August 24, 1998
|
|
|
|
BOOKS Freedom Before Midnight How a woman in undivided Punjab experienced love and liberation By Gurcharan Das DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS
The drama unfolds with intelligence and absorbing sympathy in Lala Diwan Chand's Arya Samaj family in conservative Amritsar. At the centre of the storm is Virmati, who yearns for something beyond marriage. Having seen the deadening child-bearing existence of her frail mother, Virmati wants a life of her own. She wants to be like her cousin, Shakuntala, who is educated, sophisticated and, most important, lives in Lahore. It is difficult to imagine Lahore's mesmerising pull in those pre-Independence, pre-Partition days. It was the mecca of Punjabi youth, who confidently strutted on the Mall, spent leisurely afternoons in Lawrence Gardens, thronged Anarkali Bazaar, embraced the politics of IPTA and the Left, and set and followed trends in art, literature and music. Government College, with its Gothic spire narrowing into the sky and intense intellectual life, was their "Oxford of the East". Virmati falls in love with her romantic neighbour, a married professor, England returned. She marries him eventually and comes into his home, alongside his furious first wife. Her family is disgraced; and the Arya Samaj movement for the education of women suffers a real setback in Amritsar. It is a wonderfully gripping story by Manju Kapur, who was born in Amritsar and now teaches at a Delhi college. It took her five years to research and write Difficult Daughters. She has ably captured Virmati's conflict between her duty to her family, her desire for education and independence and her illicit love for a married man. Unfortunately, the other characters are dead and wooden -- especially the professor. Like many Indian males, he is an irritating coward who talks big and does little. Occasionally, Kapur manages to bring alive the sad situation of his first wife. Even so, she has missed an opportunity by not building up two warm and sensitive men -- Virmati's father and grandfather -- who would have lifted this book to a new level. As it stands, it is a competent, intimate woman's novel -- which, mind you, is not a small accomplishment. The novel wrestles valiantly with the familiar problems faced by an Indian writer in English. Initially, I was irritated by the Punjabi-ised English idiom: "it is you who are eating my head", "but the children dance on my head all day", "who is this gandi woman who has entered the aangan?", "where has that good for nothing gone and died?". Slowly, though, the Punjabi English began to grow on me. By the end, I felt Kapur had pulled it off. Nevertheless, a good rule is that when an English word is available, don't resort to a local one. For example, aangan is not necessary when "courtyard" will do. Curiously, the impeccable, virile BBC English of the professor's letters provides a dramatic contrast to the Punjabi-ised idiom of the book. The overlay of Partition towards the end is the weakest part of the novel. Kapur tries too hard to bring in obligatory history. It doesn't work. This is not a Partition book. It is a fine love story, set in the sentimental days before Partition.
|
|
|
© Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
This charming novel is about educating daughters,
and facing the consequences when they learn to think for themselves and begin to question
the basic values of society. It is the old conflict again between the demands of modernity
and tradition, enacted this time in an upright, high-minded, middle-class Punjabi Lalaji
family in the 1930s and '40s. 
