| Abstrakt: |
Manju Kapur is a post- colonial writer who intuitively perceives the position of women in a patriarchal society and deals with the problems of women. Kapur's Difficult Daughters is the story of a young woman Virmati who falls in love with a married man, hitherto a condemned passion in her narrow social circle. It is not only about the difficult daughters but also as much about the difficult mothers of the changing times. The novelist deals with the leading themes of the times where the description of love, sex and marriage is very bold and rather unconventional. The narrator, Ida, is a difficult daughter and she explores the life of her mother in the novel. Kapur uses three generations of daughters, who exhibit three sets of notions. The novel presents the paradigm of two mother-daughter relationships where the daughters differ from their mothers and never want to be like them but in the end, they cannot but identify with their mothers. The novel Home presents Nisha, the protagonist as bold, educated and balanced. Her feminist sensibility has been suppressed to a great extent by patriarchy. Manju Kapur takes the readers through a brisk and strangely captivating account of three generations. It explores the complex terrain of Indian family and reveals many issues that are deep rooted within the family. Nisha's marriage and later her motherhood assert the fact that a woman's intellectual emancipation does not negate her biological stature of nurturing relationships. Kapur is not argumentatively vocal in pleading the fate of the contemporary woman rather she sympathetically paints a woman's struggle to find an identity. Striking a balance between a natural co- existence on one hand and unfettered freedom and space on the other, Kapur's eloquent narration of women's issues is both Indian and universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
