Bharati attended an English-style school until she was 8, when her father, after a falling-out with his business partner, took the family abroad. She studied at private schools in London and Basel for the next three years. When the family returned to Calcutta, she was enrolled in Loreto House, an elite Roman Catholic school run by an order of Irish nuns.

The world of her childhood was tightly circumscribed. When she left the family compound, she was escorted by bodyguards. Until she left for the United States, she had never attended a party with boys. At the same time, she roamed freely through the vast storehouse of Indian folk tales and epics and made a close study of the endless family dramas around her.

Image The cover of the novel “Jasmine.” Credit... Viking Books

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta 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, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa.

“I blossomed, because people didn’t have preconceived notions of who I was and what I could do,” Ms. Mukherjee told The Boston Globe in 1993. “It was an enormous transformation in my life.”

She added, “I really jumped the grooves.”

She married Mr. Blaise, a fellow student, in 1963. Besides her husband, she is survived by their son, Bernard; two sisters, Mira Bakhle and Ranu Vanikar; and two granddaughters. Another son, Bart, died in 2015.

“From those years I evolved a credo: Make the familiar exotic (Americans won’t recognize their country when I get finished with it) and make the exotic — the India of elephants and arranged marriages — familiar,” she wrote in Contemporary Authors.