Bharati Mukherjee

One of a new generation of Indian writers who have chosen to settle in the West and write in the English language, Bharati Mukherjee has staked a claim for herself as an "Ellis Island writer," an American storyteller writing about the lives of new migrants to the United States. Author of the novels The Tiger's Daughter (1972), Wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), and The Holder of the World (1993), as well as short-fiction collections and volumes of nonfiction, Mukherjee can be seen as either a leading writer of the Indian diaspora (along with Salman Rushdie, Rhonton Mistry, and Vikram Seth) or a prominent Asian-American writer (in the company of Maxine Hong Kingston and Diana Chang). By describing herself as an "Ellis Island writer," however, Mukherjee is putting herself in the tradition best exemplified by Bernard Malamud. Mukherjee has taken fiction in new directions and can claim to be a major ethnic woman writer of contemporary America. In this thorough, penetrating study of Bharati Mukherjee's published work, Fakrul Alam argues that although the author may see herself as an American writer, the circumstances of her birth, upbringing, and education in India, as much as her marriage to a North American and her education and career on the American continent, are the contexts indispensable to an understanding of her fiction. At her best, Alam concludes, Mukherjee has been able to bring to her firsthand experience of exile, expatriation, and immigration her considerable narrative skills and a lively imagination to produce memorable and colorful tales of the excitement as well as the traumas of adjusting to a new world.