The management of grief by bharati mukherjee themes

Title: Bharati Mukherjee By: Delaney, Bill, Identities & Issues in Literature,

Database: Literary Reference Center Plus

Bharati Mukherjee Born: July 27, 1940; Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India

Principal Works - Bharati Mukherjee

long fiction The Tiger’s Daughter, 1972 Wife, 1975 Jasmine, 1989 The Holder of the World, 1993 Leave It to Me, 1997 Desirable Daughters, 2002 The Tree Bride, 2004

nonfiction Kautilya’s Concept of Diplomacy, 1976 Days and Nights in Calcutta, 1977 (with Clark Blaise) The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, 1987 (with Blaise) Political Culture and Leadership in India: A Study of West Bengal, 1991 Regionalism in Indian Perspective, 1992 Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee, 2009 (Bradley C. Edwards, editor)

short fiction Darkness, 1985 “The Management of Grief”, 1988 The Middleman, and Other Stories, 1988

Author Profile

Bharati Mukherjee was born to an upper-caste Bengali family and received an English education. The most important event of her life occurred in her early twenties, when she received a scholarship to attend the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Her fiction reflects the experimental techniques fostered at such influential creative writing schools.

At the University of Iowa, Mukherjee met Clark Blaise, a Canadian citizen and fellow student. When they moved to Canada she became painfully aware of her status as a nonwhite immigrant in a nation less tolerant of newcomers than the United States. The repeated humiliations she endured made her hypersensitive to the plight of immigrants from the Third World. She realized that immigrants may lose their old identities but not be able to find new identities as often unwelcome strangers.

Mukherjee, relying on her experience growing up, sought her salvation in education. She obtained a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature and moved up the career ladder at various colleges and universities in the East and Midwest until she became a professor at Berkeley in 1989. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, was published in 1972. In common with all her fiction, it deals with the feelings of exile and identity confusion that are experienced by immigrants. Being female as well as an immigrant, Mukherjee noted that opportunities for women were so different in America that she was exhilarated and bewildered. Many of her best stories, dealing with women experiencing gender crises, have a strong autobiographical element.

Darkness, her first collection of stories, was well reviewed, but not until the publication of The Middleman and Other Stories did she become internationally prominent. Critics have recognized that she is dealing with perhaps the most important contemporary phenomenon, the population explosion and flood of immigrants from have-not nations. Mukherjee makes these newcomers understandable to themselves and to native citizens, while shedding light on the identity problems of all the anonymous, inarticulate immigrants of America’s past.

Her protagonists are not the “huddled masses” of yesteryear; they are talented, multilingual, enterprising, often affluent men and women who are transforming American culture. Mukherjee’s compassion for these newcomers has made her one of the most important writers of her time.

Essay by: Bill Delaney

Bibliography

Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996. Looks at India, women, and East Indian Americans in literature. Includes a bibliography and index.

Ascher, Carol. “After the Raj.” Review of The Middleman and Other Stories, by Bharati Mukherjee. Women’s Review of Books 6, no. 12 (1989): 17, 19. Using illustrative detail from six of the eleven short stories in this collection, Ascher shows how in dealing with the immigrant experience “the strategy of short stories has served [Mukherjee] well.”

Bowen, Deborah. “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief.’” Ariel 28 (July, 1997): 47-60. Argues that in the story, the assumption of moral universalism is a crucial precursor to the problems of negotiating social knowledge. Mukherjee addresses questions of cultural particularization by showing how inadequately translatable are institutionalized expressions of concern.

Chua, C. L. “Passages from India: Migrating to America in the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee.” In Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Drake, Jennifer. “Looting American Culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s Immigrant Narratives.” Contemporary Literature 40 (Spring, 1999): 60-84. Argues that assimilation is portrayed as cultural looting, cultural exchange, or a willful and sometimes costly negotiation in her stories; notes that Mukherjee rejects the nostalgia of hyphenated “Americans” and their acceptable stories and portrays instead settlers, Americans who want to be American — not sojourners, tourists, guest workers, or foreigners.

Fakrul, Alam. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Ispahani, Mahnaz. “A Passage from India.” Review of Darkness, by Bharati Mukherjee. The New Republic 14 (April, 1986): 36-39. Ispahani believes that the short stories in this collection “treat the classical theme of diaspora — of exile and emigration.” She singles out five stories for analysis to demonstrate her point. The review includes a brief comment on Mukherjee’s style.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “American Dreamer.” Mother Jones, January/February, 1997. Depicted literally as wrapped in an American flag while standing in a cornfield, Mukherjee speaks to her passionate sense of herself as an American writer and citizen.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists.” The New York Times Book Review, August 28, 1988, 1, 28-29. An enthusiastic celebration of those American writers who eschew minimalism to paint the dynamic picture of an increasingly diverse populace and culture.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “Interview.” In Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Mukherjee discusses the origins of her stories and the process by which they are composed. She criticizes Marxist and other social critics who reduce stories to sociology and anthropology.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Interview by Geoff Hancock. The Canadian Fiction Magazine 59 (1987): 30-44. In this important interview, Mukherjee discusses her family background, formative influences, and work. She provides illuminating comments on her fictional characters, themes, and voice.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “Mother Teresa.” Time, June 14, 1999, 88-90. Commentary on Calcutta’s most famous citizen by another child of that city, whose impressions of Mother Teresa changed over time from those of bemusement to skepticism to profound admiration.

Nazareth, Peter. “Total Vision.” Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 110 (1986): 184-191. Nazareth analyzes Mukherjee’s first collection of short stories, Darkness, to show how she has distinguished herself by becoming “a writer of the other America, the America ignored by the so-called mainstream: the America that embraces all the peoples of the world both because America is involved with the whole world and because the whole world is in America.”

Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993. A critical study of Mukherjee’s fiction. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Sant-Wade, Arvindra, and Karen Marguerite Radell. “Refashioning the Self: Immigrant Women in Bharati Mukherjee’s New World.” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Winter, 1992): 11-17. An analysis of “The Tenant,” “Jasmine,” and “A Wife’s Story” as stories in which immigrant women refashion themselves and are reborn. In each story the women’s sense of possibility clashes with a sense of loss, yet their exuberant determination attracts the reader to them and denies them the power of pity.

Scheer-Schäzler, Brigitte. “‘The Soul at Risk’: Identity and Morality in the Multicultural World of Bharati Mukherjee.” In Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literature in English, edited by Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. Discusses Mukherjee’s approach to identity and morality, a common theme of immigration literature. Discusses the tensions between the monocultural self and its multiculturally transformed versions in her writing.

Schlosser, Donna. “Autobiography, Identity, and Self-Agency: Narrative Voice in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.” English Language Notes 38 (December, 2000): 75-92. Analyzes Jasmine as a fictionalized autobiography.

Sivaramkrishna, M. “Bharati Mukherjee.” In Indian English Novelists: An Anthology of Critical Essays, edited by Madhusudan Prasad. New Delhi: Sterling, 1982. Sivaramkrishna offers a perceptive analysis of the theme of disintegration and displacement in Mukherjee’s first two novels, The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife. Her protagonists, he argues, “are victims of life which is visionless because it is voiceless.”

Vignisson, Runar. “Bharati Mukherjee: An Interview.” Span 3-4 (1993). An expansive discussion covering Mukherjee’s childhood, her experiences in Canada and the United States, her evolution as a writer, her views on feminism, and some of the ideas informing her novel Jasmine.