Dipika Mukherjee

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Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and sociolinguist. She mentors aspiring writers in Asia and founded the Dutt Award for Literary Excellence in Malaysia in 2015. She has edited five anthologies of Southeast Asian fiction and, although she lives in Chicago, is equally at home in Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi.

Reading in Malaysia: Literature beyond Erasure

January 2026
Dipika Mukherjee, Mahi Ramakrishnan, Amir Muhammad, Pauline Fan
Photo of KL Lake Gardens by svetlanamarkova / Adobestock.com Malaysia is among the most multilingual countries in the world, given the peninsula’s key role in the historical oceanic trade. Malaysia…
Singing about the Coronavirus Using an Ancient Art Form: The Patuas of Bengal

October 17, 2022 Dipika Mukherjee
Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop ent…
Tears and Song

June 18, 2021 Dipika Mukherjee
Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas Mukherjee In honor of Father’s Day, writer Dipika Mukherjee remembers her father, Kalidas Mukherjee, who passed away in New Delhi on May 8, 2021.…
The Unsevered Tongue

Autumn 2019
Dipika Mukherjee
Photo: Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash A mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court. When my da…
Five Weeks in Rimbun Dahan

July 23, 2019 Dipika Mukherjee
A writer travels from Chicago to a residency in rural Malaysia, where part of her novel-in-progress is set. While encountering the many living creatures who surround her and making progress on h…
Malaysian English Writing Today

April 16, 2019 Dipika Mukherjee
Kuala Lumpur / Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky Although the world has opened up for Malaysian glocal writers in the past fifteen years, they still face the demon of self-censorship.…
Four Books from Malaysia

September 2016
Dipika Mukherjee
The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen…
Doppelgänger

September 2015
Dipika Mukherjee
In this story written in response to current events in Malaysia, a writer confronts the doppelgänger intended to silence her political speech. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia…
Do My Poems Cry with Me?

January 14, 2015 Dipika Mukherjee
Dipika Mukherjee reports on the first-ever Migrant Workers Poetry Competition in Singapore, at which construction-site laborers read their poems in November. Rarely is poetry, with its messy…