Bharati Mukherjee was born to a wealthy Hindu family on July 27, 1940 in Calcutta India (Shilpi, 1998). She was the second of the three daughters of a chemist Sudhur Lal and her mother was Bina Mukharfee. She spent her first eight years with her extended family of about 30 -40 people. She has a family that is supportive and always loves education, so she and her siblings always have abundant opportunities to pursue their academic career. She schooled at Anglicized Bengale School between 1944 and 1948. Later, her father relocated to England due to change in job and she lived there until 1951.
This gave her the chances to explore, expand, and acquire more skills in English language. By the time she was ten years old, she had written many short stories and had even known that she was going to be a writers. She graduated with B. A honour from university of Calcutta in 1959, she also did her master in English and Ancient culture from University of Baroda in1961 (Shilpi, 1998). She was awarded a scholarship from university of Iowa to study and earn her M. F. A. in the year she got married a Canadian writers Clerk Blaise. The courtship of which was not up to 2 weeks.
She later got her PhD in English and comparative intensive from University of Iowa in 1969. Prior to her PhD, she travelled with her husband to Canada and became a naturalist citizen. In Canada, she had bad times and the life there was unbearable for her because of their discrimination to some certain people called ‘visible minority’ (University of Minnesota, 2006). Having gone through many things in Canada, she decided to relocate to the United States She has been described as a distinguish woman, who had gone through a lot both the good times and the bad times.
She has stated it clearly that she is an American writer of Indian origin and that she utterly rejects the hyphenation of her background i. e. India-American writer. She called herself an immigrant in the country of immigrant. She is currently been celebrated as a professor of English language in the University of California. Achievements She focused mainly on the ‘phenomenon of migration. ’(Shilpi, 1998) which revealed the significance of people migrating from one country to another and the feelings they always feels i. e. feelings of alienation.
It also reflects Indian culture. Her writings were based on her personal; experience first as an exile from India, an immigrant to Canada and then an immigrant to the United States. Presently she has authored about eight novels and many short stories and at the same time co-authored two books with her husband. She was the first naturalised U. S citizen to win the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards for best fiction (http://www. ou. edu/worldlit/neustadt-2008jurors. htm). While at Canada, she was able to come up with two good novels despite her condition then i.
e. the Tigers Daughter-which describe the story of a girl who went back to her home town India after many years of loosing contact with home. But all she met and gained was poverty and penury. This story described her personal experience in the first year of her marriage, and her venture back into her home town. Later she wrote invisible woman and the sorrow and terror in conjunction with her husband, to describe her personal experience when she was in the racist land of Canada to the extent that she was still humiliated even as a professor (Shilpi, 1998).
Then when she got to united state she wrote one of her short stories ‘isolated incidents’ in which she critically review the Canadians perspective about people moving into their country. She even confirmed how the government official’s maltreated some people from other race. In her second book titled Wife; where she described a woman who out of fear and anxiety murdered her husband and later killed herself when she was suppressed by some men. She talked about her experience when she was caught between two worlds: her home and culture, and how she coped with it.
She is gifted at writing novel, short stories, essays, travel literature and journalism. In one of her collections of short stories; Darkness: she focused on the southern Asia that desired success and want to be stable, but, fail to resolve and address the issues of prejudice and injustice. This later followed by the book that actually brought her into a lime light: the Middleman and other Stories which won her an award. This was then followed by Jasmine which was the most widespread and the most read of her novels. Her recent works comprise the ‘Holder of the World’, which was publish in 1993 and ‘leave it to me’ which was produced by 1997.
She has faced many critics solely on the issues she normally addresses, and even she has been criticised many times by the Indian writers that in her book she always paint India as a land that has no hope or prospects. Conclusion Having gone through the rigorous discrimination in Canada, she had found a way of reaching out and explaining the whole situation in her writings. This has help to greatly reduce the level of treatment the society at large expresses to their immigrants and this will also proffer good and healthy relationships among different tribes.
REFERENCES: Shilpi P (1998): Bharati Mukherjee: http://www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/Mukherjee. html: April 25, 2008 University of Minnesota (2006): Bharati Mukherjee http://voices. cla. umn. edu/vg/Bios/entries/mukherjee_bharati. html: April 25, 2008 Bharati Mukherjee http://www. bbc. co. uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/mukherjee_being. shtml: April 25, 2008 University of Oklahoma (May, 2008): Jurors for the 2008 Neustadt Prize: http://www. ou. edu/worldlit/neustadt-2008jurors. htm: April 25, 2008 Bharati Mukherjee (Sept. , 1998): Leave it to me http://www. randomhouse. com/catalog/display. pperl? isbn=9780449003961&view=rg: April 26, 2008.