Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), West Bengal, India. She later travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and subsequently earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.
After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night. Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). They also wrote the 1987 work, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182).
She is currently a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley.
* The Tiger's Daughter (1971)
* Wife (1975)
* Jasmine (1989)
* The Holder of the World (1993)
* Leave It to Me (1997)
* Desirable Daughters (2002)
* The Tree Bride (2004)
Memoir
* Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977, with Clark Blaise)
Non-fiction
* The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987, with Clark Blaise)
* Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991)
* Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992)
Awards
1988: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Middleman and Other Stories).
