[4] The only child of her parents, she was brought up in the hill town of Dehradun (in present Uttarakhand), where she attended Welham Girls' School, and spent her summer vacations in Santiniketan.

[10][11][12] Her bronze work emerged in the 2000s, "when the artist began casting forms moulded directly in wax using the traditional lost-wax process, whose surfaces she finished with tools obtained from a local dentist".

"[15] Mukherjee was influenced by traditional Indian and historic European sculpture, folk art, modern design, local crafts and textiles.

[17][pages needed] The authors of Indian Contemporary Art Post-Independence dubbed Mukherjee as a "unique voice in contemporary Indian art", and remarked "The sculptures knotted painstakingly with hemp ropes in earthy or rich glowing colours evoke a fecund world of burgeoning life, lush vegetation, iconic figures."

Sonal Khullar writing on Subramanyan's influence on her wrote in Worldly Affiliations Mukherjee a former student, "[...] use jute, wood, rope, and cow dung to create environments at once magical and mundane.

"[19] Art historian and independent curator Deepak Ananth also ascribed Mukherjee's predilection for modest, earthly materials to her influence from Subramanyan, and in turn from the history of Indian artisanal craft.

In an essay entitled "The Knots are Many But the Thread is One", Ananth wrote, "As if in harmony with the vegetable realm from which her medium is derived, the leading metaphor of Mukherjee's work comes from the organic life of plants.

"[14] In the context of the pedagogy professed by K G Subramanyan, Mukherjee's decision to work in a material traditionally associated with her craft rather than "high art" reflects her teacher's conscious attempts to overcome what they considered to be a staple polarity in Modernism, not least in view of the extreme richness and continuing actuality of traditional artisanal skills in India and the sheer versatility of popular vernacular idioms.