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    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters
    Ebook44 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's "Desirable Daughters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 30, 2015
    ISBN9781535821827
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters

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      A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters - Gale

      14

      Desirable Daughters

      Bharati Mukherjee

      2002

      Introduction

      Desirable Daughters is the first novel of a trilogy by Bharati Mukherjee. Published in 2002, the three-part novel explores the themes of traditional Hindu culture and assimilation as it weaves history with personal narrative. The novel follows the lives of three sisters of a wealthy Bengali family from Calcutta, India, and the secret that comes back to haunt them. The threat of a family scandal slowly takes on aspects of a mystery as the main character, Tara, finds herself swept up in a web of deceit that threatens her family while she searches for the truth about her sister. Ultimately, Desirable Daughters uses the mystery as a backdrop for Tara's exploration of her identity.

      Author Biography

      Bahrain Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, on July 27, 1940, while India was still a British colony. She was born into a wealthy Brahmin family, which is the highest Hindu caste. The family's ancestry is Bengali, meaning that they came from the Bengal districts. As Fakrul Alam explains in Bharati Mukherjee, Their families had moved to Calcutta, as did many other educated, high-caste Hindus. Both of Mukherjee's parents were devoted to educating their three daughters, which was not common at the time, and her father encouraged her to pursue writing.

      In 1947, Mukherjee's father moved the family to London, where he could research his field as a chemist. India officially attained independence this year and entered a time of turmoil. The family returned to Calcutta in 1951. Mukherjee earned a BA at the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master's in ancient Indian culture and English at the University of Baroda in 1961.

      In 1961, Mukherjee joined the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, where she attained an MFA in 1963. Her father had chosen a groom for her to marry after she graduated and returned to India; Mukherjee, however, met Canadian writer Clark Blaise at the writers' workshop, and they married in 1963. She informed her parents of the marriage after the fact because, in choosing her own husband, she had broken from the Hindu tradition of arranged marriage.

      In 1966 the couple moved to Montreal, Quebec, where Mukherjee worked as a lecturer at McGill University. She gained her PhD from the University of Iowa in 1969. Her first novel, The-Tiger's Daughter, was published in 1971, and she became a naturalized Canadian in 1972. She published her second novel, Wife, in 1975. In 1978 Mukherjee was a full-time professor at

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