The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the major novelists of Indian diaspora who have achieved enviable positions within a comparatively short creative span. As an expatriate in the United States, she has captured evocatively the Indian immigrant experience in her five novels and two collections of short-fiction. The creative odyssey that started with The Tiger’s Daughter (1972) and produced Leave it to me (1997) recently has kept her seriously involved in exploring the complexities of cross-cultural inter-actions. The present volume is the first full-length study of Mukherjee’s creative corpus from a cross-cultural perspective. The book, divided in six chapters, opens with an exhaustive account of the major concepts of culture and it ingeniously traces the nature of formative influences on her psyche in the second chapter. Mukherjee’s fiction has been examined in three well-marked phases—expatriation, transition, and immigration—in three substantive chapters. The quality of cultural conflict in all its multiplicity forms the crux of her accomplishments as a creative artist. She has an esteemed place in the luminous galaxy of Indian men of letters writing abroad with native ethos providing them a living ambience. The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective marks a milestone in the critical scholarship on the Third World Literature.