HYDERABAD: Well-known litterateur, teacher and Sahitya Academy winner Prof Meenakshi Mukherjee, died here at the age of 72 on Wednesday due to a massive cardiac arrest. Meenakshi Mukherjee collapsed at Gate 22 in Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Shamshabad. She was to board a IndiGo flight, when she collapsed at the gate. She was immediately rushed to the Apollo medical Centre in the Airport, by then she breathed her last. She was going to Delhi to participate in a function on the occasion of the release of her book, “An Indian for all seasons”, a biography of historian RC Dutt, which was published by Penguin.
Meenakshi Mukherjee received the Sahitya Academy award in 2003 for her book ‘The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English’. She was also chairperson of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies from 2001-2004 and the chairperson of its Indian Chapter from 1993-2005.
She taught in a number of colleges in Patna, Pune and Delhi before joining the University of Hyderabad. Her last and longest spell was as Professor of English in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She was a visiting professor in several universities outside India, including the University of Texas at Austin, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, Macquarie Univesity (Sydney), University of Canberra and Flinders University (Adelaide). Author of ‘The Twice Born Fiction’, ‘Realism and Reality: Novel and Society in India’, ‘Rereading Jane Austen’, and ‘The Perishable Empire’, Meenakshi Mukherjee had also edited many collections of essays. She was the wife of another litterateur Sujit Mukherjee, who was the Chief Publisher of the Orient Longman. She had jointly edited a few volumes, including ‘Another India’ (with Nissim Ezekiel, 1990). She was the founder-editor of a journal ‘Vagartha’.