Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return—seething with strikes, riots, and unrest—is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world—that of her father, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger—and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in. In this, her first novel, Mukherjee claimed as her subject the shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformation that are part of the immigrant experience—a theme she has masterfully woven into her subsequent novels, Wife and Jasmine, and into The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Author
Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-born award winning American writer who explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories and in novels like Jasmine and Desirable Daughters. Ms. Mukherjee, a native of Calcutta, attended schools in England, Switzerland and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa. After years of short-term academic appointments, Ms. Mukherjee was hired in 1989 to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Bharati Mukherjee died on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Manhattan. She was 76.
