Bharati Mukherjee, Indian-born American writer and academic, Died at 76

  Educator, Writer

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, and died on January 28, 2017.

She was an American writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

She was of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

Later, she travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s.

Mukherjee attended the Loreto School.

Mukherjee received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and subsequently earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961.

Mukherjee next traveled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa.

Mukherjee received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.

Following more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States.

Mukherjee wrote of the decision in “An Invisible Woman,” published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night.

Himself and Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977).

Together they also wrote the 1987 work, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182).

Bharati Mukherjee passed away at 76 years old.