Girl, Wom

Mothers and daughters dance a complicated dance in recent novels by many Indian writers

- Vineetha Mokkil

“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 Roy’s 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. Roy’s 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 other’s 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 Desai’s Rosarita; Avni Doshi’s Girl in White Cotton; Radhika Oberoi’s Of Mothers and Other Perishables, Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell), Anindita Ghose’s The Illuminated, Naheed Patel’s A Mirror Made of Rain and Krupa Ge’s 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 Doshi’s