Nov 14, 2009

Jasmine | Author Biography

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...