She spent her first eight years as part of a large extended family. Shortly after India gained independence, for two and a half years she lived with her parents and two sisters in London, England, where she became fluent in English. In 1951 the family returned to Calcutta, after a period in Basel, Switzerland, and Mukherjee attended the English-speaking Loreto Convent School. Her father operated a factory which resembled the one run by Tara Banerjee's father in Mukherjee's first novel,
The Tiger's Daughter, and her family's prosperity gave them protection from the poverty of Calcutta's streets. Mukherjee took a B.A. in honors English at the University of Calcutta in 1959 and an M.A. in English and ancient Indian culture at the University of Baroda in 1961.
As her sisters had done, Mukherjee went to the United States to study, going with a P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship to the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. At Iowa she received an M.F.A. and met Clark Blaise, a novelist, whom she married, North American-style, one lunch hour in September 1963. The couple has two sons, Bart and Bernard (the younger son is named after their friend, the novelist Bernard Malamud). In 1966 they moved to Montreal, where Mukherjee became a lecturer in English at McGill.
This is a free page. This page contains 196 words. This
biography contains 1,713 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Bharati Mukherjee Access Pass.
