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In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.

Bharati Mukherjee

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Bharati Mukherjee
Age: 76 †
Born: 1940
Born: July 27
Died: 2017
Died: January 28
Novelist
Writer
Calcutta
Didn
Daughter
Neighborhood
Bengali
Women
Taking
Grown
Patriarch
Ever
Middle
Families
Disobey
Men
Class
Goals
Hindu
Like
Goal
Speaking
Disappoint
Future
Setting
Provided
Father
Traditional
Charge
Mother
Expect
Settings
Pliant

More quotes by Bharati Mukherjee

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My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.
Bharati Mukherjee
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We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.
Bharati Mukherjee
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Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'
Bharati Mukherjee
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I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
Bharati Mukherjee
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There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
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I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.
Bharati Mukherjee
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In India, there are real consequences to inattention drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
Bharati Mukherjee
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But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.
Bharati Mukherjee
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One of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home, where the young woman from a nearby village, who had been hired to baby sit newborn twins, suddenly said after two weeks of work: 'I'm sorry, this is too much work, I'm going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.'
Bharati Mukherjee
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I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.
Bharati Mukherjee
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My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
Bharati Mukherjee
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I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.
Bharati Mukherjee
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In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.
Bharati Mukherjee
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You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person . . . What America offers me is romanticism and hope . . . Suddenly, I found myself in a country where
Bharati Mukherjee
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I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.
Bharati Mukherjee
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Dullness is a kind of luxury.
Bharati Mukherjee
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Mother Teresas detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement.
Bharati Mukherjee
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In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.
Bharati Mukherjee