Rethinking Relationality in the Context of Adult Mother–Daughter Caregiving in Indian Fiction

Abstract

This article seeks to examine how far mainstream moral concepts, such as rights and contracts, which came in for a strong critique from feminist ethicists in the 1980s, may still be relevant to the dynamics of intergenerational relations in old age. Through close readings of three Indian short stories about adult daughters' caregiving to their critically ill or dying mothers in a manner that recalls maternal caregiving to young children, it demonstrates how the maternal paradigm does not engage sufficiently with notions of reciprocity and is therefore unable to capture the dynamic nature of intergenerational exchange between adult children and their aging parents. Finally, it argues that neither the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls with its basis in a notion of a self-interested individual, nor the maternal paradigm theory of feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick with their emphasis on an other-focused relationality provide an adequate model for capturing th...