Description

Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1890-1936) was the first successful Indian man of letters in the United States. He studied at Duff School, the University of Calcutta, in India, Tokyo University in Japan and at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University in the U. S. In 1910 Dhan Gopal's family sent him to Japan to study industrial machinery. Although he was initially fascinated with the positivistic spirit of industrialization, later he became disillusioned by the assembly line method of production. After a short stay in Japan, he boarded a ship for San Francisco, where he looked about for a way to support himself and pay for his college education, and soon lit upon writing. Financial constraints and his political radicalism made him move on to Stanford University, from where he earned a graduate degree in metaphysics in 1914. Around 1916 he wrote Rajani; or, Songs of the Night and Laila Majnu. In the 1920s, Mukerji moved to New York and began his most prolific period of writing. Amongst his other works are Sandhya: Songs of Twilight (1917), Kari the Elephant (1922) and Caste and Outcast (1923).