There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
Bharati MukherjeeBengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'
Bharati MukherjeeIn India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
Bharati MukherjeeThrough my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
Bharati MukherjeeA farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.
Bharati MukherjeeOne of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home, where the young woman from a nearby village, who had been hired to baby sit newborn twins, suddenly said after two weeks of work: 'I'm sorry, this is too much work, I'm going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.'
Bharati Mukherjee