Vision of a Brave New World : Books: Bharati Mukherjee writes about the new Americans, the non-European immigrants who she says are changing the nation.

Bharati Mukherjee is dark-skinned, her eyes and wavy hair black. Her accent is hard to place--cultured, cultivated, of no specific region. She looks and sounds vaguely foreign. But she is an American, as American as apple pie. And her works describe a new kind of pie being put together here.

“The new America is pervasive,” she is often quoted as saying of people like herself. “We aren’t just your doctors and pathologists, your nurses, newspaper vendors and green grocers. We’re also your lovers, your husbands and your wives. We may even pop out as your children.”

And a central message of her writing is that the new Americans are having their effect on the mainstream; they are changing America.

Last January, she won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for a collection of short stories, “The Middleman and Other Stories” (Grove Press). She was the first naturalized American to receive the honor. Born in India 49 years ago, she now lives on Manhattan’s Upper Westside and teaches at Queens College and Columbia University. She has a new novel out, “Jasmine,” also published by Grove, and was in Los Angeles briefly to talk about it.

Both books involve the people that populate the “New America,” the land of non-European immigrants, the thousands of newcomers from South Asia, Central and South America, Africa and the Middle East.

“We’re infiltrators!” she said over breakfast at her hotel.

The word delights her.

Take, for example, Jasmine, once Jyoti Vijh of Hasnapur, a village in Punjab; then Jasmine, the recent immigrant to New York; then Jane Ripplemeyer of Baden, Iowa, on the lam from her past.

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

Unarguably, Jasmine is complex--”a tornado,” her creator calls her, driven at a high force through much of life, having an impact on those she meets, unsure what, if any, damage she has left behind. The superficials of her life rival a soap opera plot. Jasmine is married as a child to a “modern” man she loves, who gives her a new name as a break with the feudal past. She is widowed as a teen-ager when her husband is blown up by a Sikh nationalist, and, at age 19, as an illegal immigrant--she comes to America.

She tells herself she is in the United States to observe an ancient tradition

and burn herself on the campus of the Florida school her husband wanted to attend.

Instead, she says “yes” to life.

“Being open to things, always saying ‘yes,’ Jasmine is a lot like me in that,” Mukherjee said. “I try to build into the stories in ‘Middleman’ and in ‘Jasmine’ varying degrees of letting go of the old culture.”

Jasmine lives with an Indian family in Flushing, Queens, where Punjabi culture has been imposed on life to such a degree the neighborhood is like a museum. She becomes an au pair to an academic couple, Taylor and Wylie, on the Upper Westside near Columbia, taking care of their child, being treated “just like one of the family” and trying, unsuccessfully, to deny her feelings for Taylor.

At 23, Jasmine finds herself in Iowa, where, in no time at all and with little planning on her part, she has prompted a 50-year-old banker, Bud Ripplemeyer, to leave his wife. Until then, he had thought of Asia “only as a soybean market.”

They set up house together; they do not marry, but they adopt “Du,” a Vietnamese adolescent. Bud is shot and paralyzed by a distressed farmer who could not get a loan at the bank, and Jasmine, whom Bud tried to make into Jane Ripplemeyer, becomes pregnant. She takes care of Bud but will not marry him, and remains, in her heart, Jasmine.

It is Jasmine who must decide whether to stay with Bud out of affection and duty, or go off to California with Taylor and his child once Wylie has left him.

“She wants to be American,” Mukherjee said of Jasmine. “Not like a 19th-Century Anglo-Saxon, but living in the New World, with roots here. Jasmine always knows who she is and what she wants in the world. She does not malinger in the past.”

‘Letting Go’

The past, likewise, is no dwelling place for Mukherjee. Some of it may come along with her to the present, but she does not go back to it.

“The ‘letting go’ of the old culture is not lost to me,” she said, and, in that, she thinks she differs from many white sociologists but not young first-generation immigrants. “For me and for some of my characters, the New World is a net gain. The change is exhilarating. We’re able to discard the traditional world of passivity, too much faith in destiny, the hierarchy of caste, class, traditional feudalism,” she said.

At the same time, she said of Americanization, she is not talking about people losing their identity and mimicking the mainstream. Anything but.

“I have so radically, dramatically and, at the time, painfully reincarnated myself,” she said, it would be a travesty to simply copy others’ behavior. “To me, reincarnations in a lifetime are healthy. To pretend I was the Indian I was when I left would be a falsehood.”

Mukherjee was born in Calcutta to a privileged family. Her father was a pharmaceuticals manufacturer and she and her sister were raised with servants, culture, tradition and manners. She was sent to school for several years in England and Switzerland, and to a convent school run by Irish nuns in Calcutta. In school, she studied Catholic dogma; at home, she was surrounded by “very Hindu” lives.

“I feel I appropriated two worlds. I was not split, but had access completely to both,” she said.

She studied literature and ancient Indian culture at Indian universities, took her degrees, and, at her father’s urging, left for America to enroll in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.

That seems an odd wish for a man of culture and tradition to have for his daughter.

“I think he didn’t think writing would be a danger,” she said. “It wouldn’t threaten the life style. It would be an accomplishment.” Like needlework or the piano. Jane Austen demurely scribbling away in a corner of the drawing room.

She smiled with soft irony at that innocence, then added, “Also, I think he felt that the India he knew was coming to an end. West Bengal was coming under communist rule. Deep down--he never articulated this--he thought, ‘OK, if things are to change dramatically, take your dowry and give yourself a chance.’ ”

Her father has been dead for three years. She has maintained close ties with her family and visits India every other year with her Canadian husband, writer Clark Blaise: “My intimacy with India is totally rooted with intimacy with the family. They have responded to Clark, and so has Calcutta. The last time we were there, he was referred to as ‘son-in-law of the city.’ ”

She met Blaise while at Iowa. They married there and in 1966 moved to Canada, writing and teaching at universities in Montreal and Toronto. By the mid ‘70s, they were raising two sons and she had published two novels, “The Tiger’s Daughter” and “Wife,” both dealing with Indian women balanced between two cultures.

By then, however, Canada was getting to her. She left in 1978. Her husband and sons made it formal and followed her to the United States in 1980, going first to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, then to New York.

She left Canada because of racism, she said. What she found building in Canada in the 1970s, she said, was harassment of dark-skinned people, “especially South Asians. There was physical and institutional violence daily, even in my middle-class, reasonable neighborhood in a sophisticated city like Toronto. ‘Pakis,’ for Pakistanis, ‘Paki-bashing.’ That came straight out of England.”

The government did little to discourage that climate, vaguely lending itself to it at times, she said. She spoke out against it publicly. She became politicized, but, she has said often, the choice was increasingly clear that if she was to stay in such an environment, she would have to become a political activist. Instead, she wanted to write.

Mukherjee does not deny there is racism in the United States, and in fact she writes about it. It is also a multifaceted racism: blacks and whites, whites and everybody else, Asians and blacks. But American blacks do not figure much in the relationships and interactions Mukherjee describes. It is not that she is unaware, she said. Rather, it is an area of American racism where she does not “feel on top of it” in her understanding. In general, she will say racism here is part of everyday life.

And yet, officially racism is discouraged as un-American; there are laws, governmental institutions and private organizations to deal with it.

‘I’ve Lived Everywhere’

“I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me. I’ve lived everywhere (and) I’m truly touched and moved by the idea of America. It includes you and is curious about other people. Includes you, allows you to think of yourself as an American. Other countries in Europe, and Canada, deliberately exclude you. You wouldn’t dare to think of yourself (as one of them).”

In retrospect, however, she said the politicization she underwent in Canada has made her a better writer.

“I accept the kind of fate that exercised these rages in me,” she said. “After the fact, I’m grateful for the politicization. I’ve become a very different kind of writer (due to) the rages and the desire for democracy and equal rights that were fanned in me. If I hadn’t seen myself as ‘The Other,’ as something degraded, alien, I would have remained an elegant, mannered writer,” something like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, something like Jane Austen, she said.

Instead, she said, she was forced to see new relationships, and her fiction is full of them.

Talking about her writing lights her face. She loves it. She lives to get at her laptop computer, she said, and even when not there, she is observing, making mental notes, “writing every minute.” She does not carry a notebook around, telling herself, she said, “if it’s important, I’ll remember it.”

She is at work on a “vast historical novel” that she does not want to discuss in detail. She is moving to California next semester to become a distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley and hopes life there will allow her more writing time.

Eventually, her husband, now at the University of Iowa, will join her. At times, she said, since they left Canada and tenured academe, finances have forced them into a commuter marriage.

“I have not regretted for a second that we gave up our secure jobs,” she said. “Canada is in my past.”

She is no more an expatriate of Canada than she is of India. Neither are her characters expatriates. They are not economic refugees with their bags packed, ready to move on. They are digging in. For expatriates, she said, the real world is the country they left behind, and at that, it is an idealized version of it that in reality never was.

In her recent novel, Jasmine’s father was harking back to life in Lahore, before the partition of India and Pakistan, and Jasmine describes her reaction: “Lahore visionaries. Lahore women. Lahore music, Lahore ghazals (lyric poems): my father lived in a bunker. . . . He’ll never see Lahore again and I never have. Only a fool would let it rule his life.”

Not her.

Life is here and now--and that means the new America.

“Mine is a very optimistic vision of America,” she said, acknowledging the “hell in a hand basket” notion some Americans have of the direction in which their country is heading.

“I came in ‘61, not the ‘80s,” she said. “I saw the kind of assured, ‘No. 1,’ confident, idealistic Kennedy-era America disappear right before my eyes. Native-born Americans may be in despair about this . . . but I say, ‘Hey, give us five years!’ I don’t feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the ‘50s, to ‘Father Knows Best’ feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era.

“But we have to work together, deal with drugs and education,” she said. “I do worry about the virus of illiteracy. We have to do something fundamental--change our goals, our motivation.”

That is not an expatriate talking, not an immigrant either. More than anything, she sounds like a pioneer.

“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.”