Abstract
Bharati Mukherjee, who has died aged 76, was a pioneering writer of immigrant American fiction. Immigration is by now a familiar story, and the uneasy yet fertile fate of writers tossed between nations and cultures is no longer the preserve of a few. However, when Mukherjee took to writing to carve out a space for the identity crises of an early generation of Indians — her own — who had arrived in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, she was the first to do so. “Indian American” was an unfamiliar ethnicity and even more unheard of as an emerging consciousness. Mukherjee went on to become one of its most eloquent, and anthologized, chroniclers.
Although she was later joined by other India-born writers (Meena Alexander and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni among them) she had by then expanded her canvas to include immigrants from other parts of Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Mukherjee’s distinctive profile lay in her long — more than 45-year — career and a procession of eight novels, two collections of short stories, two works of non-fiction, including Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), a travel memoir constructed interweavingly from the perspectives of Mukherjee and her husband, the writer Clark Blaise, and innumerable essays that energized the ideological concerns of her fiction and non-fiction. The vexed question of “what makes an American” (Mukherjee, 1991: 35) was at the forefront of her preoccupations.
Mukherjee’s contribution to American literature was in her charting the two-way reconfiguration of individuals and nations when non-European immigrants, whom she christened “the new breed” of American pioneers, are transplanted into a cultural context they know nothing of and find themselves trading the security of their traditional identities for the instabilities of the new. Entangled in the “hurly-burly of the unsettled magma between two worlds” (Mukherjee, 1991: 37), her immigrants profess their investment not in the homelands left behind but in the here and now of America. Her agenda to redefine “Americanness” was also brought to bear on the literary canon. Mukherjee repeately emphasized that she was not an “Indian-American” or “Asian-American” but “an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it” (Meer, 1989: 24). She inserted herself not in the tradition of American writers such as John Updike or Richard Ford, but in the more heterogenized — immigrant — tradition of the Jewish American novelist, Bernard Malamud.
The ideals and rhetoric she pursued both for herself and her characters was the remaking of identity through immigration. Mukherjee’s romance was not as much with the US as a geopolitical or sovereign unit as with the American national mythology of equal opportunity and personal happiness irrespective of race, caste, class, gender, and place of origin. In work after work, in both her fiction and non-fiction, America epitomized an idea, that symbolic terrain for the transformation of “biological identity” (Mukherjee, 1997: 4), offering not merely hope but the promise of self-reinvention.
Her vision of the American immigrant experience as one of gain and national–cultural identity renewal was important for helping to shift, at around the time that Salman Rushdie was articulating a similar stance for Britain, the dominant terms of the debate on diaspora. “Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration”, insisted Mukherjee (1997: 4); she simultaneously rejected that old but hegemonizing script of diaspora as a condition of cultural loss and deracination.
Mukherjee had many detractors, both resident-Indian scholars and US-based scholars and academics. The former smarted at her portrayal of India and its traditions as oppressive and viewed her rejection of “Indian-American” hyphenation as a renunciation of Indian culture, while the latter took her to task for eliding the realities of US race and gender politics. Her disparagers would not admit that Mukherjee could be a trenchant critic of the American Dream. As the poverty-scarred Punjab-born protagonist of her third novel, Jasmine (1989), hurtles westward through the diaphanous fluidities of American space to flee the phantoms of her past, metamorphosing from Jyoti into Jasmine and then into Jazzy, Jase, and Jane, a disillusioning awareness of the gaudy transience that lay beneath the glittering surface of America’s promises is evinced: “We arrive so eager to learn, to adjust, to participate, only to find the monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled. Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate” (Mukherjee, 1989: 181).
As they struggle to reorient themselves, her characters, especially her female immigrants, choose to respond to America and its challenges by demonstrating their resilience and innovation. “The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules”, says one of them, Hannah Easton of Mukherjee’s ambitious fourth novel, The Holder of the World (Mukherjee, 1993: 234), which virtual-travels three centuries back in time and traverses three continents to foreground the connected histories of Mughal India, Old England, and Puritan New England. It is out of this connected knowledge, Mukherjee suggests, that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) was written. The rebellious Easton may well be the seventeenth-century antecedent of Mukherjee’s fictional warriors, but her “excess of desire” was always channelled through Mukherjee’s personal experiences as a survivor. Indeed, Mukherjee crossed borders as daring as any she had invented for her characters.
Born into a traditional Bengali Brahmin family in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1940, Mukherjee was the second of three girls. The family fortune was built on the pharmaceutical business of her father, Dr Sudhir Lal, a Europe-trained biochemist, who relocated his family to England and Switzerland for three years when Mukherjee was eight. Taught to read, write, and speak in English, Mukherjee gradually achieved perfect bilingual equilibrium between English and Bengali, her native tongue. Her mother, Bina Banerjee, was a homemaker who blossomed in a world that offered her respite from the calumny of having borne three daughters and no sons. The family returned to Calcutta in 1951, with Mukherjee continuing her education in a convent school where she was exposed to the literary staples of a British education — Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, Gujarat in 1961.
Her life changed, irrevocably, when she arrived, aged 21, in a sari and with a scholarship to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She saw cornfields for the first time, but was herself one of very few Indian women in a homogeneously-white Midwest still four years away from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which marked a radical break from previous policies privileging immigrants from northern and western Europe over Asia and other parts of Europe.
Two years and a two-week courtship later, she married fellow student Blaise, an American of Canadian origins, in an impulsive five-minute wedding at a lawyer’s office above a coffee shop where they had just had lunch. Nothing could have been further from the pageantry — and decorum — of the Bengali Hindu arranged marriage that her father was negotiating for her in Calcutta. “By the time you get this”, she telegraphed him, “I’ll already be married”. That risk-taking too paid off; Mukherjee and Blaise went on to share the intimacies of their writing lives as well as marriage for the next 53 years, along the way becoming North America’s power literary couple. An MFA in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 from Iowa followed for Mukherjee.
In 1966, Mukherjee and Blaise and their young son moved to Canada, where they lived — first in Montreal and then Toronto — for 14 years. The couple held respectable academic jobs and soon became rising figures in Canada’s literary scene, counting among their friends Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje. However, although a professor at McGill University and a naturalized Canadian citizen, Mukherjee disclosed in a now iconic essay on the character of Canadian racism, “An Invisible Woman”, that in Toronto she was always seen as the “ethnic” other, “frequently taken for a prostitute or shoplifter” (Mukherjee, 1981: 37). The double trope of (in)visibility became an important motif in her work, influencing the title of her first collection of stories, Darkness (1985). Cultural visibility and institutional erasure again surfaced as the subject of The Sorrow and the Terror (1987), a non-fictional account, co-written with Blaise, of the 1985 terrorist bombing of an Air India flight from Montreal to New Delhi. Although 90 per cent of the 300 passengers killed were Canadian citizens, the Canadian government refused to acknowledge the crash as a Canadian tragedy — the victims were Canadians of Indian ancestry.
The couple, now with their two sons, returned to the US in 1980 to a life without job stability but with the protection of the mechanisms for redress under the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, unavailable at that time in Canada. Mukherjee became a naturalized American citizen in 1988. A year later, she accepted a full professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught creative writing until her retirement in 2013. At the time of her death she was living in New York.
Mukherjee was sufficiently inspired by her characters – and her own life – to make a distinction between expatriation and immigration as two separate responses to dislocation. For Mukherjee, “expatriates” are unable to root themselves to the new homeland as they live in nostalgia for a past identity. The Canadian form of multiculturalism, Mukherjee argued, had foisted expatriation on her. Canada’s mosaic model of immigration, by compartmentalizing difference, worked to entrench separateness by making visible the boundaries between cultures, ultimately rendering minority communities invisible in the national culture. The experience of forced expatriation in Canada also affected her narrative style, compelling her to adopt self-protective omniscience and ironic detachment from her characters. The dual influences of Jane Austen and early V. S. Naipaul are clearly evident in her first two novels, The Tiger’s Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975). It was only when she moved to the US that she was able to become an “immigrant”, someone who was allowed to feel emotional and cultural belonging. Mukherjee’s argument was that the melting pot, unlike the mosaic, constituted a more nuanced “multicolored myth of shared values” (Mukherjee, 1999: 69). Within the melting pot, a nation’s various cultures continually engage in a complex process of fusion and synthesis that blurs the boundaries between “us” and “them”, centre and margin. For these reasons, Mukherjee privileged the non-hierarchical principles of synthesis and crossover intrinsic to “mongrelization” over the segregating impulse of the Canadian mosaic and the assimilationist dangers of the American melting pot.
And so, in keeping with the author’s mongrelized multicultural vision, in “Orbiting”, from The Middlemen and Other Stories collection (1988), it is his Afghan dagger for which Roashan, who has fled the Soviet invasion of Kabul to gut chickens in New York, reaches when he is asked by his Italian-American girlfriend to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. For this collection Mukherjee won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction — the first time the prestigious prize went to a naturalized American.
If Mukherjee’s refusal to accede to the demands of a mainstream, white North America can be attributed to her confident upbringing as a member of the new elite Indian class of 1950s Calcutta, her writerly imagination can trace its origins to her first eight years spent in her crowded family house. Though comfortably middle-class, it was also a joint household of 45 to 50 relatives. The young Mukherjee absorbed and internalized the labyrinthine daily world of commingling stories around her — family dramas, gossip, storytelling from the Ramayana, the everyday noise of beatings and beratings. “I couldn’t distinguish between fact and fantasy”, she wrote in a rare autobiographical essay for Contemporary Authors in 2005. From as young as three, Mukherjee began sketching her own stories as a talisman against her disorienting outer world. Yet the accretion of voices and sounds of this world went on to become an important influence on the multiple narratives crammed with people and the acute ear for dialogue that characterized Mukherjee’s prose.
Her last work, Miss New India (2011), the stand-alone final instalment in a trilogy of novels also comprising Desirable Daughters (2002) and The Tree Bride (2005), continues many of the themes that preoccupied Mukherjee — the mutability of identities, the transformation of societies, and the empowerment of her female characters. But this time, Mukherjee moves her “clear-eyed love of immigration” (Gabriel, 2003: 126) away from the US context to the exuberance and dynamism of a “new” India in the making. Her “middlemen” are the internal migrants created by the rapid changes in the wake of the Indian economic boom of the 1990s. Modern India’s Silicon Valley is a world as frenetic and confounding to small-town Indians as the America of the 1960s must have been to Indian immigrants. The novel tells the story of Anjali, a young villager from the backwater of Bihar, one of the most impoverished states in India, and her rebirth as Angie — the “new Miss India” of the title — as she strikes out on her own, shedding along the way the ancestral dictates of duty to caste and class, to embrace the exhilarating promises of cosmopolitan Bangalore. But America is ever-present in the characters’ accents, clothes, call-centre rituals — and their dream of self-reinvention.
Mukherjee’s enthusiasms were for a world alive to the values of human difference. Those passions remained an integral part of her quest for social and national engagement to the end. It was my privilege to have met her, and Blaise, on two separate occasions when she was in Kuala Lumpur in 2003 on a US State Department-funded “Writers on America” tour. Her speaking events at that time included an interview and a public lecture at my university’s English department where her novels Jasmine and The Holder of the World were primary texts on the undergraduate and postgraduate courses on American Literature that I taught. My students and I will always remember her as a person of beauty and elegance, who laughed easily and warmly, took a genuine interest in our own stories of survival, and answered every question put to her with grace and uncommon generosity.