Maternal Fictions: Writing the Mother in Indian Women's Fiction

163 Pages·2022·2.846 MB·English

by  Indrani Karmakar

Maternal Fictions
This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as
presented in selected Indian women’s fictions across a diverse range of
geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts.
Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies,
this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of
motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the
book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence;
maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood
and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand
the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in
which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and mater-
nal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing
concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers
with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to domi-
nant Western feminist discourses.
Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific
area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching areas of mother-
hood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constella-
tion of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once
ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and
yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times
and places.
Indrani Karmakar is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow
based at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and prior to
that, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes Uni-
versity, South Africa. Her works have previously appeared in the Journal
of Commonwealth Literature and Wasafiri, and she is the co-author of
Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about
Sex and Love (2021).
Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial
Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide
range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the
field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in
previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material
from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures.
Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney
Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World
Edited by Rebecca Romdhani and Daria Tunca
Poetics and Politics of Relationality in Contemporary Australian
Aboriginal Fiction
Dorothee Klein
(Re)Framing Women in Post-Millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and Iran
Remediated Witnessing in Literary, Visual, and Digital Media
Rachel Gregory Fox
The Postcolonial Indian City
Literature, Policy, Politics and Evolution
Dibyakusum Ray
Maternal Fictions
Writing the Mother in Indian Women’s Fiction
Indrani Karmakar
For more information on this series, please visit https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Research-in-Postcolonial-Literatures/book-series/SE0404
Maternal Fictions
Writing the Mother in Indian
Women’s Fiction
Indrani Karmakar
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Indrani Karmakar
The right of Indrani Karmakar to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-10204-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-25707-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21417-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003214175
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For my parents:
Gobinda Chandra Karmakar (Baba) and
Gita Karmakar (Maa)
To Baba, for your exemplary struggle and
story of triumph.
To Maa, for being there no matter what.

Contents
Acknowledgement ix
Introduction: Of Motherhood, Metaphor and Materiality 1
1 Reluctant Mothers?: Maternal Subjectivity and
Ambivalence 22
2 Cast(e)ing Motherhood: Caste, Marginality and
Maternal Agency 44
3 Mothering Daughters: The Vicissitudes of Mother–
Daughter Relationships 71
4 Motherhood and Diaspora: Remembering and
Remaking Home 91
5 Maternal Non-mothers: Motherhood beyond Biology 114
6 Coda: Moving the Maternal: Towards Solidarity 141
Index 149

Acknowledgement
This book is based on my doctoral thesis – I remain indebted to my
supervisor extraordinaire, Claire Chambers, for her unwavering sup-
port, guidance and continued friendship. Thank you, Claire, for giv-
ing so generously of your time to read through and comment on drafts.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Katherine Baxter and Elizabeth Jackson,
who read particular sections and gave judicious help. Sincere thanks to
Cecile Sandten for all her support. Thanks go to my friends, Paromita,
Jaya, Dhoopchhaya, Shahriar, Monjori, Serkan, for the much-needed
laughter and cheer. Warm thanks to my in-laws (Dilip and Chhaya
Mallick) for their encouragement. Special thanks to Dipayan for always
boosting my morale. Much love and gratitude to my brother (Bhaiya),
Goutam and his wife, Anuradha (Muntai), for all the love and spurring
me on in challenging times. My six-year-old nephew, Uttaran, does not
understand yet how grateful I am to him for making me realise the ma-
ternal in me in a way that I did not imagine before. No words of thanks
are enough for my parents, Gita and Gobinda Karmakar, to whom I
dedicate this book: thank you for believing in me. Finally, let me try and
thank my partner, best friend and critic, Dibakar. Thank you for your
honesty and compassion: thank you for everything – without you, this
book would never have existed.
The following essays have been modified and woven into parts of Chap-
ters 1, 2, 4 and 5 of the book with the kind permission of the publishers:
“Writing the Mother in Anita Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer”.
Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, vol. 17, no. 2, 2017:
pp. 16-26. ; “Mothers’ Voice from the Margin: Motherhood, Class and
Caste in Mahasweta Devi’s Two Short Stories”. Mothers Without Their
Children. Eds. Charlotte Beyer and Andrea Robertson. Ontario: Deme-
ter Press. 2019. 149-164; “Being a Foreigner … Is a Sort of Lifelong Preg-
nancy: Interrogating the Maternal and the Diasporic in Jhumpa Lahiri’s
The Namesake”, Scrutiny2, 24:1, 44-57, DOI: 10.1080/18125441.2019.1
650821; “Motherhood beyond Biology: Two Indian Women Writers’ Fic-
tions of Non-Biological Motherhood.” The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature, Apr. 2019, doi:10.1177/0021989419838018