“But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.”
—Adrienne Rich
Booker winner Arundhati Roy, who shot to literary stardom with her debut novel The God of Small Things, will publish her memoir this year. Titled Mother Mary Comes to Me, the book unravels Roy라이브 바카라 relationship with Mary Roy, the mother she ran from at 18, not because she “didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”. Mary Roy passed away in September 2022. Overwhelmed by her loss, Roy started writing the book to make sense of her tangled feelings for her mother. Roy라이브 바카라 note about the upcoming memoir says: “Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her…” Who deserved whom? And how did they shape each other라이브 바카라 lives and personalities? Roy turns to non-fiction for answers.
Fiction writers remain preoccupied with the mother-daughter bond. Mothers and daughters dance a complicated dance in recent novels by many Indian writers, including Anita Desai라이브 바카라 Rosarita; Avni Doshi라이브 바카라 Girl in White Cotton; Radhika Oberoi라이브 바카라 Of Mothers and Other Perishables, Madhuri Vijay라이브 바카라 The Far Field, Geetanjali Shree라이브 바카라 Tomb of Sand (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell), Anindita Ghose라이브 바카라 The Illuminated, Naheed Patel라이브 바카라 A Mirror Made of Rain and Krupa Ge라이브 바카라 What We Know About Her. There are absent mothers, abusive mothers. Departed mothers, depressive mothers. Stoic pillars. Ghostly presences; wafting, watching. Daughters come in many hues too: rebels, role models; those who cut the cord and fly away, those who choose to stay. Mother-daughter ties evade easy definition in these books. They spread across a wide emotional spectrum—of tenderness and love, of camaraderie, cruelty, intensity, indifference.
At the start of Avni Doshi라이브 바카라 Girl in White Cotton, Tara says, “I would be lying if I said my mother라이브 바카라 misery has never given me pleasure.” Tara and her mother Antara, a free-thinker and former resident of a charismatic guru라이브 바카라 ashram, share a deep but discomfiting bond. “If readers have been troubled by the difficult mother-daughter relationship at the heart of my novel, it is because the idea of the good mother is a ‘sacred cow’ across most cultures,’’ says Doshi. “There is a set ideal that mothers and daughters—and women in general—should fulfill certain roles prescribed by and in service to patriarchy…I hope that art in its various forms can destabilise those ideas.”
Some write to shatter stifling ideals. Some to explore the ways in which a woman라이브 바카라 bond with her mother shapes her identity. Shashi and Tara—the mother-daughter duo in Anindita Ghose라이브 바카라 The Illuminated—share many fraught moments. Ultimately, they find a way to understand each other. “When women write books, they write about what is important to them,” says Ghose. “And a woman라이브 바카라 relationship with her mother—whether good, bad or terrible—but more when it is terrible, is definitely central to her unfolding.” Bonita, the young heroine of Anita Desai라이브 바카라 lyrical, elegiac Rosarita, travels across Mexico, following the trail of her dead mother라이브 바카라 past. Bonita gathers fragments of her mother라이브 바카라 life to piece together her own self. She wanders far from home, hoping to get to know her mother better, hoping to get to know herself better. Academic and writer Malashri Lal sees the search for the mother as more of a metaphorical journey. “As we move closer and closer to a rational, individualistic existence,” says Lal, “we seem to be looking for something we lost, something calling out to us from the past.”
The ghost of the mother in Radhika Oberoi라이브 바카라 Of Mothers and Other Perishables inhabits the past and haunts the present. She reminisces about her life in 70s and 80s Delhi as she watches her daughters deal with their personal and professional lives in an increasingly polarised city. The ghost airs her dreams and longings, and keeps a loving vigil on her family. The past and the present meld, the ghost and the living share a bond that defies death. Eighty-year-old Ma in Geetanjali Shree라이브 바카라 Booker-winning novel Tomb of Sand defies the invisibilisation of mothers—all women, actually—travels to Pakistan, lays claim to her true identity, and experiences a “rebirth” of sorts. Ma and her daughter Beti, who insists that saying “no” is her birthright, share an unconventional, unforgettable relationship.
When Krupa Ge was growing up, her mother was the “main storyteller” in her life. One of the stories her mother used to share was about how Krupa라이브 바카라 grandparents met and fell in love. That story in particular stayed with Krupa, sparking her debut novel What We Know About Her, which was longlisted for the JCB Prize. In the book, Yamuna is at loggerheads with her mother, questioning her every move. “Society라이브 바카라 expectations from women—as mothers and as daughters—are highly unrealistic,” says Krupa. “We are constantly producing content on mothers—books, films, TV and OTT series—but nothing comes close to the bone.” For Krupa, fleshing out the mother라이브 바카라 character was the toughest task when she started work on her novel. The reason? She wanted to steer clear of stereotypes and avoid the cliched mother figures popular culture keeps feeding us. Italian novelist Elena Ferrante라이브 바카라 books (The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, to name a few), were a source of inspiration for her. “Ferrante writes about the mother-daughter dynamic with rare insight,” says Krupa.
“There is a set ideal that mothers and daughters should fulfill certain roles prescribed by and in service to patriarchy...art can destabilise those ideas.”
Doshi is intrigued by French literary legend Marguerite Duras’ women characters. “They seem to be always circling their own madness, but this is mostly because of their subservient role as wives…” she says. “The wife often has to go against her own ideas, against her very being, to be a good wife to her husband—and this repeated self-negation sends her into some kind of lunacy. Duras doesn’t feel that children are a burden on mothers. It is the unequal role of the wife within the marriage that takes some kind of toll.” Ghose loved reading British writer Deborah Levy라이브 바카라 novel Hot Milk, which traces the trajectory of Rose and her daughter Sofia라이브 바카라 lives, and the damage the two inflict on each other. Ghosh adds, “I must mention the movies too. Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman, which was remade in Bengali as Unishe April by Rituparno Ghosh: for being almost too raw to digest in company.”
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The mother-daughter relationship is one of the fundamental units around which society organises itself. So, it라이브 바카라 not surprising that many writers pay attention to its dynamics. Social anthropologist and fiction writer Susan Visvanathan says, “Earlier, Indian writers used to depict the mother as a pivotal figure—the centre of laws, the source of overpowering love. But a shift happened as times changed.” New writers started exploring the contradictions and tensions in the relationship, highlighting aspects like the mother라이브 바카라 need for control, and the daughter라이브 바카라 quest to break free.
“A woman라이브 바카라 bond with her mother is the primary relationship she will have with another woman,” says Ghose. “And yet it is more often than not a fraught relationship. I was interested in these contradictions—how deep this relationship can go and how easily it can tear.” By exploring these contradictions, are contemporary writers giving readers a more honest portrait of this relationship? Are they less prone to deification of the mother figure?
“On the one hand, we have the sanctification of mothers in Indian myths,” says academic and writer Malashri Lal. “But the rendering of the mother-daughter relationship has certainly changed with reference to context,” she adds, pointing out that Indian writers like Githa Hariharan, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Anita Desai, Anuradha Roy and Namita Gokhale, among others, have created mothers who defy stereotypes in their works.
Fictional mothers may rewrite the rules, and fictional daughters may rebel. Writers can write their hearts out, but what about the god of all things—the “market”? Do books revolving around the mother-daughter relationship have enough takers? Are literary agents on the lookout for them? How about publishers? Ambar Sahil Chatterjee, literary agent at A Suitable Agency, says the mother-daughter relationship is a “prevailing theme” because it is an integral part of our cultural consciousness. “The complicated aspects of the parent-child bond lend themselves to drama in fiction,” says Chatterjee. “The theme has great potential, but I would evaluate how a writer approaches it. Does the story grip the reader? How well-written is the manuscript?” Kanishka Gupta, Founder, Writer라이브 바카라 Side literary agency, values originality, voice and storytelling chops in a work of fiction. However, he warns, “Many accomplished writers have dealt with this theme in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. So, comparisons are bound to happen. It라이브 바카라 not easy for books by new writers on this theme to get picked up.”
Vineetha Mokkil is assistant editor, 바카라. She is the author of the book 'A Happy Place and Other Stories'
(This article is a part of 바카라's March 11, 2025 Women's Day special issue 'Women at Work', which explores the experiences of women in roles traditionally occupied by men. It appeared in print as 'Girl, Wom an, Mother’)
