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Bharati Mukherjee: Reminiscing about a different

Montreal
Bharati Mukherjee looks back fondly on the time she and Clark Blaise
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spent here in the 1960s and '70s, when she taught English at McGill
and Blaise helped found Concordia's creative writing program
BY IAN MCGILLIS, FREELANCE APRIL 23, 2011

"That was the happiest 12 years." The warmth in Bharati Mukherjee's voice is palpable even over the
phone from her home in San Francisco as she talks of the time she spent living in Montreal with writer
husband Clark Blaise and their two sons.

The couple arrived in the fall of 1966, fresh from Iowa, where they had met and married while at the
Writers Workshop there. Each had landed an English professorship in Montreal - she at McGill, he at
Sir George Williams, later Concordia, where he would help found the school's Creative Writing
program. He was already an established writer; she would soon score a big U.S. success with her
debut novel, The Tiger's Daughter.

"It was a perfect city for a young family who were looking for adventure," she says. "It had the flavour
of Europe and the amenities of North America. And it was contained, not chaotic and sprawling like
New York or Los Angeles."

While the Quiet Revolution may have been in full swing, the progressive spirit hadn't penetrated quite
everywhere, Mukherjee recalls.

"The faculty club at McGill was still very sexist in British clubby tradition. Women were not allowed to go
into the main Red Lounge, where men were drinking and presumably talking in a racy way that women
weren't allowed to hear. People like Myrna Gopnik and I had to liberate the room and change the rules.
There was paternity leave for the male professors but no concept of maternity leave for the female
professors. They'd not had the experience of women academics needing such a thing, presumably.
Fortunately I had (Bernard, her second son) during Christmas break and was able to go back to school
without missing a day."

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Language-wise, she had an advantage over many new arrivals.

"Bengal, where I'm from, has had a long history of association with France. Some of the freedom
fighters in Bengal had got their training and inspiration from France. I had learned French in my Calcutta
school from a Mauritian nun. I think the Québécois were very kind to me because I made an attempt to
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speak the language."

The political ferment of the time was another thing for which she found herself prepared, albeit
unintentionally.

"The feeling that a political volcano was about to erupt was always present. But I was born in Calcutta,
I had grown up as the country became independent, so that felt like familiar historical ground to me,
what states and groups quite naturally and inevitably have to work through. (The October Crisis) was
part of working through the problems of biculturalism and bilingualism. Now, when I visit Montreal, I'm
sitting in the métro and there are teenagers as Indian-looking as I am, and they're speaking Québécois
among themselves. It's a wonderful kind of success story."

"I didn't encounter personal racism, except once in a Woolworth's store when they wouldn't serve me,"
she says when asked how her visible minority status played out in Montreal. "The racial discrimination
was more targeted toward francophone immigrant groups - I'm thinking of Haitians. I certainly didn't
have the same kind of personal humiliation, despair and anger as I did in Toronto."

Toronto was where the family moved when the late-'70s allophone exodus affected funding and
enrolment at McGill and Concordia; Mukherjee's less than happy experience during their three years
there was the subject of her famous 1981 essay The Invisible Woman. Published in Saturday Night
magazine, the piece served as something of a national wake-up call, letting Canadians know that the
country wasn't the tolerant utopia we liked to present it as. That, of course, is a hindsight view; at the
time, the piece created a firestorm.

"Oh yes, there were bags of mail, so much ire directed toward me," Mukherjee says. "But I'd felt I
personally had no choice but to write about it. Rosa Parks had the whole NAACP organization as a
support system. I felt I didn't have anyone to talk to about it, or to discuss what I was going through. But
that was a different Canada, I'd like to think. I have changed and Canada has changed."

In the three decades since, Mukherjee has been at the forefront of the growth in feminist and immigrant

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literature. In 1988, she became the first naturalized U.S. citizen to win the National Book Critics' Circle
Award for Fiction, for The Middleman and Other Stories. Her forthcoming novel, Miss New India, visits
the new boom-time India, following its protagonist, Anjali, from a repressive smalltown life in the north to
the heart of high-tech call-centre Bangalore. At one telling moment, Anjali recalls how she had been left
cold at school when taught a novel by R.K. Narayan, popular chronicler of South Indian village life.
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"As a writer and a person I'm a great admirer of Narayan," stresses Mukherjee. "But I did a lot of
research and conducted a lot of interviews with these young men and women, and that kind of serene
India, that fatalistic India, just doesn't play in their imagination. They've moved on. Young India has
moved on. It's a different country now."

So, no sense of regret at the passing of the last visible vestiges of the Raj in places like Bangalore?

"Not really. I know that there is no brooking the inevitable surge forward, and I would rather go with it
than be crippled by nostalgia. And nostalgia for the social climate of that time is abhorrent to me."

At 70, Mukherjee maintains a full workload, teaching at U Cal Berkeley and lecturing around the U.S.
and abroad. "I'm not ready to retire, and I don't know when I will be," she says. "There's always a
backlog of fiction projects. Inspiration is never an issue, it's more finding time."

There's at least one thing she won't have to find the time for on her visit to Montreal later this month.
The Expos - beloved of Blaise, who has transferred his allegiance to the Washington Nationals - are no
longer here.

"I'm such a good Bengali wife, I went along to all the games at Jarry Park. Doubleheader was a
nightmare word to me. 'Oh my God, I'm stuck here in the cold for another whole game!' "

Miss New India is to be published next month.

Bharati Mukherjee takes part in several events at the Blue Metropolis festival, including an onstage
interview, hosted by Linda Leith, on Sunday, May 1, at 2 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Select Montreal
Downtown Hotel, 99 Viger Ave. W., in the Dahlia Room. Cost: $7.

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