Difficult Daughters: Manju Kapur

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I am somehow in the mood for Indian books now. So when I saw Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur in the library I thought I will give it a try. I had heard a lot about it and had wanted to read it for a long time. Here is the summary from the book jacket –

Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbor, the Professor – a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation her scandalized family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.

When scandal, rebellion and the fight for independence come together in a novel it will, rest assured, have something to keep the reader hooked. I will say that I was too; I could not keep away from the book for long. Secondly, this is a book by a woman about three generations of women, which was another interesting aspect. It begins with Virmati’s daughter Ida landing in Amritsar to find out more about her mother’s past. As she slowly traces a story laden with tears, struggles and few smiles, we come to know that Virmati’s story ran parallel to India’s own battle for independence in the 1940s.

Virmati dares to enter unchartered and “sinful” territory by desiring a married man. To her the English Professor was a man of progress, of liberal values and of modernization, all the things that India as a whole was looking to achieve then. And it was not just Virmati who used to hang on to the Professor’s words. Kailashnath, Virmati’s brother says while guiding Ida around the college where her father taught,

“This used to be the most crowded classroom in the entire college. Students used to come to Lahore to hear him.”

“But what was so special about what he said?” I was curious. English was English.

“…He brought the subject alive. Most of us had never stepped out of Amritsar. The things he talked about, his expression, his way of speaking, we felt we were in another world.”

All of this charmed Virmati and the Professor was equally taken in by her strong personality and eagerness to learn. But as the book progresses Virmati’s strength, initially running on the high octane fuel of secret trysts and forbidden love, dissolves. As she refuses to marry a “boy” her family had chosen and as they slowly discover the reason for the refusal, Virmati’s life becomes a series of escapes. On the pretext of pursuing higher studies, Virmati goes to Lahore to escape her mother’s wrath. Later she becomes a teacher at a school run by a Maharani to escape from the Professor himself and then finally she is sent to study philosophy by the Professor so that she can get away from the stifling atmosphere in his house.

I felt that it was this dissolution of strength that makes the book a long drawn affair. I wish Virmati had shown a little more spine in putting her foot down firmly to her advantage in many situations. I found it frustrating after a point that the Professor continued to have his way with her while postponing her requests to marry her. Each time Virmati would resolve not to return to the Professor but at the same time she would continue writing letters to him. To Virmati, as for any woman at that time, marriage was the only validation of her femininity and this was the one thing the Professor refused for a long time.

The Professor, again, lacked the willpower and courage of a man truly in love. Despite being educated abroad and that too in a subject like English Literature, which is quite liberating and strengthening at the same time, the Professor dares not to displease his family. Though he worships Virmati with his words, his actions hardly validate them. It takes a lot of persuasion from his friend for him to finally marry Virmati but it again gives way to further furtive fumbling in the dark and hushed voices so that the Professor’s wife does not hear them. At one point I almost felt like shaking Virmati up for continuing to fall for the Professor’s empty words!

Thus it always seems that the more Virmati is gaining her independence on one track, she is being suffocated on the other. There is always a friction as Virmati moves in these two opposite directions at once; while she is the most educated member of her family and even goes to work, paradoxically she has to stay hidden from society at large and her loved ones because of her liaison with the Professor. Even as India is being partitioned, Virmati’s life also develops cracks as she loses her family’s love.

Kapur’s women, including Virmati’s daughter, are a long suffering lot, albeit with a certain fire in them. But that spark is not enough to set light to their innermost ambitions and desire to live life the way they want. So Difficult Daughters is more a chronicle of women and their lives rather than a story with a resolution or results. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Best First Book, Difficult Daughters is difficult to put down. But at the same time it’s difficult not to wish that women like Virmati would be stronger, so as not to bring their own downfall.

Verdict: Fast read, peeps into life during pre and post independence India

Rating: 3/5