• 2 Manju Kapur, Difficult Daughters, Faber and Faber (London, 1998).

He goes on to demonstrate how, starting from the Mahabharata, revenge has been the established fact and reconciliation a mere fantasy in the Indian ethos. In fact, in many Indian languages, the story of the Mahabharata is told under the name of Panjali’s Revenge. Manju Kapur’s novel Difficult Daughters,2 published a year earlier, is a profoundly disturbing book on the impossibility of reconciliation at the individual, family, gender and national levels and the resulting loss, pain and suffering that befall existence, especially female existence in India. Spanning almost a century and a half of Indian history (1849, the year in which the British annexed Punjab, to 1997, the year in which India celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence), it underscores the role of colonization and imperialism as catalysing agents of change in the mind set and way of life of traditional societies.

• 3 See Sara Mitter, Dharma’s Daughters, Rutgers UP (New Brunswick, 1991).

2Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar, a city charged with history. She is currently a teacher of English literature at Miranda House College, Delhi University. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters took her five years of research and writing and was awarded the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best first book in the Eurasian region. The novel’s title, is doubly intriguing. Indian women are known to be ‘Dharma’s Daughters’.3 What makes them turn into difficult daughters? The usual English occurrence is ‘difficult’ or ‘problem child’. What does it mean to be a difficult daughter? The alliteration and the interplay of the voiced and voiceless alveolar plosives in the title only prepare the reader for the many dissonances that the narrative is going to reveal.

• 4 IndiaInk (New Delhi, 1997).
• 5 Arya Samaj: A reformist Hindu society founded in Bombay in 1875 by Dayananda Saraswati. It advocate (...)
• 6 See Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence, Kali for Women (New Delhi, 1986).
• 7 See Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, Penguin (New Delhi, 1985).

3Like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,4 this novel presents a daughter’s account of her mother’s troubled life and times. Viramati, as the name of the protagonist implies, is an embodiment of courage. Born in Amritsar in an austere and high-minded Arya Samaj5 household, she falls in love with her married neighbour and professor, the Oxford returned Haresh Chandra. Viramati’s struggle to achieve her own independence through education and a teaching career finds a parallel both in Indian women’s vindication of their rights6 and in India’s tumultuous course towards freedom. Obliged to abort her first baby conceived out of wedlock, she becomes Haresh’s co-wife and mothers a baby girl after a miscarriage, while Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are fighting with one another in Amritsar. When the father refuses to name the daughter Bharati after the nation and prefers to call her Ida (clean slate), the reader is sensitized to the irrevocable lines of partition and pain in and around Viramati and the impossible reconciliation between duty and daring, love and liberty, mind and body, the home and the world,7 Hindus and Muslims in India.

• 8 Child marriages in India were forbidden by the Sarda Act of 1891.

5Viramati as a daughter faces difficulties that Ida could not even have imagined. The eldest daughter of a family of eleven children, Viramati is obliged to play surrogate mother to her siblings, seeing to their food, milk, clothes and studies. Her craving for her mother’s affection is met with stern rebukes and strident reminders of her duty. According to her mother, the duty of every girl is to get married. Viramati is disappointed by the lack of maternal love and exasperated by the weight of family responsibilities that interfere with her studies. She is too young to accept the ordained path of her life and is keen on steering it on her own. Fortunately, things are changing in Punjab at that time. Under the influence of Arya Samaj girls are sent to schools instead of becoming engaged at the age of three.8 Viramati’s own grandfather is a pioneer in the cause of women’s education. And her cousin Shakuntala, an MSc in chemistry manages to escape marriage and pursue a teaching career in Lahore. Shakunatala becomes a model for Virmati and exorts her to dare.

• 9 The Laws of Manu (translated by Wendy Doniger), Penguin (New Delhi, 1991).
• 10 See Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. See also Benouada Lebdai’s article on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in (...)

6At the crucial moment in life when Viramati has to make the leap from adolescence to adulthood, she finds herself torn between contradictory impulses. If she chooses to honour family tradition, she will have to forego education and marry the prospective bridegroom chosen by her family, which means saying goodbye forever to her aspirations of freedom. On the contrary, if she insists on breaking up the engagement, she will bring shame upon the family and ruin the marriage chances of her sisters waiting in turn. She is sure of one thing only – her love for the professor. She therefore tells her family that she does not want to marry because she wants to go to Lahore and study. The only response from her mother is physical violence and verbal abuse. Viramati turns to the professor for help and quickly realizes that she cannot depend on him to sort out her situation. Unable to submit herself unquestioningly to her fate, she tries to commit suicide by jumping into a river. Trapped in Eastern assumptions9 that consider women to be the property of the father before marriage, that of the husband after the marriage and that of the son in widowhood and attracted by the opportunities for building a sense of self offered by Western education, Viramati is swayed by the disruptive force of her desire. Given the circumstances, the only way to assert her self seems to be to annihilate it. She prefers to sacrifice her life rather than her pride. If the river is an apt metaphor for the cross currents in which she is caught, Viramati’s suicide attempt is a powerful symbol of impossible reconciliation in the novel together with domestic imprisonment, the abortions that Viramati and Ida undergo for different reasons, running away, dispossession, separation, divorce and death recounted in the subsequent chapters. While the themes of rape and birth are common in postcolonial literatures,10 abortions and suicides are rare.

• 11 See Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Seuil (Paris, 1980).
• 12 See Maria Mies, Women: The Last Colony, Kali for Women (New Delhi, 1988).

8Viramati’s sense of abjection11 when the family rejects and humiliates her is reflected in the physical secretions that the novel evokes without undue regard paid to decorum – tears, vomit, blood. Viramati trusts Haresh in vain to protect her from unwanted pregnancies. When she realizes that she is with child, Viramati is hit by adversity and loneliness. She is unable to get in touch with Haresh and decides to abort. She has to find both the money and the means to carry this out. She cajoles her father into giving her a pair of gold bangles hoping to sell them to cover the medical expenses. Though her friend Swarna Lata thinks that loose conduct is incompatible with education, she agrees to help her out because she is aware that many women bleed to death after home-made abortions. Torn between the remorse of killing her baby and the fear of dying, Viramati manages to survive, thanks to the availability of Western technology. It is as if by the disposing of her own child, she has earned the right to control her body and her future. ‘Yes, she was independent. Her body had gone through knives and abortion. What could they do now to her that she could not bear?’ (p. 175). Nowhere is the implicit comparison between Viramati and colonized India so telling as in this statement. Viramati’s unjust sacrifice is a reflection of the material sacrifices that colonized countries have had to make in order to be integrated into the global capitalist economy.12 ‘The condition of her body was now commensurate with her social position’ (p. 173).

• 13 See Kunti’s conceiving of Karna in the Mahabharata. Also Shakuntala’s row with Dushyanta regarding (...)
• 14 Abortion as a new theme is treated in postcolonial French literature as well. See Maïssa Bey, Au co (...)

9Here we also witness an ironical turning of tables on the part of the author. While premarital pregnancies are known narrative motives in classical Indian literature,13 premarital abortions are not. Postcolonial novels typically depict the triumph of modern rationality over meaningless superstitions that seem to be at work in the practices of certain traditional societies such as circumcision or ‘sati’. In the case of Viramati, abortion becomes a pathetic rite of initiation into modernity,14 though it can also be seen as a sign of impossible transgression. Years later, Ida herself goes through an abortion incited by her husband, Prabhakar. His intellectualizing does not help her in any way to reconcile herself with the killing of the embryo. In the clash between brain and biology, it is her marriage that becomes the casualty. Abortion is a complex figure in the novel. The least that can be said about the author’s attitude towards it is that it is ambivalent. Viramati’s mother Kasturi would have liked to abort her eleventh child, tries to do so, but does not succeed. She regrets the absence of birth control. Viramati and Ida would have preferred not to abort, but are forced to and able to abort. Leaving aside the ethical issues involved, the author’s handling of the question of abortion illustrates how socio-political reform and economic change tend to focalize on the female body.

• 15 Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine, Seuil (Paris, 1998), p. 49.
• 16 See R.C. Majumdar, ed., British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance (Volume 10 of the Collection ent (...)

10Viramati’s mother is not intuitive enough to notice what has happened to Viramati, but vigilant enough to observe that her bangles are missing. When Viramati tells her that she gave them away as a gift for the soldiers’ relief fund, Kasturi is beside herself with rage: ‘She thinks she can dispose of what is given to her, when and where she likes’ (p. 174). Women are destined to circulate as mere fiduciary signs and the status of subject of exchange is denied to them in a male dominated society, according to Pierre Bourdieu.15 Viramati tries to forget her traumatic experience by working as the principal of a girl’s school in Nahan. Vulnerable as she is to the professor’s letters, she looks upon her stay in Nahan as a period of waiting rather than the beginning of a career. Haresh’s visit to her scandalizes the small community. Viramati is politely requested to leave her position. There is no other way to cope with this social ostracism than to flee to Shantiniketan (the Abode of Peace, a centre founded by Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore’s father, in 1863 near Calcutta). During a brief halt in Delhi, she meets Haresh’s friend who pleads with Haresh to marry her and thus legitimize their liaison. By choosing Shantiniketan as her destination, Viramati shows her determination to cross the whole Gangetic plain, if need be, to pursue her goal. However, her constant seeking of marriage is a proof of her inability to cross over to the side of absolute freedom as an unmarried single woman. Co-wives were a part of Indian tradition. The Native Marriage Act, popularly known as the Civil Marriage Act passed in 187216 was meant to change this by making monogamy obligatory and by fixing the minimum age for the bride and bridegroom respectively at fourteen and eighteen. As this legal process also authorized unorthodox marriages, not sanctioned by Hindu scriptures and thus facilitated the abolition of caste distinctions, it helped to recast the mental make-up of Indian men and women. But the bill was applicable only to those who declared themselves neither Hindu, nor Muslim, nor Christian. Viramati’s confused marriage mirrors a society in transition.

• 17 With regard to culinary metaphors, see also Radhika Jha, Smell, Viking (New Delhi, 1999).

13The novel’s epilogue narrates the story of how the family settles in Delhi after independence and how all of the professor’s children find ways to rebel against what they consider an oppressive family influence. The whole novel is a testimony to the impossibility ‘of adjusting, compromising and adapting’ that is expected of women. It is translated physically by Viramati’s pinched face, clenched jaw and tight lips, psychologically by the narrator’s refusal to partake of communal food and stylistically by her adamant recourse to Punjabi words, even when English equivalents exist. Punjabi after all is her mother tongue, while English could be considered her father tongue. Her refusal once again to refer to Ganga, the professor’s wife, by her name and her persistence in calling her ‘the woman’ also provide a clue to her inability to reconcile herself with her father’s bigamy. Her decision to divorce Prabhakar may have been prompted by the fact that he is a successful academic ‘like her father’. The candid portrayal of the deplorable yet prevalent human tendency to ‘cut off the nose to spite the face’ rather than compromise is what makes Manju Kapur’s debut novel stand apart in a series of coming of age novels written by women writers in the last decade. The predominant metaphor for violence and manipulative force17 in the novel is what is generally considered to be the female domain of cooking: ‘Cutting, peeling, chopping, slicing, pounding, wrapping, mixing, kneading, baking, roasting, stirring and frying (deep plus shallow). It paid to know these things’ (p. 205). The violence of the adult world is redeemed, only partially, by the recollections of the aroma of childhood.