ABSTRACT:
Article earlier published in THE ATLANTIC LITERARY REVIEW,
Atlantic Literary Review (New Delhi), Vol. 5, No. 1-2, January-March and April-June 2004, pp. 177-184 (see separate getcited entry). This is a revised and updated version. URL above has full text but of previous version (changes are minor).
EXTRACT:
In Difficult Daughters, her first novel, published in 1998 and located mostly in the India of the 1940s, Manju Kapur speaks, with great narrative eloquence, of the idea of independence. The book, whose author, born in 1948, lives in Delhi and teaches at Miranda House University College for Women (Delhi University), was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia Section), and has earned her very substantial success, both commercially and critically, both in her native India and on the world market (...)
The search for control over one’s destiny, surely the key theme of Difficult Daughters, refers to the Independence aspired to and obtained by a nation (despite its cruel division by a fateful Partition), but also to the independence yearned after (and finally not obtained) by a woman and member of that same nation (or of one of its rival communities). Virmati, the heroine, seeks human relations that will allow her to be herself and to exercise the degree of control over her life which, as an educated woman, she knows she deserves. Born in Amritsar in the Punjab in 1940, the daughter of a father of progressive ideas and a traditionalist mother (Kasturi, obliged to give birth to no less than 11 children), she aspires to a freer life than that offered her by those around her. This aspiration is condemned to failure, thanks to the incomprehension she receives from both her own family and that of the man she marries—but also thanks to her own mistakes, for no-one obliged her to marry who became her husband, and she was free not to make the choice she did.
Virmati, like so many other subcontinental women, is asked to accept a typical arranged marriage. She rebels against that destiny, to the lasting shame of her family, above all of her mother. Insisting on her right to be educated, she manages to leave home to study in Lahore. Nonetheless, she falls in love with an Amritsar teacher known as “the Professor,” a married man who first appears in her life as her parents’ tenant. After a number of vicissitudes, including a period as a school principal in a small Himalayan state, she finally marries the man she loves (or thinks she loves), and returns to Amritsar to live with him. However, he refuses to leave his first wife, and the consequences for Virmati are harsh indeed: she ends up being marginalised by her own family and despised by her husband’s. Virmati’s tale is told, from a present-day perspective, by Ida, her only daughter, who seeks to reconstruct her late mother’s life-story, against the background of the Independence movement of the 1940s and the subsequent trauma of Partition.
