Letters, Lineage and Liberation

In Lavanyadevi, Kusum Khemani's intergenerational narrative reveals how women shape, question, and inherit values across shifting social and spiritual landscapes

- YAUVANIKA CHOPRA

Certain answers to the eternal quest of self-understanding emerge in Kusum Khemani's 2013 novel Lavanyadevi, translated from the Hindi original to English by Banibrata Mahanta in 2024. A sweeping intergenerational story set within an aristocratic zamindar family, this book offers a keen lens with which to examine how we are shaped by our ancestors, who in turn evolve through different economic and social contexts.

Migration has been a defining aspect of Marwari identity, and a backdrop of their shifting landscapes over two centuries highlights tensions of Yugadharma between Indic tradition and Western modernity for three clear-eyed matriarchs.

The daughter of an impoverished widow, beautiful Prabhavatidevi builds a charmed life in Dhaka as the second wife of an enamoured nobleman. Her daughter Jyotirmoydevi consolidates the family legacy in Kolkata through diligent endeavour. And her daughter Lavanyadevi grows up to be a veritable paragon—but without cloying sanctimony—who returns often to the lessons imparted by the women before her.

The fairy folk-tale realm of the story casts these three within the light of mythical women like Ahilya, Shakuntala, and Draupadi, as well as archetypal goddesses like Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Durga. Their fine qualities are spoken of admiringly by many in mythologized memory; inner worlds are revealed through journalistic record.

Lavanyadevi realises the depths of her restrained mother's admiration for her upon discovering an exultant entry in Jyotirmoydevi's private diary: "To decline an offer made by a director as reputed and acclaimed as Mr. Sen was something that even celestial nymphs like Urvashi and Menaka would have found difficult. But here was my Lavanya, an ordinary human being... even at her young age, she was able to understand the transience of external appearance."