Indian author Bharati Mukherjee, part of a Canadian and American literary power couple with her husband writer Clark Blaise, died Saturday in New York at 76.

Mukherjee, who was born in Kolkata, is known around the world for her books including The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, that deal with immigrant life and trying to create a new identity for oneself — something she knew well from the experience of her own life.

“She was an early writer dealing with the kinds of tensions that we’re still dealing with today,” said Iris Tupholme, her editor at HarperCollins Canada.

“She was elegant and glamorous and dignified and determined.”

Blaise also shared some of his feelings with the Star.

“I find myself adopting a Hindu world view (she was not at all religious), meaning that the soul is eternal, but the external wrapping is ephemeral,” Blaise wrote in an email.

“I don’t want her ashes. I won’t be keeping her clothes. I’m trying to hold on to her soul, which is found in her books and essays. I know my memories of her are not transferable, and will disappear with me.”

Mukherjee and Blaise met at the highly regarded Iowa Writers Workshop where both were studying. After what can only be described as a whirlwind courtship — all of two weeks — they were married in 1963 (she defied her parents’ wishes of an arranged marriage) and a few years later moved to Canada. They put down roots in Montreal and became an integral part of Canada’s flourishing literary scene, counting among their friends Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro.

“It was an important moment in Canadian literature ... We were making history with everything we did,” Blaise told the Star in 2011.

But Mukherjee never felt comfortable in Canada. By then she had published her first two novels. The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), the most autobiographical of her works, told the story of an American-educated Indian woman who returns home to an India she no longer recognizes and Wife (1975) about a young woman who rebels against her arranged marriage.

“I couldn’t get my books reviewed,” she told the Star in a 2002 interview.

The couple moved to Toronto in 1978 where, at one point, Mukherjee was accosted by a “punk” on the subway and told to “go back to Africa.” She was wearing a sari.

Mukherjee articulated her sense of exclusion in a scathing article in Saturday Night magazine in 1980, before they moved back to the United States.

“It came down to a choice of marriage or country,” Blaise told the Star in 2011. They made a life together, with her teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.

“She became as democratic a person as you can find in our society, working hard, devoting herself to her students, to our sons, to me, while turning out her novels, stories and essays,” says Blaise.

She explored the immigrant experience, but she also explored the lives of young women who had to make their way in a sometimes hostile world.

Tupholme expresses her admiration of Mukherjee’s ability to stay relevant, as in Miss New India where she used a job in an Indian call centre to explore the idea of a young woman taking control of her destiny.

“Those were themes that kept coming back again and again.”

Mukherjee and Blaise worked on books together, as well. One was The Sorrow and the Terror, on the Air India bombing. They wanted to write it, Blaise says, “because she felt the lost lives (329 of them) and respect for fellow Indian immigrants who’d made the difficult passage to Canada and citizenship, were being swept away by official indifference. We wanted to hold the Canadian justice system and Canadian self-esteem to task.”

Still, her relationship with the country softened over the years, and she returned often.

Mukherjee was born July 27, 1940, in Kolkata. Her father, Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, ran a successful pharmaceutical company and her mother, the former Bina Banerjee, was a homemaker. Mukherjee attended an English-style school until she was 8, when her father took the family abroad. She studied at private schools in London and Basel, Switzerland, for the next three years.

She returned to India and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kolkata in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She earned an MFA in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa.

Besides her husband, she leaves their son, Bernard; two sisters, Mira Bakhle and Ranu Vanikar; and two granddaughters. She was predeceased by a year by her son, Bart, who died at age 51.

With files from the New York Times

With files from the New York Times

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