Bharati shares her experience as a writer in the West
Staff Correspondent
India-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee has said she had to undergo various adverse phases of identity crisis and racial marginalisation both as a woman writer and a South Asian during her early years of career in Canada and the United States. "I was viewed as a dark-skinned non-European immigrant instead of a woman when I started my career as a lecturer at the McGill University in Montreal," said Bharati at a lecture jointly organised by the American Centre and the High Commission of India in the city yesterday. She said the works and status of non-European writers who are dark South Asians and naturalised citizens in America are hyphenated and considered as unable of being absorbed in aesthetics. "I, as a writer, have been constantly fighting against such views and attitudes," she said. "I have the experience of racist marginalisation and hyphenation of non-European writers and settlers both in Canada and America." "But a blend of various races and ethnicity in American social fabric is something that I am hopeful about and I will be for such improvisation," she added. Born to a traditional family in Calcutta in 1940, Bharati went to America in 1961 to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop and earned her masters in fine arts and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She immigrated to Canada in mid-1960s and became a naturalised citizen in 1972. She moved to the US after spending 14 years in Canada. Her fictions include 'The Middleman and Other Short Stories', 'Wife', 'The Tiger's Daughter' and 'Leave It to Me' while her non-fictions include 'Political Culture and Leadership in India' and 'The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy'.
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