taking an M.A. in ancient Indian culture and Eng-
lish. From there, her father arranged for her to
travel to the United States to enter the University
of Iowa, where she later earned an M.F.A. in 1963
and a Ph.D. in English in 1969. While in Iowa,
Mukherjee began writing fiction in earnest among
her midwestern environs and met and married
Clark Blaise, a Canadian-born novelist with whom
she still resides in San Francisco. The marriage fa-
cilitated her subsequent move to Canada and the
beginning of her fiction-writing career. However,
due to the overt racism she experienced in Can-
ada, where she and her husband lectured at McGill
University, Mukherjee convinced Blaise to immi-
grate with her to the United States. After returning
to the United States in 1980, Mukherjee became a
naturalized U.S. citizen in 1988, the year that she
would publish perhaps her best known and most
critically praised work, The MIDDLEMAN AND OTHER
STORIES. Since its publication, Mukherjee has held
an appointment as a distinguished professor at the
University of California at Berkeley, in addition to
publishing another five books of fiction.
While lecturing at McGill University, Mukher-
jee published her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter
(1972), which charts the return of a young In-
dian woman to her family after studying and liv-
ing abroad and all of the attendant challenges she
faces merging past and present and accounting for
her obvious disillusionment with the discrepancy
between her memories and the realities she finds.
In Mukherjee’s own estimation, her first novel
“embodies the loneliness I felt but could not ac-
knowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no
man’s land between the country of my past and
the continent of my present. Shaped by memory,
textured with nostalgia for a class and a culture I
had abandoned, this novel quite naturally became
an expression of the expatriate consciousness”
(Mukherjee 33). Yet, this longing for the return,
the longing for a lost home and culture, provides a
stark contrast to Mukherjee’s later works, notably
darker in tone, which refuse to romanticize the ex-
perience of the expatriate or exile. As early as her
second novel, Wife (1975), Mukherjee takes aim at
traditionalist notions of culture and oppression, as
the protagonist, Dimple Dasgupta, finds that one
or the other, oneself or the avatar of the oppres-
sively dominant culture, must die: Significantly,
Dimple kills her husband, not herself.
Mukherjee took a break from writing fiction
between the publication of Wife and the release of
the short-story collection Darkness (1985), during
which she traveled to India and worked on a num-
ber of nonfiction projects including a pseudo-
travel memoir, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977),
cowritten with her husband. However, with Dark-
ness, Mukherjee initiated the phase of her writing
for which she is best known, as she takes aim at
the immigrant experience in both Canada and the
United States, charting the trajectories of her char-
acters with unsentimental honesty. In this phase,
she not only revealed the travails and hardships
faced by immersion into an oftentimes xenopho-
bic and economically challenging environment
but also developed an overriding interest in the
possibilities for the immigrant experience. Her op-
timistic immigrant narratives have drawn the ire
of certain critics. As Sharmani Gabriel comments:
“One of the chief criticisms made against Mukher-
jee, especially by US-based India-born critics, is
that her optimistic narration of the American saga
of immigrant incarnations elides a consideration
of the material realities impinging upon Third
World immigration, namely the role of race, class
and gender in the workings of identity politics in
America.” Yet, this take on the immigrant experi-
ence, somewhat at odds with other contemporary
immigrant fiction, has arguably made Mukherjee’s
work central to academic and popular interest, a
point perhaps most significantly demonstrated by
the reception of The Middleman and Other Stories,
which won the 1988 National Book Critics Award
for Fiction.
After the publication of The Middleman,
Mukherjee returned to novel writing, though she
did not abandon her interest in the immigrant
experience, especially as manifested in the sto-
ries of Eastern women. JASMINE (1989) deals ex-
plicitly with the realities of immigrant women in
the United States, as Jyoti/Jasmine/Jase/Jane must
mitigate not only economic and cultural uncer-
tainty, but also the violence of constant remak-
ing and constant movement. Arvindra Sant-Wade202 Mukherjee, Bharati