Difficult Daughters

About the book

Difficult Daughters is the first novel by Manju Kapur, published in 1998 by Faber and Faber in London, with an Indian edition from Penguin India in the same year. Kapur, who was born in Amritsar and taught English at Miranda House in Delhi, began it in 1991 and, by her own account, spent eight years on it: her forties were spent on this book. Publishers in India, the United States and Britain rejected it before Faber took it, and Kapur has said the title itself was the publishers' choice: she would have called it Partition, or Partitions. The published title proved exact, because the book is about three generations of women, each of them a difficult daughter to the one before.

The novel is told by Ida, a divorced, childless woman who begins with the line that she had wanted, above all, not to be like her mother. After her mother Virmati dies in Delhi, Ida travels to Amritsar and rebuilds her mother's hidden past out of what relatives and old friends will tell her. What she finds is a story of education, desire and disgrace in the Punjab of the 1940s, running in parallel with the freedom struggle and ending in Partition.

What is Difficult Daughters about?

Virmati is the eldest of eleven children of Kasturi and Suraj Prakash, in an upper middle class Arya Samaj family of Amritsar. While her mother moves from pregnancy to pregnancy, Virmati runs the house and raises her siblings. At about thirteen she is struck by her cousin Shakuntala, educated, unmarried and independent, and begins to want a life beyond marriage. She fails her intermediate examination at seventeen, passes at a second attempt, and asks to study further. Her parents instead arrange her marriage to a canal engineer.

When the wedding is postponed because of a death in the groom's family, Virmati is allowed to go to college, and there she falls in love with her teacher, Professor Harish Chandra, an Oxford returned professor of English who lodges in her aunt's part of the house and is already married to Ganga, his child bride. Virmati refuses the arranged marriage, attempts to drown herself, and is locked away by her family. She is then sent to Lahore for higher studies, where her roommate Swarna Lata draws her into the world of women students active in the Independence movement, while the affair with Harish continues in secret.

Virmati becomes pregnant, and Harish will not marry her. With Swarna Lata's support she undergoes a painful abortion. Qualified as a teacher, she becomes principal of a girls' school at Nahan, in the princely state of Sirmaur, the freest period of her life, until Harish's secret visits destroy her reputation and she loses the post. On a journey that was meant to take her to Shantiniketan, she stops in Delhi, where a friend of Harish persuades him, at last, to marry her. But Harish does not leave Ganga. Virmati returns to his Amritsar house as second wife, to live alongside the first wife and her children, scorned in the house and cut off by her own family. As violence rises, the household moves, and she and Harish settle in Delhi, where Ida is born around Independence.

Themes: education, mothers and daughters

The book's deepest subject is what a woman of that time and class was permitted to want. Kasturi, educated only for marriage, spends her life bearing eleven children. Virmati wants study, work and chosen love, and gets each of them at a price that leaves her neither free nor forgiven. Ida, educated and divorced, repeats her mother's pattern in a new form and judges her for it, until the telling of the story teaches her what her mother's choices cost. Around this family argument the novel sets the national one: as India fights for freedom from Britain, its daughters are still told that marriage, and nothing else, is their freedom.

Kapur has said that Virmati was loosely based on her own mother, a teacher and principal who married a man who was already married: the broad fact is the same, the details are the novelist's. She has also resisted calling the book autobiographical. It is better read as an act of understanding across a generation: a daughter using fiction to ask why her mother lived as she did, and what she endured.

The author

Manju Kapur (born 1948) taught English literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi, for over twenty five years, and wrote Difficult Daughters around her teaching life. Her later novels, A Married Woman, Home, The Immigrant, Custody and Brothers, continued her study of middle class Indian women's lives. Her full story is in her Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

Difficult Daughters won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the Eurasia region in 1999, and was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. Contemporary reviewers praised its quiet control: the Sunday Times called it a skillful, enticing first novel offering a completely imagined, complex world, and the Observer praised Kapur's quiet intelligence and wry, deadpan humour. Scholars have since read it as a layered feminist text in which a woman's private rebellion and a nation's birth are made to explain each other, and as an elegy for the shared Punjabi culture of Amritsar and Lahore that Partition ended.

The book has stayed in print, in a Faber paperback and, in the United States, as an Open Road Media edition, and in a Spanish translation, Hijas difíciles (2003). For Punjabi readers its force is double: it is a major Indian English novel, and it is also one of the fullest fictional records of an Amritsar family in the last years of undivided Punjab.