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key influences and themes
| "I think there are several defining moments in my life, .. moments that hang around my neck like a pearl necklace. I grew up the first 8 years of my life in Calcutta, in a very crowded traditional Bengali Hindu Brahmin family, which was also a very patriarchal family. And my mother, who had no sons only 3 daughters, was constantly verbally abused for not having borne a son. And I remember very well my mother saying at first in whispers and then very loudly that my daughters are as good as sons and I'm going to make sure that they're not chattel as I have been.. "
Bharati Mukherjee |
Her mother has been a powerful influence on her.
| "when I'm writing I'm not conscious of anything other than getting in the skin and into the skull of my character but when I'm finished with a draft and look at it I realise that very often it's about mother-daughter relations and about the formation of a very strong woman. And that strength may sometimes express itself in negative and violent ways but I still think of all my characters as women who've asserted themselves according to their own improvised moral code -even if they murder or hurt other men who've hurt them earlier, the hurt that they inflict comes out of their own very precise sense of Right and Wrong."
Bharati Mukherjee |
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