Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born in a Bengali Brahmin family[2] on 6 July 1890, in a village near Calcutta[3][4] on the edge of a jungle called Kajangal.

[5] Caste details Dhan Gopal's induction into the Brahminical tradition of his ancestors, and his experiences of wandering for a year as an ascetic, as was the custom for boys in strict priestly households.

However, disillusioned with the traditional role and impatient of the backward-looking element in strict Hindu society, he left the ascetic life to study at the University of Calcutta.

[6] Barely out of his teens, Dhan Gopal had absorbed enough revolutionary ideology from his peers to have been well on the way to following in his brother's footsteps, and may not have left India entirely willingly.

He married Ethel Ray Dugan, an American artist and educator, and in 1918 they had a son, also called Dhan "Dan" Gopal Jr.[6] In the 1920s, Mukerji moved to New York City and began his most prolific period of writing, published mainly by E.P.

Of his many children's books, Kari the Elephant was the first to see publication, in 1922, followed by Hari, the Jungle Lad two years later and Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon in 1927.

[citation needed] In spite of his many friends he felt isolated and marginalised in America, as he could do very little, beyond raising funds and entertaining visiting celebrities, to further the cause of the Indian independence movement.

There was also notable work by figures such as Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, writer of Sultana's Dream (1905), the first science fiction piece in English by an Indian, comparable to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.

Dhan Gopal never lost the sense of mission which he shared with his brother, and throughout his life strove to complete the task he had set himself: to emancipate India from foreign rule and win for her culture and philosophy the respect he felt it deserved.

In his work the Gond hunter and the Brahmin child are equals in their travels in the jungle, and Dhan Gopal Mukerji never (unlike Kipling) anthropomorphises the animals or draws a facile moral from them.

He writes movingly of child prostitutes in America in the 1910s and 1920s, especially of their plight during the Great Depression, but he also romanticises the life of Rangini, a 'tawaif' (courtesan) encountered in Caste and Outcast.