Jasmine Lesson Plan

Bharati Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta. Her family was wealthy, and she attended many English-style schools and spent time abroad in her youth. She earned bachelors and masters degrees in India before being accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and other prominent figures. She thrived, she said, because she was able to escape the pressures of India's patriarchal social order and come to a place where people didn't have preconceived notions of her. In Iowa, she met her husband and earned an M.F.A. and a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Iowa. In her fiction, Mukherjee writes about the culture clashes and questions of...