A Short Intro. On Bharti Mukherjee And Her Works

Born in Calcutta in 1940, Bharti Mukherjee married a Canadian in 1963, Clark Blaise who was her class mate at the University of Lowa. She lived in Canada from 1966 to 1980. She became a naturalized Canadian, got Canadian citizenship and lived in Toronto and then in monterial and held teaching positions at the McGill University and Concordia university. However, in 1980 she migrated to the U.S. and became a U.S. citizen in 1988.

During her stay in Canada, Bharti Mukherjee published two novels, The Tiger’s Daughter an 1971 and Wife in 1975. She also co-authored a book of memoirs with her husband, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), on their year-long stay in India in 1973-1974, after a fire in their Montreal home. Other writings in Canada included articles on civil rights and a few short stories later published in the collection Darkness (1985). It is with the collection of these short stories that I am concerned here.

A close look at the short stories contained in the collection Darkness reveals the fact that they are mostly dealing with the theme and representation of conflict. Doubtless, conflict is a natural outcome in any society where there is pluralism of culture prevalent, but without accepting each other’s difference. In fact, culture is more often than not born out of conflict; wherein we find the transformation process of a given social norm. In this sense, the individual, the group, the community, and even the larger society pass through a perpetual flux of change and transformation. Rushdie rightly comments: “How does newness enter the world? By using what is old, we make what is new”. No culture is thus ever fixed and pure, for the very being of culture is grounded in hybridity and fluidity. All this is duly reflected in Mukherjee’s Darkness. For in this short fiction, Bharti Mukherjee articulates palpably the conflictual situation obtaining in the inter-relationships immigrant Indians and Canadians. Thus her works focus more on the darker side of life for immigrants, she can be regarded as one of the few writers who write extensively on immigrants, their issues, and how they can cope with differences in culture and tradition.

Rahul for

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