Dareechah-e-Nigaarish
Toronto, ON
Canada
talat
Manju Kapur (1948 – Amritsar, India) is an Indian writer and author of six English language novels. She lives in New Delhi, India where she is a teacher of English literature at Miranda House College, Delhi University.
Her first novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), received tremendous international acclaim.
Her second novel, A Married Woman (2002) was called "fluent and witty" in the Independent.
Her third novel, Home (2006), was described as "engaging, glistening with detail and emotional acuity" in the Sunday Times.
Her fourth novel, The Immigrant (2009), has been longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Her fifth novel is Custody (2011).
Her sixth novel is Brothers published by Penguin, UK, 2016 .
An internationally acclaimed Indian woman novelist, Manju Kapur (1948 - ), the Common Wealth Prize winner is also called the Jane Austen of India.
Born on 6th August 1948 in Amritsar, she has lived through turbulent times in India. She graduated from Miranda House University College for Women, New Delhi, India. She then completed her MA at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia province, Canada and later on an M.Phil from Delhi University.
She then returned to her alma mater Miranda House University College, New Delhi as a Professor and retired from there many years later.
As her father worked as Cultural Attaché in the Indian Embassy in America and Canada, she spent her childhood there. She is married to Gun Nidhi Dalmia, and has three children.
She is one of the famous post independence Indian feminist writers who fought for the rights of women through her novels. She has written six English language novels. Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006), The Immigrant (2009) and Custody (2011) and Brothers (2016, Penguin, UK) are her widely acclaimed novels. All her novels deal with the problems faced by Indian women in their every day lives and how Indian women deal with these problems. Her debut novel Difficult Daughters won the Commonwealth Prize for First Novels (Eurasia Section) and became a best seller in India. Home was shortlisted for Hutch Crossword Book award.
- - - Biographical details courtesy of Dhanya Panicker's book “Does Feminism Support Infidelity?
Manju Kapur (1948 – Amritsar, India) is an Indian writer
Kindle eBook web link to Manju Kapur's novel Difficult Daughters:
Amazon Books Reviews of Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters
"This is a skilful, enticing first novel by an Indian writer who prefers reality to magic realism. Manju Kapur's sensuous pages re-create an intimate world where family groups sleep in the open air on the roof and wash themselves in the yard in the dewy cool of morning, where love-making is furtive and urgent because another wife may be listening, and women's lives move to a complex choreography of cooking, washing, weaving and mending, growing, picking, chopping and blending...This book offers a completely imagined, aromatic, complex world, a rare thing in first novels."
-- Review by Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
"Kapur's book is steeped in exquisite melancholy." -- Review by Guardian
"Kapur writes with quiet intelligence and wry, deadpan humour. Set against the bloody backdrop of Partition, this is a powerful portrait of a society where shame is more important than grief, pragmatism goes hand-in-hand with superstition, and a pregnant wife has to share a bed with her mother-in-law."
-- Review by Observer
"An urgent and important story about family and partitions and love. Difficult Daughters is intensely imagined and fluidly written by Manju Kapur. Moving through our struggles with our parents, it flings us into their own momentous times, their youthful yearnings for love and independence and life. And so it becomes an urgent and important story about family and partitions and love.'
Set around the time of British India's Partition of 1947 into Pakistan and India and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Manju Kapur's first novel Difficult Daughters is the story of a young woman torn between the desire for education and the lure of illicit love. The novel's heroine Veermatee, a young woman born into a high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor - a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Veermatee, installs her in his home alongside his furious first wife and helps her with her studies, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Veermatee herself, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition from her family and of personal pain around her."
-- Review by Vikram Chandra.
Kindle eBook web link to Manju Kapur's novel A Married Woman:
Astha has everything an educated, middle-class Delhi woman could ask for - children, a dutiful loving husband, and comfortable surroundings. So why should she be consumed with a sense of unease and dissatisfaction?Astha finds herself embarking on a powerfully physical relationship with a much younger woman, Pipee, the widow of a political activist. But with this extra-marital affair is she foolishly jeopardizing everything - or is Astha at last throwing off the fear and timidity instilled in her by her parents, her husband, her social class?
Manju Kapur, celebrated author of the prize-winning Difficult Daughters, has written a seductive and beautifully honest story of love and betrayal, set at a time of on-going political and religious upheaval. Told with great sympathy and intelligence, and without a shred of sentimentality, A Married Woman is a story for anyone who has felt trapped by life's responsibilities.
Kindle eBook web link to Manju Kapur's novel Home:
When their traditional business - selling saris - is increasingly sidelined by the new fashion for jeans and stitched salwar kameez, the Banwari Lal family must adapt. But instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop and the daughters are confined to the family home. As envy and suspicion grip parents and children alike, the need for escape - whether through illicit love or in the making of pickles or the search for education - becomes ever stronger. Very human and hugely engaging, Home is a masterful novel of the acts of kindness, compromise and secrecy that lie at the heart of every family.
Kindle eBook web link to Manju Kapur's novel The Immigrant:
An engrossing portrait of an arranged marriage, from the prize-winning author of Home and Difficult Daughters.Nina is a thirty-year-old English lecturer in New Delhi, living with her widowed mother and frustrated by how little life has to offer. Ananda has recently emigrated to Halifax, Canada; having spent his twenties painstakingly building his career, he searches for something to complete his new life. When an arranged marriage is proposed, Nina is uncertain: can she really give up her home and her country to build a new life with a husband she barely knows?
The consequences of change are far greater than she could have imagined. As the two of them struggle to adapt to married life, Nina's whole world is thrown into question. And as certain truths threaten the marriage, her fragile new life in Canada begins to unravel.
Poignant and intimate, The Immigrant is an honest exploration of a marriage, what it costs to start again - and what we can never leave behind.
Kindle eBook web link to Manju Kapur's novel Custody:
When Shagun leaves Raman for another man, a bitter legal battle ensues. The custody of their two young children is thrown into question and Shagun must decide what price she will pay for freedom... Meanwhile, Ishita, a failed marriage behind her, finds another chance at happiness with Raman. But when the courts threaten the security of her new family, she decides to fight for it - whatever the cost. From prize-winning author Manju Kapur, Custody is an intimate portrait of marriages that disintegrate and intertwine, with heart-rending consequences.
Manju Kapur's sixth novel Brothers published in 2016 by Penguin, UK.
Breaking the Silence: A Study of Manju Kapur and Bapsi Sidhwa's Novels by Santosh Malik Chahar 2018 Kindle eBook link:
The book brings to fore the struggle of middle class women in the social set up of India and Pakistan in the writings of Manju Kapur and Bapsi Sidhwa. It lays bare the constricting nature of environment in which women are placed in tradition bound society and how they move forward to niche a space for themselves within the boundaries of home and marriage without disregarding the positive values that these institutions hold. Women defy the conventions that are suffocating, derogatory and dehumanizing. The women protagonists of both the writers take a leap towards autonomous self by rebelling against the ‘tyranny’ of culture and traditions which, they know, impede their economic and social growth. These women empower themselves with the strongest tool of betterment- Education which helps locate them in society with vigor and fervor and they come to vision society from altogether different perspective. The women characters of the writers are convinced that individual autonomy cannot be attained at personal level without linking it to the social and political roots of inequality and discrimination which needs to be questioned at multiple levels while adopting multiple tools of strategies and resistance. They understand that a decisive battle needs to be waged at the level of mindset too since a real change can only come about when the outer struggle against structural and gender disparity is necessarily accompanied with a radical transformation of individual and collective consciousness. The book explores that, to regain the centrality of autonomous existence of women, the power equations and accepted norms of inequality and discrimination within the outside the home and family, have to be interrogated, reanalyzed and reinterpreted in the context of changing circumstances. The study also suggests that the values and codes of predominant groups that favor and perpetuate hierarchy must first be unmasked as instruments of subservience and control and must be replaced by human and democratic values which are all inclusive and all encompassing.The book critically brings to light that the process of redefining the structures of marriage and finding outlets for individual and social space, at no stage involves the mindless denouncements of the positive values of love, care and compassion inside the family or relishing the individual space at the cost of trampling upon others freedom and individual expression, as it sometimes made out to be. On the contrary, the whole struggle of redefining human values, structures and institutions in order to attain autonomy and self-hood is necessarily an all inclusive process where it is not the question of man or woman alone but that of creating a conducive situation for both the sexes to be able to function as equal partners in domestic as well as social spheres in a combined effort to create a truly participative society based on love,mutual respect, equal opportunities and social justice for each and every individual irrespective of caste, class or gender. However this entails immense struggles, conflicts, contradictions, emotional pulls and pressures, intense agony and dilemma. By resisting and challenging the hegemonic nature and structure of various social and cultural institutions, women are trying to deconstruct the image of domesticity and subjugation that has been thrust upon them. They make fervent attempts to enter various socio-political spaces in a strong bid to assert their individuality as well as social responsibility. Their self awareness and consciousness in the whole process of struggle and transcendence helps them realize their potential and self-worth and they are ultimately able to raise the level of consciousness among the wider segments of the society as well. What matters most is not the ultimate success but the constant urge to resist the hegemonic thoughts, practices and stereotypes and move gradually towards the realization of the goal.
Book review courtesy of Amazon Kindle eBook Store.
Does Feminism Support Infidelity by Dhanya Pankicker 2019 Kindle eBook web link:
Many customs like Purdah system, child marriage, Sati, ban on remarriage etc prevailed in India and all these customs marginalized women. The feminists united to eradicate these social evils from our society. Preserving the culture of India, Manju Kapur wanted her characters to be strong enough to gain their genuine rights which society once denied. She is a post colonial feminist writer who raised her voice against the traditional patriarchal culture. She is the one who introduced the concept of 'New Woman' in Indian novels. Till then, the Indian feminist writers dealt with the pathetic condition Indian women suffered in this male dominated society. Manju Kapur wanted her protagonists to move a step forward from these woman stereotypes. She wanted a woman who questions the rules regulated by patriarchy and who breaks all the shackles which limits her from gaining an identity of her own. Though she craves for gender equality in all aspects, she never wants her characters, especially her women characters to move away from the culture of their mother country. There is an underlying moral in all her novels. She never wants her feminism to go beyond the limits of Indian culture.
In Vedic religion, women were given the status of goddesses and it is believed that from their Shakthi emanated the male strength. The Vedas emphasized that women enjoyed a reasonably high position during the Vedic period. Two great epics of Hinduism, namely, Ramayana and Mahabharatha portray women in a good light. In Indian culture, the word which denotes strength and power is feminine, that is, Shakthi, and all male power is derived from this feminine. Then why she degrades herself by being a puppet in the hands of other men or engaging herself in activities beyond our culture.
Kapur wants a new woman who should also be a role model for all others. A new woman which suits India. By being strong, she should never move away from her character. Cherishing the beauty and purity of her character, she should be strong enough to face the problems in her life. She should be chaste, never be spoilt. By seeking pleasure in extra marital relationships, women are proving themselves weak as well as worthless. A strong woman should have the ability to stand alone. Through her novels, she portrays women from different generations and their character to state her view.
Book review courtesy of Amazon Kindle eBook Store.
Manju Kapur (1948 – Amritsar, India) is an Indian writer.
Dareechah-e-Nigaarish
Toronto, ON
Canada
talat