Top 35 Bharati Mukherjee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

2. “I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

3. “My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

4. “What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?”

— Bharati Mukherjee

5. “Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

6. “Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world ‘another Calcutta.’”

— Bharati Mukherjee

7. “I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

8. “I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

9. “The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

10. “The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

11. “In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

12. “My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just continuous overload.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

13. “Dullness is a kind of luxury.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

14. “I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

15. “Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

16. “We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

17. “What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?”

— Bharati Mukherjee

18. “But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

19. “The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

20. “One time you mentioned the loneliness inside of marriage and I did not understand what you were saying. Two people are together; they have come from the same place; they share the same values, the same language. Practically speaking, they are the two halves of one consciousness. They eat the same food; they have a child; they sleep in the same bed, how can they be lonely.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

21. “She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

22. “How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi’s generation of “girls of good family,” who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

23. “Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?”

— Bharati Mukherjee

24. “But only men destroy and give back nothing.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

25. “I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn’t enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can’t feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

26. “A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

27. “I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer’s office above the coffee shop where we’d been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, ‘By the time you get this, Daddy, I’ll already be Mrs. Blaise!’”

— Bharati Mukherjee

28. “In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

29. “There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn’t regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn’t conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

30. “Where, in Heaven’s name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother’s words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

31. “The blame lies with anyone who confuses protection with power.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

32. “She finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India – how fatal – to cling.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

33. “The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

34. “Watch me re-position the stars.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

35. “He understood something about firangi arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn’t think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

36. “His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the “Zentoos,” meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

37. “English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

38. “Duty! Duty, judgement! I have heard enough of duty. And of judgement. You cloak your lust for vengeance and for gold and diamonds in the noble words of duty and judgement and protection and sacrifice. But it is the weakest and the poorest and the most innocent who suffer, who sacrifice, whose every minute of every day is obedience to duty.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

39. “Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work: Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over.”

— Bharati Mukherjee