Bharati Mukherjee, 1940-
Bharati Mukherjee, (born July 27, 1940, Calcutta, India), Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer whose work reflects Indian culture and immigrant experience.
Mukherjee was born into a wealthy Calcutta family. She attended an anglicized Bengali school from 1944 to 1948. After three years abroad, the family returned to India. Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and the University of Baroda (M.A., 1961). She then entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning an M.F.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1969. From 1966 to 1980 she lived in Montreal, which she found provincial and racist. She then moved to the U.S. in 1980 and began teaching at the university level. She became a U.S. citizen in 1989 and that year accepted a position teaching postcolonial and world literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
We discussed her story "A Father" in class as we closely read the thematic concerns of: -old world verses new world, -tradition verses progression, -religiosity verses secularism, -family expectation and intimacy, -notions of "success" and the "American dream", -gender construction, and the implicit (and explicit) violence bound to stereotypical identity paradigms.
Some links to sites which feature Mukherjee:
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