Mukherjee was born in 1940 into an elite caste level of Calcutta society. A Bengali Brahmin, Mukherjee grew up in a house cluttered with extended family, 40 or 45 people by her own count. In a 1993 interview with Runar Vignission in Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Mukherjee said she "had to drop inside books as a way of escaping crowds."

Mukherjee was educated as a proper Indian girl of a good family: she spoke Bengali her first three years, then entered English schools in Britain and Switzerland. Back in India, she attended the Loretto School run by Irish nuns, and subsequently universities in Calcutta and Baroda, where she earned a master's degree in English and Indian Culture. She immigrated to the United States in 1961 to attend, on scholarship, the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. There, she earned her M.F...