Perspective (2004); Stanley M. Stephen’s Bharati Mukherjee: A Study in Immigrant Sensibility (2010); and Christine Kutschbach’s The Literariness of Life: Undecidability in Bharati Mukherjee’s Writing (2012). Prior to Alam’s study, Emmanuel S. Nelson edited Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives (1993). Further edited volumes—R. K. Dhawan’s The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium (1996) and Somdatta Mandal’s Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives (2010)—have been published since 1993. Bradley C. Edwards’s Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee (2009) collects many of Mukherjee’s interviews over the past four decades.

These studies amply prove Mukherjee’s significance both as a diasporic Indian writer and as an American author whose fictional and nonfictional work charts and examines changing narratives of Americanness and what it means to be Indian. Such academic research also reflects the enduring interest—both critical and popular—in Mukherjee’s writing. The monographs by Alam and Dlaska, and Nelson’s edited collection, are particularly ambitious. But they are now somewhat out-of-date in that in her later years, Mukherjee went on to publish