INDIA ABROAD Feburary 10, 2017 21 INDIAN AMERICAN AFFAIRS
INDIAABROAD.COM
By Visi Tilak
am an American, not an
Asian-American. My rejec-
tion of hyphenation has
been called race treachery,
but it is really a demand that
Bharati Mukherjee died on
Jan. 28 in Manhattan at the age
of 76. The cause was complica-
tions of rheumatoid arthritis and
takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a
stress-induced heart condition,
her husband, writer Clark Blaise
told the New York Times.
She was known for her fiction
about Indian-American immigrants. “Through my fiction, I
make mainstream readers see the
new Americans as complex
human beings, not as just ‘The
Other,’ ” she said in an interview
with the blog, Suprose.
Mukherjee’s first book was “The
Tiger’s Daughter,” published in
1971.
Her third novel, “Jasmine,” is
on many high school and college
reading lists. She has written
eight novels, four short story collections, a memoir and four
works of nonfiction. Two of them
were co-authored with her husband, whom she met when she
was a student at the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. They married
in 1963.
“I've always thought that
there are no accidents in life, and
that all coincidence is convergence,” she told Bill Moyers in a
PBS interview.
“And so, somehow my desire,
unacknowledged desire to be a
permanent member of the new
world where I was having to
make the rules up as I went along
coincided with my falling in love
with someone so totally outside
the Brahmanic pale of civiliza-
tion…”
A memorable encounter with
the author
The first time I met Bharati
Mukherjee was when she came
to do a reading at Wellesley
College in Wellesley,
Massachusetts for the launch of
her book, “Desirable Daughters.”
I was taken by her piercing black
eyes, her gorgeous smile and
most of all, her self-assured poise
and personality. Being a huge fan
of her work, I helped a literary
conference in Boston, “The Muse
& the Marketplace,” invite her
and her husband to present two
independent workshops. Her
workshop room was packed with
an enthralled audience. I
watched the standing-room-only
audience take in the elegance
and authority of
this short, unassuming woman
who was thought-provoking and
elicited many conversations.
Bharati
Mukherjee has said
in many interviews, as she did to
me, that there are
Indian writers and
then there are American writers
who write about their experiences. She considered herself an
American writer who wrote
about her experiences as an
Indian-American immigrant and
those of others that she came
across.
Ideas came to her from the
world around her. She said,
“there’s hardly a moment when
I’m not seeing a story in real-life
incidents swirling around me and
in conversations I overhear.
Because I never mastered the art
of driving, I’m a veteran user of
public transportation. My ‘fail-
ing’ as a driver has happy conse-
quences for me as a writer. On
buses, street cars and BART -- the
rapid transit system I take to
travel between San Francisco
where I live and Berkeley where I
teach —I am surrounded by, and
drawn into conversation with,
large numbers of fellow-riders. I
can’t help imagining the life-sto-
ries of people with whom I have
such chance encounters.”
The idea for her
novel, “Miss New
India,” published
in 2011, came to
her when she was
getting a credit
card activated over
the phone.
Outsourcing was in
its early stage, and
at that time several
U.S. companies
that outsourced
routine customer support func-
tions insisted that their overseas
call-center agents, who were
non-Americans sitting in cubicles
in mid-sized towns on a distant
continent, not disclose their loca-
tion to U.S.-based customers. She
said, “The call-center agent who
processed the re-activation of my
credit card identified herself by a
common two-syllabic Anglo-
American first name, and spoke
idiomatic American English with
an accent that I recognized as
Indian. I felt an affinity because
she sounded Indian. But when I
asked her if she were talking to
me from India, she did her best
to pass herself off as a U.S.-based
American. I am an immigrant
who writes about immigrant
identities in flux. I couldn’t help
but be intrigued by the identity-
role-playing required of this call-
center employee.” From this was
born “Miss New India,” a novel
about call center outsourcing and
the struggles of one young
woman to fit into a new trans-
forming society in Bangalore.
In the Bill Moyers interview,
Bharati Mukherjee said, “Yes.
You don't know how much of the
Old World thought patterns to
get rid of or to allow to wither
away, and how much of the 21st
century in the United States with
all its frenzy disruptions to
adopt. And like myself, my characters are always in between.
They are trying to balance the
two and sometimes the scales tilt
one way, sometimes another. But
if I were finding an absolute fixed
balance, I think I would be a less
interesting person and a more
tiresome writer. It's that constant
disruption, not knowing what I
want, where I belong, that feeds
my energy.
“I love every phase of the
writing process,” she told me.
“There are so many ideas for
novels, and characters, jostling
each other in my head that part
of the pleasure is discovering
which character speaks to me
with the most urgency and inti-
macy. While I am writing a story
or novel I actually ‘inhabit’ the
lives of my characters. If I have
to just choose one aspect of writ-
ing as my most favorite, it’s the
draft-by-draft ‘thickening’
process—the sinking deeper and
deeper into the characters’ emo-
tions; understanding better what
causes them to hurl themselves
into the adventures they do; rec-
ognizing, and if necessary
strengthening, the aesthetic pat-
terns already hiding under the
draft’s surface.”
An avid reader, she said in an
interview with Suprose, “I can’t
bear to part with any of my
books. I have wall-to-wall book-
shelves in every room and every
hallway. I am interested in non-
fiction as well as fiction. For
inspiration, I keep the works of
Flaubert, Hawthorne, Conrad,
Chekhov, Babel, Shakespeare,
within easy reach of my desk. I
don’t have to open any of these
books to be inspired by them.”
What inspired Bharati
Mukherjee to write? She replied,
“I write to create ideal worlds; I
live to realize them.”
Visi Tilak is a fiction and non-fiction
writer based in Ashland,
Massachusetts. She can be reached
at visitilak@gmail.com
I
She Wrote to ‘Create Ideal Worlds’
Bharati Mukherjee, author of “Jasmine,” other novels, dies at 76
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