Her name, Bharati Mukherjee, announces to anyone who understands the Bengali language, both the region-Bengal-and her caste-Brahman.
Mukherjee, 50, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award in 1988 for ”The Middleman and Other Stories” and author of the novel ”Jasmine”
(Fawcett Crest, $4.95), had an unusual chance to examine her life midstream. And that examination became one of the major turning points in her life.
”My husband and I, in an attempt to recover from two devastating incidents-our house burned down and our car was totaled in an accident-went to my native India in the early `70s on a sabbatical,” she says.
”We had a contract from Doubleday to keep a journal of our sabbatical year, and my part of that record became an accidental autobiography.
”It showed me that my life was divided into three disproportionate parts: before the age of 8, when I lived with my extended family; from 8 to 21, when we lived as a single family; and since the age of 21, when I have lived in the West.
”It also forced me to come to terms with who I was: Did I want to stay in a biracial marriage and was I going to remain an expatriate-that is, someone who thinks of herself as primarily Indian but happens to be in residence in North America because she accidentally fell in love with and married an American? Or, in my own identity, had I now become primarily a New World person as opposed to an Indian?”
This ”accidental” autobiography, ”Days and Nights in Calcutta,” which she wrote with her husband, Clark Blaise, was published in 1977 and is being made into a feature film.
Her first eight years, she says, were spent in a very middle-class, very orthodox, Bengali Brahman family in Calcutta. (Brahmans are the highest of the four castes of the ancient Indian religious and social system.)
Her father was the head of the household, which consisted of at least 40 people-uncles, cousins, poor relatives, servants, hangers-on. Her own nuclear family-her parents, two sisters and herself-had one room in the house.
”There was never any sense of privacy,” she says. ”The extended family provided a sense of community; your primary identity was a community identity, and you were trained to think of privacy as selfishness. Closing a door or wanting space for yourself was considered a selfish act.”
Mukherjee says that reading, however, was an acceptable way of dropping into private space, and so she read voraciously. By the time she was 8 she had read extensively from Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevski and Maxim Gorki in Bengali translation.
”I credit that reading of non-Bengali literature as part of my formative experience and part of my growth as a writer.”
When she was 8, she went with her parents and sisters to England and Europe for three years. This, she says, was the biggest, most important change in her life.
And the reason for the change was that for the first time, her mother was allowed to work, which made her mother feel so much better about herself. And the family was no longer just one little cog in a huge network.
”That, I think, is when my mother`s desire for more individual expression articulated itself for the first time,” Mukherjee says.
Mukherjee`s double doctorate in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa and her three master`s degrees (in English and in ancient Indian culture from the University of Baroda in India and a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa), she credits to her mother`s ambitions for her daughters.
Her mother had been an excellent high school student, but she married as a teenager, and brides of her generation were not allowed to go to university. She felt a deprivation from that loss, and also, in their orthodox family, was made to feel inferior because she did not bear a son.
As a result her mother insisted that her daughters be educated in the best schools and be able to make decisions on their own.
”The term feminist seems inappropriate for my mother,” says Mukherjee,
”and yet she was one. The battles that she conquered were much bigger than the over-articulated battles that the Gloria Steinems of the `70s conquered.
”The difference is in the enormity of space that non-European women have covered in the same time. Despite her influence, I assumed, however, that I would marry a man chosen by my father and make my life in Calcutta.
”When we came back to Calcutta my mother insisted that while we continue paying for the rest of the family, we physically move out of the household. That was the first physical, self-assertive dislocation in my mother`s life and, therefore, in my life.
”She took some verbal and physical abuse because she dared say she wanted to break away from the household. I have seen wife-battering up close.”
The next portion of Mukherjee`s life in Calcutta, in the 1950s, was a magical time, she says.
She led a privileged existence in terms of finances and caste. She went to a school run by Irish-Catholic nuns where the syllabus and exams were administered by Cambridge University.
Her father made all the decisions, and she and her sisters were very protected, surrounded by bodyguards and domestic staff.
Then, about the time that her father`s financial empire collapsed, he decided to send his overprotected daughters to schools in the United States, a country he didn`t know much about.
Mukherjee thinks he expected them to come back with their fancy degrees, a kind of womanly accomplishment, then marry the men he picked for them. But it didn`t happen. The lives of all three daughters changed.
”In my case,” Mukherjee says, ”I came to the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1961 and met a fellow writer, Clark Blaise, in 1963. We fell in love and got married after a two-week courtship. We decided to go through with the wedding rather impulsively, on our lunch break.
”In India you can`t be a free spirit or reinvent your identity because your name gives it away. That`s why America, with its opportunity to change names and cancel one`s past and make up a new history or try out different roles, is so attractive to the character in my novel, Jasmine, and to myself.”
The first two years Mukherjee spent in America she was like any other well brought-up foreign student, she says.
”I roomed with a Chinese woman from Singapore who had a similar kind of post-colonial background, so we could communicate right away.
”It was wonderful to know that no one knew who I was, who my family was. That meant I could make mistakes, do anything I wanted, without censure, whereas in India one was always watched. Family honor was continually at stake. I`d never even been in a room with males at parties, in social situations.
”The very loose atmosphere of a co-educational classroom shocked me. The way people talked, the books that we read. I`d never even pronounced the word `sex.` So one of the things America has liberated me to do is write about sensuality. I would have been a writer if I had lived in India, but I would have been a very different kind of writer.”
Mukherjee and Blaise lived for a time in Canada, where they each had full professorships at universities. They left Canada, she says, at a time when rising prejudice made their lives difficult.
And she wanted to write novels that she felt were struggling to be born. This meant they had to take whatever visiting writerships they could get in the United States.
”The cost of protesting civil rights,” she says, ”was financially and psychologically very high. But I don`t regret having made the decision to move to the United States, where there has been a long history of discrimination but also a long history of civil rights legislation.”
Mukherjee`s association with Iowa and the American Midwest is reflected in ”Jasmine,” which is set in part in Iowa and says much about America, Mukherjee says. Her two sons graduated from high school in Iowa and one graduated from the University of Iowa.
Mukherjee now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, while her husband remains in Iowa City.
”Ours has been a long-standing commuter marriage. Until last year we had hoped that some day when our ships came in we would be able to find equal jobs in the same city.
”Now we realize that our ships have come in in different towns. It`s a very expensive way to conduct one`s domestic life. My husband is the director of the Iowa International Writing Program in Iowa City. And I have a very nice professorship at Berkeley.
”We`ve been in this commuter phase of our marriage since 1978. It was very hard in the beginning. I`ve been married a long time, and in some ways I think the marriage survived the early years of cultural disparateness because I was an Asian wife who had been trained to adapt. So I was probably making more compromises.
”But I was also lucky that we were always so poor and so busy and Clark and I were such good friends, as well as spouses, that we never had rigid gender roles assigned, as did my American and Canadian feminist friends.
”We were always a four-career family because we were both writers and both professors. So whoever had time looked after the children and did the shopping and cooking. And I think that saved us and made us very different.”
