The Middleman (Author Biography)

Author Biography

American novelist and short-story writer Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, in Calcutta, West Bengal, India, to wealthy parents, Sudhir Lal and Bina Mukherjee. Her father co-owned a pharmaceutical factory and later became director of research and development of a large chemical complex.

Even as a child, Mukherjee knew she was going to be a writer. She learned to read and write at the age of three, and she later reported that as a child, the fictional worlds she discovered in stories were more real to her than the world around her. She started her first novel when she was nine or ten, and at high school in Calcutta, she started writing short stories for school magazines.

Mukherjee received her bachelor of arts from the University of Calcutta in 1959, and a master of arts from the University of Baroda in 1961. Wanting to pursue a career as a writer and encouraged by her father to do so, Mukherjee then left India to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She received a master of fine arts in 1963, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, also from the University of Iowa, in 1970.

While studying at the Writers' Workshop, Mukherjee met the Canadian, Clark Blaise, who was also a student on the same program. The couple married in 1963, and from 1966 to 1980, they lived in Canada, first in Toronto and then Montreal, where they both held teaching positions.

Mukherjee became a Canadian citizen but was unhappy living in that country because of the racial prejudice she encountered. She was refused service in stores and was sometimes followed by detectives in department stores who assumed she was a shoplifter. It was in Canada that Mukherjee wrote her first two novels, The Tiger's Daughter (1972) and Wife (1975), but her work received little attention from critics or the public.

In 1980, Mukherjee resigned her professorship at McGill University and moved with her husband and two sons to the United States, where she became first a permanent resident and then a U.S. citizen. Living in New York, she taught at Skidmore College, Mountain State College, Queen's College of the City University of New York, and Columbia University. In 1984, she was writer in residence at Emory University. She felt that being in the United States was a great relief after the discrimination she had suffered in Canada. In New York City, she was able to blend in with people on the street, and she believes that attitudes toward Indian immigration are healthier in the United States than in Canada. Mukherjee chose to identify fully with her new country of choice, and she regards herself as an American, not an Indian-American or an Indian in exile.

Mukherjee's first short story collection, Darkness, was published in 1985. This was followed by a second collection, The Middleman and OtherStories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction. Like much of Mukherjee's work, the stories deal with the experience of new immigrants to the United States. This is also the theme of one of her most popular novels, Jasmine, which was published the following year. The title character, Jasmine, is a young Indian woman who comes to the United States as an illegal immigrant.

Mukherjee has also written The Holder of the World (1993) and The Tree Bride: A Novel (2004), as well as several nonfiction works, including some co-authored with her husband. As of 2006, Mukherjee was a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.