Manju Kapurਮੰਜੂ ਕਪੂਰ

Early life and education

Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar, Punjab, in 1948, a year after Partition divided her province. She grew up in the north Indian middle class world her novels return to again and again: households run by women, where education was prized and marriage was still treated as a woman's main destination. Her mother, born in 1915, had herself been a teacher and a school principal, a woman who had gone out into the world and, as Kapur has put it, suffered accordingly. That mother's story, loosely retold, became the seed of her first novel.

Kapur studied at Miranda House, the women's college of the University of Delhi, and later taught there. She took her M.A. at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, in 1972, and an M.Phil. at the University of Delhi. The college classroom, with its generations of young women negotiating between home and ambition, became the other great source of her fiction.

A teacher who became a novelist

Kapur taught English literature at Miranda House for almost thirty years before taking voluntary retirement to write full time. She came to writing late and, in her own account, almost by accident. She began Difficult Daughters in 1991, when her youngest child was one year old. From start to finish the book took eight years: her forties were spent on it.

Publication took nearly as long. The manuscript was rejected in India, the United States and Britain, by Penguin among others, before Faber and Faber in London saw its possibilities. Penguin, which had earlier turned the novel down, brought out the Indian edition in 1998 under its tie up with Faber, and her Faber editor, Julian Loose, remained her editor for the books that followed. Kapur has said the rejections taught her to edit. She has described herself as an obsessive word counter.

What is Difficult Daughters about?

Difficult Daughters (1998) is the story of Virmati, the eldest of eleven children in an Arya Samaji family in Amritsar, who wants an education, falls in love with Harish, a married professor who is her family's tenant, and becomes his second wife at the cost of her family's love. It is set in Amritsar and Lahore in the 1930s and 1940s, against the freedom struggle and the approach of Partition, and it is told by Virmati's daughter Ida, a divorced woman reconstructing her dead mother's life.

Kapur drew the novel from the lives of her mother and grandmother, with her mother's permission and help, although she has resisted calling it autobiographical: the broad fact that her mother married a man who was already married is the same, while the telling is hers. Even the title was not hers: the publishers gave the book its name, and her aim, she has said, was empathy rather than a portrait of a troublesome child. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, for Europe and South Asia, in 1999, and was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. The Guardian found it steeped in exquisite melancholy, and The Sunday Times called it a skillful, enticing first novel. It has its own entry in this Kosh.

The novels that followed

A Married Woman, published in India in 2002 and by Faber in 2003, follows Astha, a Delhi schoolteacher and painter whose arranged marriage to Hemant leaves her longing for a life of her own. Against the Ayodhya movement and the destruction of the Babri Masjid, she is drawn first to the street theatre activist Aijaz and then, after his killing, to his widow Pipeelika. Kapur has said the relationship began as a study of female friendship, and that the politics mattered most to her. The novel was shortlisted for the Encore Award.

Home (2006) stays inside one house: the home of Lala Banwari Lal, a Karol Bagh cloth merchant. Across three generations it follows his daughter in law Sona, childless for ten years and pitied for it, and Sona's daughter Nisha, whose struggle to become more than the family allows carries the second half. Reviewers praised Kapur's refusal to judge her characters, and the book was nominated for the Hutch Crossword Book Award.

The Immigrant (2008) takes a Punjabi lecturer out of Delhi altogether. Nina, thirty and living with her widowed mother, marries Ananda, a dentist settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in an arranged match, and follows him to Canada, the country where Kapur herself had studied. The novel follows two adjustments, first his and then hers, as Nina rebuilds a self in a new country. It was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was a finalist for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Custody (2011) is set in the new money Delhi of the 1990s. Shagun leaves her husband Raman for his boss, Ashok Khanna, and their two children, Arjun and Roohi, become the stakes in a bitter custody fight. Ishita, whose own marriage ended because she could not have children, enters the children's lives as their stepmother. Kapur has said she identified most with Raman, the father traumatised by the loss of his children.

Brothers (2016) deliberately left Delhi for Rajasthan: Lalbanga village near Ajmer, Ajmer itself and Jaipur. It traces the Gaina family across some seventy years, through the freedom struggle, caste politics and the Emergency. In the second, Himmat Singh Gaina rises to become chief minister of Rajasthan and is shot by his younger brother Mangal, whose wife Tapti stands at the centre of the story. Critics noted how the book opens with its own ending and works backwards to the killing.

Kapur also edited Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves (2014). Her seventh novel, The Gallery, appeared in 2023, after a gap of almost seven years. It follows two Delhi families whose lives run side by side without ever becoming equal: Minal, who opens an art gallery in the wealthy Golf Links neighbourhood, and Maitrye, the Nepali woman employed in her home, whose daughter Tashi grows up in the servant quarters alongside Minal's daughter Ellora. Kapur told Mint Lounge that she wanted this book to reflect a larger world, one of women going out to work and to independence.

Themes: women, family and power

Kapur has described herself as a very Indian novelist, more specifically a north Indian urban middle class novelist. Her subjects look domestic on the surface: marriage, divorce, custody, the joint family, the woman who wants a room and a life of her own. Underneath they are about power: who in a family may study, work, choose a partner, keep a child, or leave. Her material comes from observation, her own family and thirty years of students, whose aspirations she watched change as jobs became expected for every girl.

History reaches her characters through the household. Partition divides the Punjab of Difficult Daughters, the Babri Masjid campaign shadows A Married Woman, the Emergency and caste politics drive Brothers, and the money of the 1990s unsettles Custody. Unlike the heroines of the nineteenth century novels she taught, her women are not required to die for their choices: the world has changed enough, she has said, for compromise to replace tragedy.

Honours, adaptations and later work

Difficult Daughters won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. A Married Woman was shortlisted for the Encore Award, Home was nominated for the Hutch Crossword Book Award in 2006, and The Immigrant was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2011 and was a finalist for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. Her novels have been translated into German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, Marathi and Hindi, and are widely studied in Indian universities.

Television carried her Delhi households far beyond her readership: Yeh Hai Mohabbatein, based on Custody, ran on Star Plus and was remade in several Indian languages, The Immigrant became Pardes Mein Hai Mera Dil, and A Married Woman became a web series, The Married Woman. She lives in New Delhi and continues to write.

Legacy

Kapur's place in Punjabi letters is distinctive: an Amritsar born writer working in English, whose best loved book looks back to the undivided Punjab of Amritsar and Lahore before 1947, and to the women whose ambitions that world had no room for. Difficult Daughters gave the Punjabi middle class family, and especially its mothers and daughters, a permanent place in the Indian English novel, and the six novels after it carried the same clear eyed attention to the Delhi of galleries, courtrooms and custody battles.