Mother – Daughter Relationship in Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur

                   The  Society  we  live  in  is  a  Patriarchal Society , where  the  Child – father  relationship  is  given  more attention than the issue of the poor mother-daughter relationship openly in Main Stream culture because women are believe to be more nurturing, emphatic and social which prevents them from having any serious conflicts with their children. The fact is that broken daughter relationships are more than most are aware. This complex relationship of mother and daughter can be taken similar to a roller coaster where some parts of the ride can be fun, thrilling and crazy. While there may be some other structures of that ride also where one feels anxious, fearful and alienated. In studies it is proved that 30% of women have been estranged from their mothers at some point in their life and suits for the extreme levels of the society- the high sophisticated class and the poor driven class. The mother daughter relationship is characterized by tenderness, love and affection. It is considered to be the most scared bond replete with care, concern, love and trust.

                   Feminist thinking on motherhood emerged during the decades of 60s,70s and through 80s. The first emerged feminist critics are Simone De Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet and Betty Friedian. With large critical discussions and advent of psychoanalytical theories the mother daughter relationship followed by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan insights deconstruct into three stages of child development: Imaginary-stage; Mirror-stage and Symbolic-stage. In Imaginary stage-the child finds one to one relationship with mother where complete identification takes place, in Mirror stage-the child begins to conceive a separate self of itself, different from that of the mother and in the Symbolic stage-the child asserts its own identity represented by the language system.

                    Difficult Daughters is a debut novel of Manju Kapur. It deals with the story of three generation women, Kasturi is the Mother of Virmati, the protagonist and Ida her daughter who reveals her mother past. The story is set admist the time of partition. The novel primary deals with both mothers and daughters and the complicated relationship there share. In other words,it capture the complex relationship between mothers and daughters over a period of three generations. The story is narrated by Ida, daughter of Virmati, a divorcee and childless lady. As a daughter, Ida feels alienated from her mother who is presented in the opening lines of the novel as she says: “The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother” (1). This line plays the keynote to project her relationship to her mother. Therefore, in trying to reconstruct the history of her mother, Ida tries to search out a better understanding of her mother. Ida has a different impression on her mother before looking into her past but after looking into it she discovers what it is to be a mother.

                   Virmati, in Difficult Daughters, is the eldest daughter of respectable “Arya Smaji” business family at Amritsar. Kasturi enjoys her fecundity and every year she gives birth to a child and so she remains sick or pregnant most of the time which made Virmati the second mother for her brothers and sisters. She longs for love and affection but fails to get any. Most of her energy is wasted in rearing and caring for her younger siblings. Kasturi says, “You are the eldest. If you don’t see to things, who will?”(7). After her primary education, she is further trained into domestic chores that are considered to be the essential pre-requisites of an Indian marriageable girl in a traditional family. When Virmati reveals her wish to study further instead of marrying her relationship becomes a problematic one. This is because of Kasturi’s world which is not a female world but a world of man-made values. Through this we can understand that Mothers are merely exercisers of the patriarchal ideology under the pressure of their own gender. As from an orthodox background, the daughters are married off after receiving the basic qualification of housekeeping. But Shakuntala, cousin of Virmati, does not adhere to this family tradition. She studies, teaches and takes part in the political-Gandhian movement in Lahore. Thus, she becomes the role model for Virmati. Kasturi was not given a choice by her mother and so she is not ready to give any choice to her daughter too. But Shakuntala had planted the seeds of aspiration in to Virmati. Thus, she tends to think a life without marriage, husband and children. But, Kasturi is unable to understand her daughter’s ideas and views on life. For Kasturi, education has a corrupting influence over her daughter and so she is least concerned about educating her. She intensely seeks to shape Virmati after herself, and considers any attempt of her towards independence as an ungrateful act of selfishness. Hence, Kasturi here unknowingly voices the ideology that is integral to patriarchy. It is the hollowness created by her mother and her carving to be loved compels her to seek love in her relationship with a married professor, Harish. Virmati succumbs to his requests and implorations, and gets into useless love affair and unwed pregnancy. Later, understands that there is a vacuum existing in their relationship. By becoming the second wife of the professor, Virmati completely breaks away from her family and mother. Her marriage proves unfortunate for herself and her family. She led a life of a stranger in her husband home. Ganga, the first wife of the professor and his mother treat her as an outsider and untouchable. On the other hand, when her father dies in the partition riots, Kasturi blames Virmati for her father’s death. She began to consider herself as an isolated being that is unwanted both in her paretal home and in her in –laws’. Virmati does not attend any of the rituals after her grandfather’s death, she hardly spoke to her husband too.

                   In Ida’s memory, Virmati is in Lahore doing her MA in Philosophy, the partition riots force Ganga, with family to shift to Kanpur and thus she gets a chance to come back to her own home. There she gave birth to a daughter Ida. Virmati tried not be like her mother, and portrays herself as a sheer opposite of her mother, Ida confirms her inheritance. As a daughter, Virmati who was difficult for her mother to handle, herself becomes the mother of a daughter, then she realizes the meaning of being a mother. She imposes the same restrictions over her daughter, and then she realizes the meaning of a mother. She imposes the same restrictions over her daughter, Ida, which was once imposed upon her by her own mother, Kasturi. Ida , in her journey to her mother past measures her own state with the situation of her mother. She comes to know why Virmati, as a difficult daughter herself to her mother Kasturi, turns to be a stern and strict mother, as in patriarchy, a mother has to become strict for the safety of her daughter. Ida wistfully remembers how her mother had tried to teach her to ”Adjust, compromise, adapt”. The daughter confronts the fact that it is not as simple to be a mother in a male dominant society. Ida as being educated can see with a drive on her mind motivated and brimming with gumption to leave no stone unturned in the search of identity. For Virmati, marriage was scared and an institution that can be revoked and a broken marriage reflected her women’s failure. Ida, portrayed by the author is a down to earth, straight forward person. She recognizes Virmati’s failure, flaws and shortcomings even after her death and she does not want them to haunt her. Ida’s reason rejects Virmati not as a mother but as a woman in the following closing lines.’ This book weaves a connection between my mother and me, each work a brick in a mansion I made with my head and my heart. Now live in it, mama, and leave, me. Do not haunt any more (258).

                   It is clear that in the novel Difficult Daughters, it is clear that the narrator Ida has achieved a lot more than her mother Virmathi and her grandmother Kasturi with the simple fact we can understand that it the courage that she took to write it down her own family history. This novels touches a various dimensions of the mother and daughter relationship. Initially, the daughter identifies herself with her mother but later breaks off and feels alienated. Later, as the same daughter being an experienced self, looks back at her mother’s past and realizes what it is to be a mother in a patriarchal society. In this way we can find that there is again identification and understanding takes place between the mother and daughter.  

                                                                              By, 
                                                                                     S.T.Sreenidhi
                                                                                  I M.A English Literature