Voicing the Unspeakable: Indian Daughters Writing Mothers

Abstract

Indian society has traditionally glorified the mother as the silent and submissive producer of sons. In the context of hegemonic patriarchal discourse, the motherdaughter relationship has been an “unspeakable plot” (Hirsch 1). Yet mothers have always shaped their daughters’ identities through their own sacrifices and resistances. In this paper, I have examined the contours of the mother-daughter plot through two texts by Indian daughters/writers: Mai: A Novel by Geetanjali Shree (1997; translated from Hindi by Nita Kumar, 2000), and the “biography-novel” Diddi: My Mother’s Voice by Ira Pande (2005). Although both texts are located in middle class, upper caste families in North India, the mothers respond to patriarchal subjugation in contrasting ways. These texts challenge and subvert patriarchy at various levels: by reasserting the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship; by narrating stories of maternal resistances within and outside the family; by articulating the ambivalences felt by daughters and their consciousness of progressive empowerment; by examining the problematic relationship between procreativity and creativity; by unpacking the social construct of motherhood through the prism of the daughters’ representations; and by tracing the formation of the “motherline” (Lowinsky 1) which creates, values and transmits enabling maternal legacies. Using the methodologies of comparative textual analysis and feminist psychoanalysis, I have attempted to rediscover the “matronymic” that is “blanked out by the patronymic” in the family plot (Gilbert and Gubar 378) as narrated by daughters writing their mothers in India.