SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Novelist and short story writer Bharati Mukherjee, a professor emerita at UC Berkeley whose vast body of works, amongst other things, examined the Indian American immigrant experience, has died. She was 76 years old.
Mukherjee died Saturday at New York University Hospital, said her husband, author Clark Blaise. She had rheumatoid arthritis for the past few years, he said, and suffered from cardiomyopathy.
“She begged for death,” Blaise told the San Francisco Chronicle. “She was really not in pain as such, but she realized there was no turning around.”
A native of Kolkata, India, she wrote several celebrated and influential works that chronicled the lives of Indians on the subcontinent and in the United States.
Her books include “The Tiger’s Daughter” (1972), “Wife” (1975), “Darkness” (1985), “Wanting America: Selected Stories” (1995), “Leave It to Me” (1997), “Desirable Daughters” (2002), “The Tree Bride” (2004) and “Miss New India” (2011). “The Middleman and Other Stories” (1988) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Raised in India, Bharati traveled to the U.S. in the 1960s. She earned her master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1963 and later a doctorate. She and Blaise met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had been married for 53 years.
After retiring from UC Berkeley in 2013, Mukherjee and her husband sold their house in San Francisco last year, Blaise said, and moved to New York, where they have had a home for 35 years. She had also taught at Queens College and City University of New York.
