Indian-born author Bharati Mukherjee didn’t learn English as her first language, but it provided the best path for her self- expression.
“It was so much easier for me to live an imaginary life in English,” Mukherjee says. “I was free to invent, free to disassociate myself from the taboos . . . the social strictures, the class strictures, of my personal life.”
“Since then, I found that I can write fiction in English and not my mother tongue,” she says.
The 69-year-old author will be honored for acclaimed novels like “The Tree Bride” and “The Holder of the World” on Thursday with the 2010 Evil Companions Literary Award at the Oxford Hotel.
The award pays tribute to a group of Denver writers who gathered in the 1950s and ’60s and fancied themselves the “Evil Companions.” Past award winners include T. Coraghessan Boyle, Annie Proulx and Pam Houston.
Mukherjee, currently a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, says winning literary awards can impact a writer’s career — and the culture at large.
She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for “The Middleman and Other Stories,” a prize that gave her a forum to speak on issues integral to her fiction — immigration, women’s rights and modern-day prejudice.
Those topics, she says, weren’t “recognized as part of public discourse,” at the time.
They’ve remained critical to her fiction, stories about women torn between cultures — and identities. Her novels provide a view of what it means to be an American from an inquisitive immigrant.
The author moved from India to England as a girl, and later spent significant time in Canada before becoming an American citizen. Along the way she felt conflicted about her cultural identity and suffered the emotional scars left by racist comments.
She says knew she was destined to be a writer from an early age, but that was partly due to family obligations. She grew up in a traditional Bengali household during the 1950s, a time when children were steered to a particular vocation.
“You had to know, especially if you were a male child. Your parent had to decide what track you’d be on,” she recalls. “The only school my parents would have thought to put me in offered English and French as the only majors. I didn’t have a choice to say, ‘I’m gonna become a doctor.’ That came with the next generation.”
The young Mukherjee read voraciously as a young girl, devouring Russian novels available inexpensively in her neighborhood.
“These Russian families were so much like my crazy, dysfunctional Bengali family, so it didn’t seem strange at all,” she says.
Later, as a developing author, she turned to her own life to power her narratives.
“I found myself solving, through fiction, the emotional, social, racial and gender problems I had to suffer with in real life,” she says.
Mukherjee’s fiction often involves intensive research, pointing to the 11 years it took to complete the sprawling novel “The Holder of the World” (1993), a spin on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” that darts between two centuries.
The rigors of that novel couldn’t compare to the fallout she experienced after writing the nonfiction book “The Sorrow and the Terror” (1987) with her husband, Clark Blaise.
The book investigated the downing of an Air India Flight in 1985 that killed 329 people. Confronting terrorism meant she was suddenly the target of death threats.
“If I had known, I don’t know if I would have guts to undertake it,” she says, adding she “fully expected” to open her door one day and see someone wielding a weapon on her doorstep. “But given my personality I suspect I’d do it again.”
Her career is calmer today, between writing and teaching classes like her current workshop on personal essays.
“I’m absolutely bowled over, blown away by the talent in this class,” she says. Her students, some of whom come from broken homes, are working through their issues via fiction.
“It’s about surviving the cultural and media influences,” she says.
