Bharati Mukherjee, (born July 27, 1940, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India–died January z8, 2,017, York, New York, U.S.), Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer  who portrayed in her -writing the cultural changes and alienation in the immigrant experience. Mukherjee was born into a wealthy Calcutta (now Kolkata) family. She attended an Anglicized Bengali sch”c4 from 1944 to 1.948. After three years abroad, the family returned to India. Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and the University of Baroda (MA, 1960. She then entered the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned an M.F.A (Master of Fine Arts). in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1969. In 1966 she moved to Canada, where she lived in Montreal and then, from 1977, in Toronto. In 1980 she settled in the United States and began teaching at the university level. She became a U.S. citizen in 1989, and that year she accepted a position teaching postcolonial and world literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Mukherjee’s work features not only cultural clashes but undercurrents of violence. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), tells of a sheltered Indian woman shocked by her immersion in American culture and, on her return to India, by a changed Calcutta. in Mukherjee’s first book of short fiction, Darkness (1985), many of the stories, including the acclaimed ” The World According to Elsa,” are not only indictments of Canadian racism and traditional Indian views of women but also sharp studies of the edgy inner lives of her characters. The former work, among her best known, centers on a Punjabi woman living in Florida, and the latter tells of a contemporary American woman drawn into the life of a Puritan ancestor who ran off with a Hindu raja. Mukherjee’s later works include Wanting America: Selected Stories (1995) and Leave it to Me (1997), which traces the journey of an American woman abandoned in India as a child and her return to her native land. Desirable Daughters (2002) attracted considerable acclaim for its intricate depictions of Indian caste relations and the immigrant experience of reconciling disparate worldviews. Mukherjee delved further into the family history of the characters from that novel in The Tree Bride (2004), broaching issues of the time-spanning ramifications of colonialism.

Questions:

1. What does Mukherjee mean when she says, ” The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is that trauma of self-transformation” (paragraph is)?

2. Why do you think Mukherjee’s sister feels “used” by attempts to change American laws regarding benefits for legal noncitizens, also do you believe that every immigrant is actually “used” by the host country for the country’s benefit?

3. Do you believe that the different experiences immigrants go through when leaving their native countries make them who they are later in their life or not?