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Background
Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), West
Bengal, India. She later travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only
returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School. She
received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. from the
University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the
University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963
and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.
After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee
and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in
"An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night. Mukherjee and
Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). They also wrote the 1987 work,
The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India
Flight 182).
Career
• Darkness (1985)
• The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
• A Father
Memoir
• The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987,
with Clark Blaise)
• Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991)
• Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992)
Awards
• 1988: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Middleman and Other Stories).
Further reading
Biographies
Major Themes
I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed
of my past, not because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult
life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through
the process of making a home here... I write in the tradition of immigrant experience
rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury
of being a U.S. citizen for me is that can define myself in terms of things like my politics,
my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis
of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race. (Mukherjee qtd. in
Basbanes)
Mukherjee continues writing about the immigrant experience in most of the stories in The
Middle Man and Other Stories, a collection of short stories which won her the National
Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction, Jasmine, and essays. These stories explore
the meeting of East and West through immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Canada
along with further describing the idea of the great melting pot of culture in the United
States.
Jasmine develops this idea of the mixing of the East and West with a story telling of a
young Hindu woman who leaves India for the U.S. after her husband's murder, only to be
raped and eventually returned to the position of a caregiver through a series of jobs
(Alam 100). The unity between the First and Third worlds is shown to be in the treatment
of women as subordinate in both countries.
Her latest works include The Holder of the World, published in 1993, and Leave It
to Me, published in 1997. The Holder of the World is a beautifully written story about
Hannah Easton, a woman born in Massachusetts who travels to India. She becomes
involved with a few Indian lovers and eventually a king who gives her a diamond know
as the Emperor's Tear. (Alam 120). The story is told through the detective searching for
the diamond and Hannah's viewpoint. Mukherjee's focus continues to be on immigrant
women and their freedom from relationships to become individuals. She also uses the
female characters to explore the spatiotemporal (Massachusetts to India) connection
between different cultures. In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee tells the story of a young
woman sociopath named Debby DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who
abandoned her. The story reveals her ungrateful interaction with kind adoptive parents
and a vengeful search for her real parents (described as a murderer and a flowerchild).
The novel also looks at the conflict between Eastern and Western worlds and at mother-
daughter relationships through the political and emotional topics by the main characer in
her quest for revenge. Candia McWilliam of The London Review of Books describes
Mukherjee appropriately as "A writer both tough and voluptuous" in her works.
Bharati Mukherjee
I swam to where the river was a sun-gold haze. I kicked and paddled in a rage.
Suddenly my fingers scraped the soft waterlogged carcass of a small dog. The body was
rotten, the eyes had been eaten. The moment I touched it, the body broke in two, as
though the water had been its glue. A stench leaked out of the broken body, and then the
pieces quickly sank.
That stench stays with me. I'm twenty-four now, I live in Baden, Elsa County, Iowa, but
every time I lift a glass of water to my lips, fleetingly I smell it. I know what I don't want
to become. --Jasmine
Biography / Criticism
Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, to an upper-middle class Hindu
Brahmin family in Calcutta, India. The second of three daughters of Sudhir Lal, a
chemist, and Bina (Banerjee) Mukherjee, she lived with 40 or 50 relatives until the age of
eight. Born into an extraordinarily close-knit and intelligent family, Mukherjee and her
sisters were always given ample academic opportunities, and thus have all pursued
academic endeavors in their careers and have had the opportunity to receive excellent
schooling. In 1947, her father was given a job in England and he brought his family to
live there until 1951, which gave Mukherjee an opportunity to develop and perfect her
English language skills.
Mukherjee earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Calcutta in 1959. She and
her family then moved to Baroda, India, where she studied for her Master's Degree in
English and Ancient Indian Culture, which she acquired in 1961. Having planned to be a
writer since childhood, Mukherjee went to the University of Iowa in 1961 to attend the
prestigious Writer's Workshop. She planned to study there to earn her Master's of Fine
Arts, then return to India to marry a bridegroom of her father's choosing in her class and
caste.
However, a lunch break on September 19, 1963, changed that plan, transferring
Mukherjee into a split world, a transient with loyalties to two cultures. She impulsively
married Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer, in a lawyer's office above a coffee shop after
only two weeks of courtship. She received her M.F.A. that same year, then went on to
earn her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa in 1969.
In 1968, Mukherjee immigrated to Canada with her husband and became a naturalized
citizen in 1972. Her 14 years in Canada were some of the hardest of her life, as she found
herself discriminated against and treated, as she says, as a member of the "visible
minority." She has spoken in many interviews of her difficult life in Canada, a country
that she sees as hostile to its immigrants and one that opposes the concept of cultural
assimilation. Although those years were challenging, Mukherjee was able to write her
first two novels, The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975), while working up to
professorial status at McGill University in Montreal. During those years she also
collected many of the sentiments found in her first collection of short stories, Darkness
(1985), a collection that in many sections reflects her mood of cultural separation while
living in Canada.
Finally fed up with Canada, Mukherjee and her family moved to the United States
in 1980, where she was sworn in as a permanent U.S. resident. Continuing to write, in
1986 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. After holding several
posts at various colleges and universities, she ultimately settled in 1989 at the University
of California-Berkeley. Because of the distinctly different experiences she has had
throughout life, she has been described as a writer who has lived through several phases
of life. First, as a colonial, then National subject in India. She then led a life of exile as a
post-colonial Indian in Canada. Finally, she shifted into a celebratory mode as an
immigrant, then citizen, in the United States. She now fuses her several lives and
backgrounds together with the intention of creating a "new immigrant" literature.
Known for her playful and developed language, Mukherjee rejects the concept of
minimalism, which, she says, is "designed to keep anyone out with too much story to
tell."(New York Times Book Review) Rather, she considers her work a celebration of her
emotions, and herself a writer of the Indian diaspora who cherishes the "melting pot" of
America. Her main theme throughout her writing discusses the condition of Asian
immigrants in North America, with particular attention to the changes taking place in
South Asian women in a new world. While the characters in all her works are aware of
the brutalities and violence that surround them and are often victimized by various forms
of social oppression, she generally draws them as survivors. Mukherjee has oft been
praised for her understated prose style and her ironic plot developments and witty
observations. As a writer, she has a sly eye with which to view the world, and her
characters share that quality. Although she is often racially categorized by her thematic
focus and cultural origin, she has often said that she strongly opposes the use of
hyphenation when discussing her origin, in order to "avoid otherization" and the "self-
imposed marginalization that comes with hyphenation." Rather, she prefers to refer to
herself as an American of Bengali-Indian origin.
Born in Calcutta on July 27, 1940, to an upperclass Bengali Brahmin parents, Sudhir Lal
and Bina Banerjee, Bharati was the second of three daughters. She grew up in an
atmosphere of privilege and wealth in an extended family that included aunts, uncles, and
cousins. Even in a crowded household Mukherjee found time and space to become a
varacious reader. According to her, she knew as early as the age of three that she
wanted to be a writer. As a child her favorite pastime was to hear Indian folk tales told
by her grandmother. By the time she was eight she had already read several works of
Leo Tolstoy,Dostoevsky, and Maxim Gorky, along with Bengali classics. In 1948
Mukherjee moved to England with her immidiate family and it was there she enjoyed
privacy and independence. "I discovered myself in new ways," she told Natasha Rafi
in an interview. Living apart from various relatives allowed her to concentrate on what
was important to her. At the age of nine, she wrote her first "novel" about a child
detective. The family returned to Calcutta after three and a half years and Mukherjee
received the best English schooling available at Loretto House,a missionary school.
She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a
master's degree from the University of Baroda in 1961.
That same year Mukherjee moved to the United States to study creative writing at the
University of Iowa. She considers this event to have been the turning point in her career.
"If I had to live in India, I still would have been a writer, but a very different sort," she
said. It was in Iowa that the 23years old Mukherjee met and married a Canadian
student,Clark Blaise, in 1963. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1968 Mukherjee moved to
Canada with her husband, where she became a naturalized citizen in 1972.
Her first book, The tiger's Daughter, was published in 1972 by Houghton Mifflin.
It is about an Indian woman who returns to India after many years in the West and looks
at her native country through changed eyes. The poverty, hunger and dirt in the country
now cloud the memory of the upperclass genteel life-style of her childhood and youth.
Yet the longing for the security of home and comfort of her own culture creates a conflict
known only to those born in the third world,burdened with the choice of living in the
West. "While changing citizenship is easy, swapping culture is not," said Mukherjee. "I
want to write about others, who for economic, social, political, or psychological reasons
have had to uproot themselves from a life that was predictable to one where you make up
your own rules."
A painful part of immigration is encountering racism in the adopted country. In
her short story collection,Darkness, p ublished in 1985, Bharati explores Canadian
prejudice against South Asians. The racial intolerance she experienced in Canada
compelled her to move back to the United States where she is now setteled and claims to
have found greater acceptance as a South Asian. In an interview with Sybil Steinberg of
Publishers Weekly, she described her feelings about America: "Mine is a clear-eyed but
definite love of America. I'm aware of the brutalities, the violances here, but in the long
run my characters are survivors....I feel there are people born to be Americans. By
American I mean an intensity of spirit and a quality desire. I feel American in a very
fundamental way,whether Americans see me that way or not."
According to Mukherjee, her mother was determined that her daughters' lives
would not be confined to the home and family as hers had been, and that she was the
driving force behind the professional success of her daughters. Mukherjee described her
as "a most modest heroic woman" who achieved her goals in "quite and determined
ways." All three children realized their mother's dreams--the eldest is a psychologist in
Detroit and the youngest heads the English department at the University of Baroda in
Gujarat State, India.
Throughout her professional and personal life Mukherjee felt her Indian heritage
has shaped the way she views the world. Strong family ties and love of education that
was vital part of her upbringing have stayed with her through the years. Her advice to
others is: "Treat every moment with reverence."
Sources: Brandmark, Wendy.Review of The Holder of the World. New Statesman &
Society, November 19, 1993.
Zia, Helen and Gall, Susan B. Notable Asian Americans, ©1995 GALE Research INC.
Bharati Mukherjee Runs the West Coast Offense Dave Weich, Powells.com
"I also have two sisters," she explained. "I'm playing with author-protagonist
relationships in ways that I haven't before. I think it's because I want to write an
autobiography, but I just can't bring myself to. You create masks. It's a story about three
sisters following different paths, each somehow important to me."
Publishers Weekly raved, "It should take nothing away from the achievements of
new, young writers of South Asian origin to state that Mukherjee eclipses all of them in
her new novel, the highlight of her career to date."
RH: There are things that I like about her, but she's not what I'd call endearing or
sympathetic.
BM: I hope she's sympathetic. She's tough and vulnerable. I don't have any control over
my characters. At any given time, there are scores of characters yelling at each other,
yelling at me, inside my head. Some of them sort of take over, and I become totally
intrigued or mesmerized by them. Devi came to me as the opposite of a character I'd
written earlier, Jasmine from the novel Jasmine. Draft by draft, I came to understand
Devi better, and the most important idea that wrote itself in the second or third draft was
that she prizes clarity over everything else.
What she understands, in retrospect, is that there's a huge difference between vengeance
and justice. Once that idea was articulated by my character, I realized that in order to
make my concept of divine justice, which sometimes involves great violence,
understandable to the reader, I'd have to dig into and share the Hindu mythology of the
goddess Devi worshipped in Bengal, who was created by the Cosmic Spirit to do battle
with the baddest bad ass of all the demons, the Buffalo Demon, and is therefore quite
violent.
I never saw my character Devi's tale as optimistic. Here's a street smart, savvy,
manipulative young woman, enraged about the fact that she was thrown out like a
garbage sack on the hippie trail, who's part of a larger design in which some higher power
uses her to restore some kind of balance and purge evil out of our California. I never saw
her as a mean person, more as a person capable of redemption after she's gone through
some of the violence within herself.
RH: So as you were writing the novel, it wasn't necessarily that much of a surprise
when she burns down her ex-lover's house at the end of Part One? That's the point
for me where I stopped seeing her as a sarcastic but sweet character and started
seeing her as being capable of just about anything.
BM: I knew she was going to burn down the house in the early drafts, but I didn't know
what would happen as a result, other than that there was no turning back for her. The final
ending of the book was what came as a total surprise to me.
BM: I don't look at my early drafts in hard copy. I just open another file in my word
processor and start from scratch. Each draft helps me know my characters better; draft by
draft, their voices get louder and they tell me their adventures more fully each time
through. The characters thicken, becoming more dense and complex. I hear the sentences
better. I do a lot of drafts. In order to get these very dense, high-energy sentences, I've
thought through much bulkier paragraphs.
RH: One of the things this novel is about is coming to grips with the legacy of the
'60s. The former hippies have put aside the consequences of their actions; Devi, as
the instrument we've discussed, represents those consequences coming back to them
and forcing the issue.
BM: As a professor and workshop leader, I'm constantly working with young people for
whom Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and so on mean nothing. They're simply
statistics. But Devi's generation is still a victim of those events, they're formed by post-
Vietnam America. I've come to realize that one of the themes throughout my fiction is the
changes in the way America thinks of itself and is seen by the rest of the world as a result
of Vietnam. My sympathies are very much with people like the character "Loco Larry,"
people I see around my neighborhood who were damaged by the war. The peace
protestors were noble -- and both I and my husband were involved with rallies and vigils
at the time -- but the peace movement also masked a certain excessive narcissism. People
were doing good, but at the same time they were self-indulgently satisfying their sensual
and sexual appetites, and many of them never acknowledged the fallout from that kind of
narcissism, how it affected the people around them. Many of the people who went to
India looking to escape Western civilization misunderstood and misapplied Indian
traditions, and succumbed to the imperializing impulse. They thought that their version of
India was the way India really was, without understanding Indian culture.
BM: I think my work from Darkness onward, so from about 1985 to the present, is hard
for some readers to understand because I don't fit into any easy slots. I'm a woman who
was born in Calcutta, but I've lived in America my entire adult life and consider myself
an American. My literary soul was formed by literature from around the world, but
especially American literature. I'm an American writer of Indian origin. I'm not doing an
exotic ghetto, National Geographic Indian number, and I'm not making readers feel good
about those locales -- aren't we quaint, aren't we sweet, aren't we sentimental and
emotionally expressive. I'm showing white Americans their world in a different way, so
they'll never be able to walk down their own streets quite the same way after reading my
books.
BM: I read many different kinds of authors. I love James Ellroy's books. He has qualities
that I strive for in my work, particularly an edgy humor combined with a dark vision of
society, as well as incredible energy in every one of his sentences. It must seem very
strange that a very demure Indian lady sees James Ellroy as a kindred literary spirit, but
there you are.
BM: With Indian literature in English and Bengali, as much as possible. I go to India
every year to see my family and during those trips, I empty out bookstores getting the
latest books. But there are so many languages in India, so many regional literatures with
prolific writers that I can't claim to know all of Indian literature, or even all of that from
the languages I know.
RH: But you know enough of it to know that American readers are only getting the
tip of the iceberg, as it were.
BM: Absolutely. The only writers of Indian origin that American writers know are the
ones who happen to be credentialized by magazines like the New Yorker and, of course,
published in America. Very often, the writers who are picked up and given that attention
by the American publishing industry are minority writers who are expatriates. They've
lived outside India for much of their lives, and Indian writers in India don't necessarily
see any affinity with them. It's sad to me that Americans aren't as interested in reading
translations of some of these Indian writers. We don't see many translations from non-
Western languages being made available to us.
RH: Do you usually spend a lot of time on the research and draft phases of your
work?
BM: It depends on the book. Once the character comes to me, I know what kind of
material will be essential, what I'll need to know. My last novel, The Holder of the World,
made much use of virtual reality. And as with Devi's job as a media escort, the narrator of
that novel had a very 90s profession; she was an asset hunter, tracking down people's
financial holdings. But the novel was also about seventeenth century Massachusetts and
various trading companies that established themselves in seventeenth century India,
which meant eleven years of uncontrolled and immensely pleasurable research. I love
history as story, and the details of customs, manners, and social structures, the way that
people thought and behaved.
RH: Media escorts and asset hunters are both facets of contemporary culture that
perhaps only an outsider perspective would notice, although you don't necessarily
have to be a foreign- born author to do it.
BM: A writer, in order to be at her or his sensitive and most receptive, has to be both an
insider and an outsider. My quarrel with certain writers who see themselves only as
expatriate Indians writing about India from outside is that they're too far out. To write
about something, I need to both know it well and look at it from an odd angle. I don't
want to be sneer at or satirize my characters, just to look at them differently.
RH: That gives you the insight to see them behaving not as examples of a satirical
point, but out of sincerely felt motivations and interests.
BM: Exactly. That's where I feel I'm very different from, say, V. S. Naipaul, who all too
often in my opinion sets himself above the cultures he depicts, adopting a patronizing or
snide tone. Coming back to your initial question, that's why I don't see Devi as an
unlikable or unsympathetic character. I can't write unless I've come to love a character for
all his or her wickedness or flaws
Selected Bibliography
...her books are smart investigations into the ideas, people, history and personalities that
have determined what has shaped modern India and ultimately, who she is as a woman of
Indian descent.
» Tan, Amy from Bios
Tan has said that her intention in writing is not to provide historical information, but
rather to create a work of art.
Dave: I didn't know until recently that you taught at McGill University in Montreal.
That's where I went to college.
Bharati Mukherjee: Really?! I was there for fourteen years. "The Management of Grief"
is a Canadian story, and it's probably the most anthologized of all the ones I've written.
Dave: I just read that last week for the first time.
Mukherjee: My husband, Clark Blaise, and I wrote a nonfiction book [The Sorrow and
the Terror] about the terrorist bombing of an Air India jet that took off from Toronto on its
way to Bombay with 329 people on board, ninety percent of whom were Canadians of
Indian origin. The bad guys were Canadians, but Sikh, militant Khalistanis in politics. It
was the bloodiest terrorist incident until WTC.
We interviewed all the terrorist cells, including an interview with the guy who financed
the bombing and has just this November finally been arrested. We talked to the bereaved
also. The book was a nonfiction bestseller in Canada. We were under death threat for two
years. When I sat down to write The Middleman and Other Stories as a collection of
stories about diaspora, "The Management of Grief" came out in one sitting. It was a very
sad story to write.
I would have been on that plane if I hadn't left Canada for the U.S. five years before -
that's the plane we used to take to India, the first one after school closing. I lost a friend
on that flight.
Dave: Having created two products from one body of research, a short fiction and a
longer work of journalism, how do you account for the life spans being so different?
Mukherjee: What survives and what doesn't? Yes, they've long forgotten the nonfiction
book, which was dangerous to write, but the story lives on.
The persuasive power of fiction was heartening. The nonfiction book that tracked all the
cells and the ways in which money is raised, the carelessness of CSIS versus the RCMP
versus the local cops...The story of individual families or individual victims lived on and
spoke to people in ways that the statement of facts didn't.
I used part of what I had experienced myself in Jasmine, the hot dog vendor who is a
refugee, a terrorist. Here [in Desirable Daughters], when I used the Dawood gang I was
anticipating the Daniel Pearl kind of kidnapping, which is going on. The Dawood gang
was involved very recently in the attack on the American Center in Calcutta, my
hometown. But it wasn't until the World Trade Center was demolished that the average
citizen began to realize how, like Tara, you can be living your life, immersed in your own
personal conflicts - Should I go back to my husband? Why did my Hungarian lover leave
me for someone else? etc. - while unknowingly you are enmeshed in someone else's
incredible fantasies.
Dave: Tara's lover, Andy, is telling her, "Nonattachment. Don't get caught up in it." In
terms of managing your stress, that's certainly a nice approach, but the problem, at least
in Tara's case, isn't going to go away by itself. She wouldn't have ended up any better by
ignoring it, let's put it that way.
Mukherjee: At all. I've always been a little impatient, not totally understanding, of exotic
interest in Oriental philosophies. If it works for a Californian, great, I'm happy for that
person, but you'll find that most South Asians in California, especially Silicon Valley,
they're very much into participating in capitalist, liberal democracy.
Dave: Tara acknowledges that Andy has seen a whole lot more of India than she has.
I wanted to write about the age and culture of diaspora at a hinge moment in both India's
and America's history. Things are changing so fast.
In the nineteenth century, Tara Lata, the Tree Bride, had an identifiable enemy - the bad
guys were the British. Colonialism must be fought. Because of misfortune, she was freed
to live her life as she wanted to; she could devote it to helping the freedom fighters.
Nothing is so clear-cut in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Tara, the narrator, is very
cosmopolitan. She knows Gilbert and Sullivan, and she also knows how to do Indian
singing and dancing and all that, but she doesn't have the focus; she doesn't have the
tradition that she thought supported her. She's the only one of the sisters who listens to
Father and lets him find a husband for her. Later, she realizes that those traditions were
either fraudulent or not worth hanging onto intact. The Indian cultural traditions don't
support any of the sisters, women in that age group, the way they did the patriarch, the
Tree Bride's dad, or the Tree Bride herself.
It's that moment in diaspora: white America is not the America of the mythological
melting pot that my character Jasmine had bought into in the late eighties - discard your
past if you can, or suppress it, and reinvent yourself as often as you need to (and some of
those reinventions are hopelessly excessive) until you find a new autobiography. Here it's
no longer possible. Neither America nor the non-European immigrant accepts that
melting pot myth. It's been discarded. So how do you find a balance to give you meaning
in your life, and at the same time not wind up feeling isolated?
Dave: Tara speaks repeatedly about the American quest to discover "Who am I?" Where
she comes from, in India, that question would be nonsense. It's all so clear-cut and spelled
out.
What happens with the sisters in the book is that once pulled out of that bubble-wrapped
condition where you're not given an opportunity to make mistakes - the older two sisters
still manage to make mistakes, but Dad is able to hide the mess almost completely - once
they're pulled out of that protective situation, they act out all their fantasies. Only
America gives you the opportunity for those kinds of wonderful, melodramatic errors.
Dave: The narrator is younger that you, but her Indian upbringing was quite similar.
You've placed her in the same Loreto school, for instance. In Days and Nights in
Calcutta, which is autobiography, not fiction, you explain that you weren't taught Indian
history.
Mukherjee: I was growing up in the fifties when history books had to be rewritten
because the texts were all British. I took overseas Cambridge University exams. We were
supposed to do only British history, in which the Indians are savages. For a year or two,
there was incredibly tricky deconstruction that we brown students had to make. And the
poor Irish nuns, being caught in between (they were very colonial even though they were
Irish), realized that it was inappropriate to be using those texts, but Indian history texts by
Indian historians hadn't yet been written. The compromise was, Alright, we'll opt for the
European paper and forget British and Indian history. Later, in Western India, I had to
take graduate level courses on ancient Indian culture and learn the history on my own.
Someone like Tara, because she's growing up so much later, has had schoolbook history -
though she's not the brightest; she's not a rocket scientist - and she'd have also had comic
history. These are wonderful, government issue books in which all the historical
characters, the great heroes, are done as comic strips. Not funny, but as pictures. That's
how the children learn history.
There is a kind of vacuum. And there isn't the passion the first generation had about
nation-building. Now, your ambition, your fantasies, your dreams are about When I get to
Canada or When I get to the Silicon Valley. And I'll go back later or be shuttling back
and forth. It's being comfortable with your bag packed and feeling that you're master of
two continents, which is never possible.
But they don't know their Indian history at all, you're right. Parvati and Padma, they don't
talk about it except to say, "Oh, I'm Indian." Especially Padma, the drama queen in New
Jersey.
These things enter the story draft by draft as I write. I never go back to look at the
preceding drafts.
Dave: You don't go back to your written copies? So you're writing those early drafts,
basically, to create a vision that lives in your mind, upon which the next incarnation will
be based?
Mukherjee: And therefore I know what the story is. The version of Desirable Daughters
that survived...I thought it was all finished. I handed in my final draft to the Hyperion
editor, and I went off to Innsbruck. Then I got the manuscript back with one or two little
questions, and I sat at this incredibly comfortable desk in Innsbruck and I rewrote the
novel entirely, including plot.
Mukherjee: It's not cosmetic changes and it's not fussing with sequencing. I'm always
rethinking character, and the character dictates the situation. I'm going by the psychology
of the characters.
Dave: Is that typical for you? As you got closer to finishing, did characters or events
sneak up on you? Were you surprised by any of the late changes?
Mukherjee: The process of writing was very different this time. I fell in love with the
character of the Indian husband. Tara leaves him in a huff because she has fabricated an
image of him as a kind of father figure, and she's decided in her quest for freedom that
the gated community in Atherton is prison. I had no idea when I started out that she
would try to woo him back in that scene in Rivoli Street.
He surprised me in the ways in which he integrates American football or aspects of
American culture onto his very Bengali self, for example that bit about Chet Yee and Bish
watching Joe Montana on t.v. and getting CHATTEE because of the west coast
offense...the width of the field instead of the length! Later I was talking to someone and I
realized that the aesthetic strategy for this book was also using the width of the field - of
history, geography, diaspora, gender, ethnicity, language - rather than the old fashioned
long, clean throw. That's what I've been trying to do from Middleman on.
Dave: Early in the novel, the narrative voice is interrupted by an italicized comment:
I have done something here for which I should apologize. I have structured a surprise
event in such a way that it will seem to you obvious and inevitable. You will wonder how
we missed it, and I might not be able to communicate the shock, the bolt of lightning that
sent me to Bangladesh last year, that set me to writing this book, and started everything
else in motion.
Dave: Well, the next sentence reads, "You will wonder how we missed it." So is the story
about how you missed it, then? As a writer, what's your goal in not only undercutting the
surprise but calling special attention to it?
Mukherjee: When I had first written the Tree Bride section [the first chapter] I didn't
realize that what would become important for me was not merely the Tree Bride as the
iconic myth - the free person who turns adversity into opportunity - but by the end of that
draft, Tara, the modern narrator, realizes that she now is the family chronicler. In writing
up history she is going to reframe it in order to tell herself a myth to survive by. That's
why the I became far more self-conscious in the later draft.
Dave: You say that, but step back: That's Tara's excuse. What's your excuse? Is there a
detachment between yourself as author and Tara as narrator at that stage or are you
genuinely speaking for her?
Mukherjee: I am. I have to. And as someone pointed out in Iowa City two nights ago on
NPR, Tara was also the name of the protagonist in my first novel [The Tiger's Daughter],
and that character was very much me, too, so it's obviously a kind of alter ego that I
wasn't totally aware of when I embarked on this. Other than the three sisters... I also have
two sisters, and we've had our estrangements even though we've always pretended to be
so close-knit.
I'm playing with author-protagonist relationships in ways that I haven't before. I think it's
because I want to write an autobiography, but I just can't bring myself to. You create
masks. It's a story about three sisters following different paths, each somehow important
to me.
Dave: Jasmine and Tara both encounter an Indian culture in the United States that is more
Indian than India. Jasmine can't deal with it; she has to escape pretty quickly.
A few years ago, you published an article in Mother Jones called American Dreamer,
arguing that you're an American writer, as opposed to an Asian-American writer,
explaining that your "rejection of hyphenation... is really a demand that America deliver
the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally."
Mukherjee: India is only partially important. I'm not writing about nostalgic past, and
I'm not writing about only the Indian-American ghetto. I wrote that essay after the
publication of Holder of the World, which was really rewriting The Scarlet Letter from a
perspective that Hawthorne, an Anglo-Saxon, would not have seen seventeenth century
America, when because of trade routes the world came to places like Salem. That's why I
was objecting. Desirable Daughters is the product of an Indo-American writer and that's
what it's about, having one foot in each culture, whereas Leave It to Me, Middleman,
Jasmine, and certainly Holder of the World are not.
Unless people uniformly address the Joyce Carol Oateses and the John Irvings of the
world as European-American writers - which frankly doesn't mean anything - then calling
me an Asian-American writer when "Asian" means so many different races, religions,
and generations of immigrant history? I just felt that was racist. But I don't go there
anymore. I've made my point.
Dave: Tara says she's tired of explaining India to Americans, but to most Americans India
is a total mystery. It's enormous, for one thing, but also incomprehensibly divided along
very subtle racial, religious, and historical lines.
Mukherjee: And regional... The narcissism of the smallest differences so that even in
New Jersey they're making fun of other Indian subgroups!
Dave: It's not as if similar divisions don't exist among Americans, but Indian writers
addressing an American audience have to somehow make it all comprehensible without
distracting too much from the story. You certainly can't assume that the average reader
coming to your novel will know much of anything that these characters take for granted.
Mukherjee: No, and you can't assume they'll be interested in knowing. But it was
important to the character, and therefore there was no way to leave it out. It would have
been inauthentic.
India Times is a cyber-newspaper that features news on current events, arts and
entertainment, technology, and finance in India. In this brief interview, Mukherjee
discusses the risks of being categorized as an Asian American writer, her novel Holder of
the World, and her life in Canada and the United States.
BIOGRAPHY
Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940) was born in Calcutta, India. She lived in London as a
young girl but returned to India at the age of eleven, where she subsequently attended
Calcutta and Baroda Universities. After winning a scholarship to the University of Iowa
Writers' Workshop, she moved to the United States and married Canadian novelist Clark
Blaise in 1963. The two then lived in Montreal where Mukherjee joined the faculty of
McGill University until 1973, when they traveled to India. She and her husband kept
separate diaries of their trip, which were published in 1977 as Days and Nights in
Calcutta.
Mukherjee's first novel, The Tiger's Daughter (1972), deals with the
disappointment felt by an expatriate on her return to India. Her second novel, Wife
(1975), tells the story of a psychologically abused woman who kills her husband.
Mukherjee received the National Book Critics' Award for The Middleman and Other
Stories (1988). She currently teaches at Queens College of the City University of New
York. Her most recent works are The Holder of the World (1993) and Leave It to Me
(1997).
BM: I started writing by age five. I wrote and wrote but I never published anything until I
immigrated to the United States as a student. Writing is where I exist, where I live, and
it's incredibly intense for me.
BM: I have an urgent need to write. I must write. I have all these stories I want to share,
and I want the reader to understand my stories.
BM: No, but it came out of one evening‘s close conversation with my two sisters at the
home of my India-based sister who lives in Bombay, in an apartment with a spectacular
view of the city (just like in the book)! We started to talk about the choices we had made,
and how different our lives were, and how we all married men my father would not have
chosen for us. It's not really our story but does have real background things in it, like our
upbringing, our schooling etc.
BRC: Things were up in the air at the end of the book? Is there going to be a sequel?
BM: I realized while I was writing it that this was going to be the first in a trilogy.
BM: No, they are composite characters. They have some characteristics, eccentricities of
people I have known. For instance, the character of Andy, the live-in lover, is inspired by
a Buddhist painter who my friend retained. Bish is based on what I imagined the
bridegroom would have been like that had been chosen for me. I have a son who is a little
bit like Rabi.
BRC: Does the Indian lifestyle you described in DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS still
exist?
BM: Everything has changed. It's been modernized. Young people everywhere have lots
of choices.
BRC: And some of the quaint customs did exist? Like Tara Lata, the Tree – Bride?
BM: Yes, there were many Tara Latas, married to trees, so that they could have a life on
earth, a place in society where they would not be considered outcasts, and a place in
Heaven. The ancient Hindus believed that widows were unlucky and would descend to
hell.
BRC: While you are writing, do you think of how it will be received by critics?
Awards you could win?
BM: Awards are useful when pitching a book for publication. They help, but I never
think of them. Sometimes a good novel is read by only two people and a bad one is read
by hundreds because of good public relations.
BM: I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not
because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been
lived here. I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of
making a home here. I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia
and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S.
citizen for me is that I can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual
orientation, or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what
they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race."
Bharati Mukherjee
Desirable Daughters
Jasmine
James Ellroy