Literary Birthday – 27 July – Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee was born on 27 July 1940 and died on 28 January 2017.
Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
- Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
- I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
- What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
- I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, ‘Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.’
- Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise.
- As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.
- The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.
- Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just ‘The Other’.
- Humour’s the hardest thing to translate.
Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-born American novelist and short story writer. Mukherjee’s writing explores cultural changes, alienation, and the immigrant experience. Her works often feature cultural clashes and undercurrents of violence. In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley. She is the author of Jasmine and Miss New India.
Source for Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MukherjeeL3.jpg
by Amanda Patterson
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