A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's "The Tenant"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's "The Tenant," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories 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 Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839983

Book preview

11

The Tenant

Bharati Mukherjee

1988

Introduction

Bharati Mukherjee, a native of India who evolved from temporary exile to perceptive immigrant author through her years of residence in Canada and the United States, has gained through her novels, short stories, nonfiction, and essays a reputation as the grande dame of Indian diasporic literature (literature of people living far from their homeland). Raised in a wealthy family of the elite Brahmin caste (hereditary Hindu social class) in Calcutta in the 1940s, Mukherjee was interested from childhood in becoming a writer, and her attendance at the prestigious University of Iowa Writer's Workshop sped her toward this goal. After publishing several volumes while residing in Canada, her breakout success upon relocating to America came with The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Although she was initially shunned by American publishing houses for telling immigrant stories, in this virtuoso collection she demonstrates acute insight into the psyches of immigrants from a global variety of backgrounds. Of particular renown in this volume is The Tenant, which was first published in the Literary Review, a small quarterly journal, and was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1987. In this story, an immigrant Indian woman'a classic protagonist in Mukherjee's early fiction—who is ensconced in academia finds herself in a state of irremediable loneliness as she uncertainly navigates from one tenancy to the next.

Author Biography

Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, the second daughter in a Brahmin family of the uppermost caste in Calcutta, India. She spent the first seven years of her life sharing a home with some forty members of her extended family, a traditional domestic arrangement. Her father was a distinguished chemist whose business success would allow his three daughters many opportunities and advantages. Her mother, as Mukherjee noted in her autobiographical half of Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), was a powerful storyteller who cared not about technical details but only about passion.

While her first language is Bengali, Mukherjee began attending a Protestant missionary school that emphasized English lessons at age three, and by age eight, when her father took the family to London, she felt she had become bilingual. During the three years she spent attending boarding schools there and in Basel, Switzerland, she started her first novel, about children in England. As she noted in an interview for the Massachusetts Review, she always knew she would be a writer: the world of fiction seemed more real to me than the world around me.

Her family returned to Calcutta in 1951 to inhabit a mansion on the compound of her father's factory, leaving the