Events, time and tradition

The fact is that despite the free and easy lifestyle that is depicted by the songs and dances, the extraordinary events, the daring dresses and beautiful people of the Indian commercial cinema and TV soap operas, life in South Asia is in many ways the same as it has been for many years. This is especially so in matters of personal and familial relationships and the interaction between men and women both inside and outside the bonds of marriage. The constraints of social behaviour, the expectations of friends and families and the socio-religious traditions that circumscribe our lives, bind us in chains that are only slightly looser than they were for our mothers.

Thus, novels about such relationships must convey a convincing realism to be captivating and I found just that in the works of a trio of women writers.

Manju Kapoor's debut novel which was awarded the "Best First Book" Commonwealth Writers Prize is DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS (pub: Faber and Faber 1998). This is as much a story about difficult mothers, changing times and putting ghosts to rest as it is about difficult daughters.

Although it is set in politically charged, pre-partition Amritsar, the immediacy of the experience is easy to identify with. The heroine is the daughter of a deeply traditional, middle class, Punjabi family who defies convention to fall in love with a married man and is fully conscious of the outrage this causes her family and the heartbreak it causes her mother. The core of the book is her attempt to explain herself to her dead mother in order to resolve the conflicts and confusion that beset her. "This book weaves a connection between my mother and me," she says at the end "each word is a brick in a mansion I made with my head and my heart. Now live in it, Mama, and leave me be. Do not haunt me any more."

With her second book, A MARRIED WOMAN, (pub: IndiaInk 2002), Ms. Kapur has established herself as a sensitive novelist who has a deep and mature understanding of the inner subtlety of women's psyches. But while Ms. Kapur's portrayal of women is credible, sensitive and sympathetic I find her men could do with some backbone. How her vigorous, even strong minded heroines could fall for these feeble characters is puzzling. They are wishy-washy and inadequate as lovers, leaving one with a strong urge to shake them vigorously and knock some gumption into them!

That is not the case with ANCIENT PROMISES (pub: Penguin Books 2000) by Jaishree Misra. This is a semi-autobiographical love story and the man in question is a strong but sensitive hero. The love story is tenderly told, the arranged marriage credible and the unhappiness within it convincing in its inevitability. The added poignancy of a handicapped child and the disparate ways of life of the two communities -- bureaucratic Delhi and rural Kerala -- are well brought out and the heroine keeps our sympathies to the end.

The theme of mothers and daughters continues in Vancouver based Anita Rau Badami's first novel TAMARIND MEM (pub: Viking 1996). It reflects her own growing up in a railway town nurtured by the lore of myth and legend that surrounds children in a large, garrulous family. Tamarind Mem illustrates vividly how perception and memories of the past differ from person to person. The mother and daughter of the novel have vastly differing memories of the same past and the differences that exist between them are a result of the changing culture of a modernising world.

Inhabiting a different place and time, where social restrictions have largely disappeared, the daughter must begin to view her mother from a different perspective in order to comprehend her problems in the context of the cultural restrictions of the past. The largely forgotten railway world of the novel, clinging to its colonial legacy and at odds with the Indianised world around it, is well evoked as is the exploration of emotion and thought; shakiness of memory and the elusive nature of the mind.

Ms. Badami's second book THE HERO'S WALK (pub: Alfred Knofp 2000) deals with the changes faced by a Canadian-raised, seven year old girl, who loses her parents in a car crash and is forced to return to her grandparent's South Indian home to live. This book was the well deserved winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Prize for fiction because Ms. Badami succeeds in telling a compelling story which is lush with the traditions and atmosphere of rural India.

Her characters take on life of their own because of their irreverent even comic humor and the wicked absurdity she finds in the hidebound traditions which dominate small town life. However the comedy masks larger, more pervasive social issues of caste and conflict that find echoes in other communities and countries of South Asia.

All three of these authors manage to blend the personal with the external and ground their tales within the context of the major political and social events of the time in very realistic terms. The communal riots of Partition, the Babri mosque issue, the crisis of identity faced by the children of the Diaspora and the conflicts within society as it slowly changes from its old fashioned ways and adapts to a global culture are relevant to our own times and our mores. There is a cultural universality to these books with their sensitive depiction of the displacement of the individual and the classic stories of women who sacrifice their own individuality for the sake of tradition or family.

It is ironical that these self limiting values have not changed much over time because successive generations of mothers pass it on to their daughters and all of us are guilty, to some extent of, "thus teaching her daughter how to devalue her work and passing on the tradition from woman to woman."

Yasmeen Murshed is a full-time bookworn and a part-time educationist. She is also the founder of Scholastica School.