The Holder of the World [Paperback]

Bharati Mukherjee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 1994

"An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove
she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative."
--AMY TAN
This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.
It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography...."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Neither as accessible as Jasmine nor as superbly crafted as National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Middleman and Other Stories , Mukherjee's new novel is a challenging work that engages the intellect more than the heart. Narrator Beigh Masters is a Yale grad who has put her history degree to use in "assets research," tracking down rare art and jewels for wealthy clients. Her pet research project involves Hannah Easton, born in Massachusetts in 1670, who went on to marry an English trader, journey with him to India at the dawn of European colonization and become the lover of a Hindu prince. This novel is Hannah's story, told by Beigh with an emphasis on the themes that interest her: the nature of time, the merit of attempts to recapture the past, the collision of values that inevitably occurs when New World meets Old, the power wielded by unconventional women in a hidebound society and the revenge that such a society exacts. Mukherjee writes with her customary elegant lucidity; her insights into 17th-century America, England and India are as tough-minded and astute as anything she has written about contemporary society; and she spins a rousing narrative of greed, lust, battles and betrayals. Readers may feel somewhat aloof from Hannah, who is viewed always from a distance, but an abundance of interesting ideas partly compensates for the book's lack of an emotional center.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Exotic locales and historical-genealogical connections color this novel by the author of Jasmine ( LJ 7/89). Beigh is a contemporary New England woman of Indian (that is, "Indian-Indian, not wah-wah Indian") heritage, who is in love with technocrat Venn from India. Beigh is obsessed with antiquities. The graduate work she was doing on the Puritans had led her to the discovery of one of her ancestors, a Hannah Easton, who traveled from her home in New England all the way to India with her trader husband. The author has woven together Hannah's story with Beigh's search for ancient jewels and legends. Mukherjee writes about all these unusual times and places with a style that is mesmerizing. Unfortunately, the dialog of bygone eras too frequently sounds contrived. Recommended for larger fiction collections.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 285 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 9, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449909662
• ISBN-13: 978-0449909669
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Award-winning Indian-born American author Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in 1940, the second of three daughters born to Bengali-speaking, Hindu Brahmin parents. She lived in a house crowded with 40 or 50 relatives until she was eight, when her father's career brought the family to live in London for several years.

She returned to Calcutta in the early 1950s where she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.

After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, internationally acclaimed author Clark Blaise, returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of "Saturday Night." Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored "Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) and "The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182)" (1987).
Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York. She is currently a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mukherjee is best known for her novels "The Tiger's Daughter" (1971); "Wife" (1975); "Jasmine" (1989); "The Holder of the World" (1993); "Leave It to Me" (1997); "Desirable Daughters" (2002); "The Tree Bride" (2004); and "Miss New India" (2011). Her short story collections and memoirs include "Darkness" (1985); "The Middleman and Other Stories" (1988); and "A Father". Non Fiction works include: "Days and Nights in Calcutta"; and "The Sorrow and the Terror."

She was the winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for "The Middleman and Other Stories."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Holder of the World: A Different Experience, April 24, 2000

By 

Alpana Gupta (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Holder of the World (Paperback)

The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee is a novel that sets itself apart from contemporary novels. Readers are accustomed to reviewing traditional Western literature, which operates according to an often unnoticed set of assumptions. Mukherjee takes a critical step and calls attention to these assumptions that most take for granted. Whether or not readers agree with her redefined notions of history and art, it is an enlightening experience to be introduced to these other, non-traditional processes of thought. Mukherjee takes a number of popular Western texts and proceeds to raise and question the assumptions upon which they are based. Revolving around a Puritan girl who travels to India, the text as a whole is a twist on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. For instance, Mukherjee centralizes characters such as the American-Indians who were marginalized in Hawthorne's novel and decentralizes its main characters, such as Hester. Mukherjee goes on to rewrite the Puritan alphabet, claiming "I" represents Indian lover and independence. Furthermore, while witch-like powers are condemned in Hawthorne's novel, they are presented in a new, positive light in this subversive novel; Hannah, the main character of the novel, has seemingly magical powers that are crucial to the survival of a number of the characters. Mukherjee goes on to question another text that has long-been a pillar of Western literature, Keat's "Ode to a Grecian Urn." While this poem testifies to the frozen nature of beauty and truth, Mukherjee asserts that the beauty of art depends upon the viewer and is constantly expanding. Finally, Mukherjee refers to a number of texts in passing, including Hannah's Memoirs and London Sketches by an Anonymous Colonial Daughter. What is interesting to note here is that a few of the texts she mentions do not exist at all, while others are real texts, however obscure. Her point is to encourage the reader to question how she or he determines what is real and what is not. Mukherjee also questions the manner in which her audience defines history. Contrary to popular opinion, she asserts that history is always mediated, that it is necessarily subjective. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that Hannah's story is told through the eyes of Beigh, the narrator of the novel. Even when she manages to virtually participate in Hannah's time period through a computer program, she cannot participate as Hannah, but only as Hannah's friend, Bhagmati. Mukherjee further uses the mythological story of Sita to highlight the interactive nature of history. She emphasizes how the ending of Sita's story always changes to match the mood of the times. Continuing with the theme of questioning, Mukherjee disputes the way in which people usually confine identity to a single plane. Instead, she emphasizes the multiple planes of Hannah's identity, who has a "Christian-Hindu-Muslim" self and an "American-English-Indian" self. Hannah is further described as "a woman, a pregnant woman, a pregnant white woman," highlighting the limitless nature of identity

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holder of the World is a gem that will hold you spellbound., August 28, 1997

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Holder of the World (Paperback)

If someone told me that an author could transplant a seventeenth century female Protestant from Salem, Massachusetts, to the excesses of southern India and have the character enjoy that life, I might raise an eyebrow at its improbability. If someone told me that the vividly bloody action of King Philip's (Indian) War in Massachusetts and a Muslim-Hindu holy war near the Coromandel Coast in India were connected, I might look askance in disbelief that such atrocities on opposite sides of the world, committed for totally different reasons, could possibly be related. If that someone then told me that a narrator might locate a missing three hundred year old jewel by using a virtual reality program developed by her MIT researcher/lover, I'd be picturing a bodice-ripper with Fabio on the cover. And if that someone still had the nerve to suggest that all the above could be combined seamlessly, knowledgeably, and totally successfully in one astounding novel of fewer than 300 pages, I absolutely would not believe it. I still don't. Yet that is exactly what Bharati Mukherjee has done in The Holder of the World. In doing so, she manages to create a true literary bridge between East and West, reaching so far back to the roots of our respective cultures and thinking that for the first time in the dozen or so novels I've read by Indian authors, I feel as if I'm beginning to understand how and why we and they became who we are

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A virtuoso miniature, August 24, 2001

By 

Winston Barclay (Iowa City, IA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Holder of the World (Paperback)

Bharati Mukherjee emigrated from her Brahmin family's insular compound in India to study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her abiding literary yantra ever since has been inter-cultural dislocation, transplantation and rebirth -- in particular the collision of intransigent tradition with the chaotic possibilities at freedom's edge. In "The Holder of the World," she does not merely turn her personal experience on its head, but she does dizzying somersaults with full twists in midair. The context and model for her treasure-hunt mystery is one of the fascinating artistic traditions of the Indian subcontinent: Mughal miniature painting. The unexpected depiction of a fair-skinned Western woman in one of these 17th-century paintings launches the narrator on detective work she expects to lead to material treasure, but what she exhumes as virtual reality and historical truth converge is both tantalizingly less tangible and inestimably more valuable. The particular virtuosity of this slender volume is Mukherjee's determined compression of plot, narrative, character and information that makes reading something akin to aerobic exercise. Brief phrases and gestures become complex characterizations; sketches and outlines evoke transcontinental adventures; narrative whizzes by in a blur that somehow suggests rich detail; well-placed smudges and squiggles expand into vast landscapes. "The Holder of the World" is a sprawling, wide-screen historical epic, painted in miniature with a one-hair brush.