Bharati Mukherjee  (b. 1940) Orbiting LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940)  Born in Calcutta, India, Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959), the University of Baroda (M.A., 1961), and the University of Iowa, where she took an M.F.A. (1963) and a Ph.D. (1969). In 1963 she married Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer and professor, and joined the faculty at McGill University in Montreal. In 1973, Mukherjee and her husband visited India and kept separate diaries of the trip, published as Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). The diaries reveal marked differences in their responses: Mukherjee found her home environs, especially the status of women, worse than she remembered, while Blaise, after an initial revulsion at the squalor and poverty, found India a fascinating and attractive culture compared to the West. Mukherjee "left Canada after fifteen years due to the persistent effects of racial prejudice against people of my national origin," and joined the faculty in Skidmore College in New York. Later she moved to Queens College of the City University of New York. Her fiction frequently explores the tensions inevitable in intercultural relationships. Her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter (1972), deals with the disappointment of an expatriate's return to India. In her second novel, Wife (1975), a psychologically abused woman finally kills her husband. Her recent works include The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics' Award, The Holder of the World (1993), and Leave It to Me (1997).