Bharati Mukherjee

Jasmine, a young widow in India, moves to the United States to begin a new life

Jasmine

Beigh Masters stumbles upon the records of a remote ancestor and discovers a remarkable woman related only by blood before a persistent investigation lends Beigh an unexpectedly intimate understanding. Reprint.

The Holder of the World

Taken under the wing of an expat teacher for her ambition and talent, Anjali Bose hopes to escape unfavorable prospects and falls in with a crowd of young people in Bangalore, where she endeavors to confront her past and reinvent herself. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of India: In Word and Image. 25,000 first printing.

Miss New India

Darkness

The Management of Grief

Desirable Daughters is set in America and India equally. It is both the portrait of a traditional Brahmin Indian family and a contemporary story of an American woman who has in many ways broken with the tradition but still remains tied to her native country. An intricate mystery that unfolds throughout this compelling novel, it creates both intrigue and suspense but also initiates a quest for identity.

A Novel

Desirable Daughters

a novel

Desirable daughters

Newcomers to America struggle with cultural transformation, including an Iraqi Jew who lands in Queens, New York, and a Vietnam vet returning to a Florida more foreign than the Asia he left behind.

The Middleman and Other Stories

The first naturalized citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940), born into a rigid hierarchy as a Bengali Brahmin and raised in the elite of Calcutta society, joined the American masses by choice. This journey from a privileged yet circumscribed life to one of free will and risk supplied the experiences she has turned into literature. From her first interview, originally published over three decades ago in her native tongue Bengali in the Calcutta journal Desh and appearing here for the first time in English, to an in-depth interview in 2007 granted specifically for this collection, this volume provides a candid look at the woman who has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature.

Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee

Clark Blaise

In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.

Days and Nights in Calcutta

A Study of West Bengal

Political Culture and Leadership in India

Study of the concept as expounded in Arthaśāstra, ancient work on Indian polity, by Cāṇakya, also known as Kauṭalya.

A New Interpretation

Kautilya's Concept of Diplomacy

Hastily married off to Amit Basu, an engineer about to emigrate to the United States, Dimple Dasgupta dreams of a glamorous existence in America. By the author of Jasmine. Reprint.

Wife

"A very fine writer, funny, intelligent, versatile and, on occasion, unexpectedly profound." --The Washington Post Book World "MUKHERJEE IS FEARLESS . . . DARING AND WITTY . . . Take the wild ride with Debby DiMartino from Albany to San Francisco, from lost child to masked avenger." --The Boston Globe "POWERFULLY WRITTEN . . . Debby has no memory of her birth parents. All she knows is that she was born in a remote Indian village, the daughter of a hippie back-packing mother and a mysterious Eurasian father, both of whom have disappeared almost without a trace. . . . Her quest for her biological parents turns into an obsession. . . . Leave It to Me . . . shows Mukherjee at the peak of her craft. . . . Mixing the Greek myth of Electra with the Indian myth of Devi, she sends Devi/Debby careening down on the Bay Area like an elemental force of vengeance." --San Francisco Chronicle "DEVI IS A BRILLIANT CREATION--hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious--through whom Bharati Mukherjee, with characteristic and shameless ingenuity, is laying claim to speak for an America that isn't 'other' at all." --The New York Times Book Review "STUNNING . . . An astute, ironic, and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Leave It to Me

"Mukherjee writes with beautiful precision and just the right density of detail. There is an unlikely marriage of Jane Austen and Nathaniel West in her words." THE VILLAGE VOICE "Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads." So begins the wry story of an obedient daughter of middle-class Indian parents who is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Driven first to shock and then to despair, Dimple lives in a waking dream. And when her fantasies take a violent turn, she wonders where wishes end and reality begins....

The Tree Bride

“An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative.”—Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography....”

Holder of the World

"When Tara Banerjee Cartwright, the heroine of this elegant first novel, returns to her native Calcutta for a summer, she finds she must not only become an intermediary between two cultures but also bear witness to the downfall of her own class. Tara is the adored, beautiful, and intellectually gifted daughter of Bengal Tiger Banerjee, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer, who is, in turn, descended from Hari Lal, a poet and physician who once quelled a Hindu-Moslem riot. Tiger Banerjee has sought to broaden his daughter's horizons by sending her to Vassar and to graduate school in America, where she has met her American husband, David Cartwright. Tara's trip home forces her to come to terms with her two worlds--and the growing realization that the Brahmin class to which she was born is about to undergo a siege and possibly suffer ultimate defeat. The Banerjees' house on Camac Street, cooled every hour by a spray of scented rose water, symbolizes the elegant, protected atmosphere in which Tara grew up. Outside, in the bustling alleys of Calcutta, starving naked children eat yoghurt and rice off the sidewalks and swarms of hoodlums call for revolution. Tara, who adores her handsome if naive father and her religious mother, is shocked at her own feelings of distaste for aspects of her heritage--the funeral pyres, the teeming life of the slums, and the intensity of the masses' needs. Bharati Mukherjee, who writes with delicate irony and sharp-eyed perception, has painted a memorable portrait of a refined yet aware young woman who is entirely sensible to the anomalies of her position. As Tara strives to recall her husband's liberal ideas, she at the same time views with sympathy the absurdity and vulnerability of her high-caste friends' lives. 'While her personal story remains the foreground of the novel, it is the fate of her class and all of India that hangs in the balance. Sensitive to the vibrations, the sounds, and the smells of Indian life, Bharati Mukherjee has given her novel a special texture--like that of the silk lining to a rajah's pocket. Her vision of India's destiny hovers--slightly off center--always quizzical and penetrating."--Jacket.

Bharati Mukherjee

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