About Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, to an upper-middle class Hindu Brahmin family in Calcutta, India. She is the second of three daughters of Sudhir Lal, who is a chemist, and Bina Mukherjee. She was born into an extraordinary close-knit and intelligent family. Mukherjee and her sisters were always given ample academic opportunities, and they have all pursued academic endeavors in their careers and also have had the opportunity to receive a good schooling. In 1947, her father was given a job in England and all of his family went along and lived there until 1951. This has given Mukherjee a good opportunity to develop her English language skills. In 1959, she earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Calcutta. Later then she and her family moved to Baroda, India where studied for her Master’s Degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture. This was in 1961. Mukherjee have also been awarded a scholarship from the University of Iowa where she earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English as well as Comparative Literature in 1969. She then returned to India to get marry to a bridegroom of her father’s choosing. However, during a lunch break on September 19, 1963, the whole thing has been changed. Mukherjee has married to Clark Baise, a Canadian writer. This happened in a lawyer’s office which is above a coffee shop and it is only two weeks of courtship. In the following that is in 1968, Mukherjee have immigrated to Canada with her husband and became a naturalized citizen in 1972. During her 14 years in Canada, she has suffered quite a lot. She found herself to be discriminated where she was treated badly. She has also spoken in one of the interviews about her hard life in Canada. Apart from all that, she was able to write her first two novels which is The Tiger’s Daughter published in 1971 and Wife published in 1975. Besides that her collection of short stories entitled Darkness which was published in 1985 is actually a revelation of the cultural separation while living in Canada. A few years later after being fed up with Canada, Mukherjee and her family moved to the States in 1980, where she lived as a permanent U.S. resident. Because of the different experiences which she had gone through in her life, she has been described as a write who has undergone several phases of life. The first phase is where she struggle with her own identity as an exile from India, then an expatriate in Canada, and finally as an immigrant in the United States. Mukherjee is currently working as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. On the other hand her husband teaches at the University of Iowa and they have two sons by the name Bart Anand and Bernard Sudhir. I would like to quote Candia McWilliam of the London Review of Books where it says Mukherjee as “A write both tough and voluptuous” in her works.