[In the following review, Appiah lauds Mukherjee's The Holder of the World stating, "Ms. Mukherjee draws us with vigor and scrupulous attention to detail across time … and space … into the footsteps of not one but two extraordinary women."]

We live in a time of bad news for relations among communities. From Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from South Africa to Kashmir (and, dare I add, from Paris to Los Angeles), men and women live and die within the shifting alliances and antagonisms of constantly reshaping identities. The passions of these conflicts seem to call for the martial virtues: courage, strength, honor. It is tempting, in such a time, for those of us who favor the more peaceable virtues—gentleness, mercy, the compassion that the King James Bible calls loving kindness—to treat any novel that demonstrates how richly rewarding are the places between cultures as a moralizing allegory. In a world where a Bosnian Serb can murder a Muslim in-law, whose language he knows, whose table he has shared, we can find solace in even the fictional idea of a love that transcends more substantial cultural differences.

I report this temptation because Bharati Mukherjee's newest novel has taught me to resist it: it is one of the many values of The Holder of the World that it celebrates the borderlands without any such sentimentality. Ms. Mukherjee draws us with vigor and scrupulous attention to detail across time—from the present to the 17th and early 18th centuries—and space—from Salem, Mass., to the coast of Coromandel, in India—into the footsteps of not one but two extraordinary women.

The first woman, our contemporary, and one of the novel's two voices, is Beigh ("looks like 'Bee,' sounds like 'Bay-a'") Masters, who does "assets research"—high-toned snooping for antiques and art treasures. She has impeccable Puritan antecedents, descended from "one Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster, born in Morpeth, Northumberland," who "stowed away to Salem" in 1632 "in a ship heavy with cows, horses, goats, glass and iron."

The second woman is Hannah Easton. "In the remotest of ways," Beigh tells us, "Hannah Easton is a relative of mine." Hannah grew up in Salem, in the latter part of the 17th century. Her life comes to matter professionally to Beigh. In the tumultuous course of it, after her widowed mother's disappearance, Hannah was raised by another family and taught needlework. She later married, went to England, was widowed, remarried, traveled sometime around 1695 to Mogul India and held in her hands (for a moment, around 1700) the Emperor's Tear, "the world's most perfect diamond," an "asset" Beigh is currently researching for an acquisitive client. The ruler in question was Aurangzeb, the last great Mogul emperor; the jewel, it seems, was taken from him during his victorious battle against Raja Jadav Singh, who happens to have been the love of Hannah Easton's life.

If it seems implausible, without the scaffolding of the whole tale, that a Puritan girl from Salem—still less a devout one—should, as a woman, become the concupiscent lover of a Gentoo prince, I can only say that Ms. Mukherjee knows how to make the tale work. Each of these women is written eloquently into full being. And the lines that connect them across time entwine them as surely as Hannah's life embraces Salem and the Coromandel coast.

Beigh traces the life of her almost-ancestress through texts and paintings, through museums in Massachusetts, graveyards in India and auctions in Bangkok, and, in the end, through a computer simulation, made by her lover, Venn, a contemporary Indian computer scientist. (In love, too, Hannah and Beigh have something in common.) But Beigh's passion to discover the truth of Hannah's life becomes more than professional: it consumes her. In the extraordinary climax of this extraordinary novel, Venn's technical time-tripping skills allow Beigh to experience Hannah's escape from the battle between Aurangzeb and Jadav Singh—and so to solve the mystery of the jewel.

Yet once she "finds" the jewel, Beigh tells us only where "I think the world's most perfect diamond lies." She doesn't need to dig it up; she has already uncovered the greater treasure, Hannah's amazing life.

Bharati Mukherjee constantly reminds us of the interconnections among cultures that have made our modern world. And she records the brutalities and the squalor of these dealings between peoples, as well as the passions that yoke us together. What she offers as a model of cultural cross-pollination—alas, one cannot forever resist the temptations of allegory—is not a gentle melding but a more vigorous, and a more bitter, fusion.

In this celebration of a life lived three centuries ago across cultures, Ms. Mukherjee discovers for us in Hannah a woman whose triumph is one of courage, of unyielding passion, of the obstinate will to survive. There is no place here for mawkish talk of tolerance and understanding. In Ms. Mukherjee's world, in the real world, we understand as much through butting heads as through shaking hands.

Hannah Easton survives both her English adventurer husband and her Hindu warrior lover and returns to Salem and to her mother, whom she remembers only as the woman who staged her own murder to run off with her American Indian lover. Her mother has come back to the white world with her five half-Nipmuc children, and after the custom of the time must wear an I, the badge of an "Indian lover." Mother and daughter live together in Salem with Hannah's child, the daughter of Jadav Singh, her "badge," the mark of her Indian love. Black Pearl, the gossips of Salem call the child; Hannah, the mother, they name White Pearl.

To sketch the plot of a book like The Holder of the World is to disfigure drama into melodrama. The truth is in the details, brilliantly conceived, finely written, sustained from the first to the last page. And when, at the end, Bharati Mukherjee has the hubris, the chutzpah, the sheer unmitigated gall, to connect her book, in Beigh's voice, with Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, which "many call our greatest work." it is, I think, a connection she has earned. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a relative of hers. And, like Hannah Easton, she has every right to claim her kinship across the centuries.

"When my writing is going well, I know that I'm writing out of my personal obsessions," says Bharati Mukherjee.

The obsession behind The Holder of the World appeared to her in 1989 at a pre-auction viewing at Sotheby's in New York—in the form of a 17th-century Indian miniature, a woman in ornate Mogul court dress holding a lotus blossom. The woman was Caucasian and blond.

"I thought, 'Who is this very confident-looking 17th-century woman, who sailed in some clumsy wooden boat across dangerous seas and then stayed there?'" Ms. Mukherjee said by telephone from her home in San Francisco. "She had transplanted herself in what must have been a traumatically different culture. How did she survive?" These questions prompted the novel.

Ms. Mukherjee's travels approximate, roughly in reverse, those of her 17th-century heroine, Hannah Easton. She was born in Calcutta in 1940, has lived in England and Canada, and first came to the United States in 1961 to study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She became an American citizen in 1988 and is now an English professor at the University of California. Berkeley.

Ms. Mukherjee researched her novel in the logbooks of European trading companies, in memoirs from colonial Massachusetts and in 17th-century travelers' accounts.

"I don't want to write that 500-page conventional historical novel, because that's a mimicry of a form," she said. "I want to bring the world into the 300-page novel without losing the complexity. What novelists have the power to do is imagine the inner life of people who acted out the facts of history. And do it with sympathy for every side."