SOURCE: “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” in Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, University Press of Mississippi, 1997, pp. 189-98.

In the following interview, Mukherjee discusses the writing process, violence, feminism, and how her stories help to understand the immigrant experience.

Born in Calcutta, Bharati Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta and Baroda where she received a master's degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture. In 1961 she came to America to attend the Writer's Workshop and receive both the M.F.A. and the Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Mukherjee represents and writes about the (in her words) hybridization of the new American. In examining this new identity, she says she wants to explore the consciousness of those who are not of one ethnic group or another, but of many different ethnicities. She is the author of two volumes of short stories...