Home

About the book

Home is the third novel by Manju Kapur, first published in 2006 by Random House India. It was the first novel to come out of the publisher's new Indian imprint, and it became a number one bestseller in India. Kapur, born in Amritsar in 1948 and for many years a teacher of English literature at Miranda House in Delhi, had already won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her first novel, Difficult Daughters, and written the bestseller A Married Woman. Home was her return to the world she knew best: the middle-class joint family of Delhi, its shops, its marriages and its silences.

The novel is set in Karol Bagh, one of Delhi's oldest trading districts, and it follows three generations of a single family, the Banwari Lals, cloth merchants who sell saris and bridal wear from a shop in the bazaar. It spans about thirty years, from the years just after Partition to the 1980s, and it watches a family grow rich, grow crowded and slowly come apart. The Guardian's reviewer called it a brisk and strangely captivating account of three generations, and praised its tender humour and its sharp ear for Delhi middle-class English.

The story: three generations in Karol Bagh

Banwari Lal comes to India after Partition, his family's business destroyed in Lahore, and builds a new one in Karol Bagh with the help of his wife's jewellery. The shop sells saris and bridal clothes, and slowly the family prospers. His sons Yashpal and Pyare Lal join the business, and the family house fills with wives, children and grandchildren. But success does not bring peace. Banwari Lal's daughter Sunita is married off young to a man of dubious character. She is abused by her husband and dies in what is reported as a kitchen accident, leaving a small son, Vicky, to be brought up by the Banwari Lals.

Yashpal, the elder son, falls in love with the beautiful seventeen-year-old Sona, who walks into the family shop one fine day in May 1965, and marries her for love rather than by arrangement. For ten years Sona cannot conceive, and her childlessness makes her a subject of pity and resentment in the house. Her sister Rupa, married to a junior government officer, is childless too, but happier. When Sona finally gives birth, the house fills again, and the novel's attention turns to the next generation, above all to Sona's daughter Nisha.

Vicky, Sunita's orphaned son, becomes the family's black sheep. Neglected and resentful, he abuses his little cousin Nisha, an act the family cannot bring itself to name. The elders send the traumatised Nisha away to live with her aunt Rupa, a few houses away. It is the novel's darkest passage, handled by Kapur with a matter-of-fact calm that makes it harder, not easier, to read.

Nisha: the heart of the novel

The second half of the novel belongs to Nisha. She grows up at Rupa's house, studies English literature at university, and becomes the first woman in the family to gain a higher education. She falls in love with a young man from a lower caste, stands up to her conservative family, and is jilted by her lover. Her struggle to become a modern woman, to find work and a life of her own inside a family that measures a woman by her marriage, is the thread that holds the novel together.

Around her, the family changes. Banwari Lal dies, and with him goes the old order. The shop is modernised, the family house is divided into self-contained flats, and the joint family fragments into separate households. The business survives, but the home that held everyone together does not. Nisha's story ends without triumph: she finds a place of her own, but the price is paid in disappointment, in small compromises and in the quiet knowledge that independence in such a family is always partial.

The author

Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar in 1948 and taught English literature at Miranda House, Delhi, for more than twenty-five years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia) in 1998. A Married Woman was a bestseller in India and Britain. Home, her third novel, was followed by The Immigrant (2008), which was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her novels return again and again to the same ground: women in middle-class Indian families, caught between duty and desire.

Reception and legacy

Home was a number one bestseller in India and was nominated for the Crossword Book Award in 2007. Reviewers praised its plain, unshowy prose and its understanding of how families work: the small envies, the unspoken rules, the kindness that arrives disguised as duty. The Guardian's Tabish Khair called it a novel of tender humour and subtle retellings of north Indian family life, and read it with increasing pleasure. The Delhi Walla's Mayank Austen Soofi, writing in the year of publication, called it an engrossing, simple and quick read, and a worthy first book for Random House India.

The novel belongs to the tradition of Indian domestic fiction, the novel of weddings and deaths, arranged marriages and love affairs in a joint family. Kapur's version is quieter than most: there is no single villain, no great event, only the slow pressure of family life on the people inside it. That is why it is still read in classrooms and book clubs, and why it remains the best-known portrait of Karol Bagh's merchant families in Indian writing in English.

Why is Home still read?

It is still read because its subject has not gone away. Joint families still bargain over marriages, still measure women by children, still keep their hardest truths unnamed. Kapur does not lecture about any of this. She shows it happening, in a shop in Karol Bagh, at a table where the men nibble kachoris and talk about food while the women count the cost of the next wedding. Readers recognise their own families in the Banwari Lals, and that recognition is the book's lasting power.