Virmati’s Feministic approach in Manju Kapoor’s ‘Difficult Daughters’

Taking into account the complexity of life, different histories, cultures and different structures of values, the Woman’s Question, despite basic solidarity, needs to be tackled in relation to the socio-cultural situation. The impact of patriarchy on the Indian society varies from the one in the West and therefore, the Indian women novelists have tried to evolve their own stream of feminism grounded in reality. They have their own concerns, priorities as well as their own ways of dealing with the predicament of their women protagonists. Manju Kapoor’s Difficult Daughters, recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book ( Eurasia region), is a significant contribution in this direction.

The consciousness of the reader shuttles between the present and the past along with Ida who visits different places and meets her mother’s relatives and acquaintances to know about Virmati, the woman.

Virmati, being the eldest, is burdened with family duties because of her mother’s incessant pregnancies. Belonging to an austere and high minded Punjabi family, she grows up with the conditioning that the duty of every girl ‘is to get married’ and a woman’s ‘shaan’ is in her home and not in doing a job. She is already engaged to a canal engineer, Inderjeet. However, seeds of aspiration are planted in Virmati when she sees Shakuntala, her cousin, tasting the ‘wine of freedom’. She secretly nurtures the desire of being independent and leading a life of her own she wants to shoulder responsibilities that go beyond a husband and children. She realises that it is useless to look for answers inside the home as the “language of feeling had never flown” between Virmati and Kasturi, her mother. She had to look outside .... to education, to freedom and the bright lights of Lahore College even if “she had to fight her mother who was so sure that her education was practically over”. (17) Asserting herself, she not only clears her FA but joins A.S. College , “the bastion of male learning”.

It is here that the Oxford- returned Professor, her neighbour, notices her particularly, ‘flower like, against a back drop of male students’ and forces himself into her mind and heart by spreading his anguish at her feet. Caught in the whirlpool of misplaced passion towards the already married Professor, she has the temerity to spurn marriage, attempts suicide and bears confinement. However, she does realize the hopelessness of her illicit love when she learns about the pregnancy of the Professor’s wife. How could it be true? Man professing his love for her on the one hand and making his wife pregnant on the other. At this juncture, decisively and brusquely she cuts him saying that “You think you can do what you like so long as you go on saying you love” and goes to Lahore for further studies.

But does Virmati blossom into a ‘New Woman’ in the real sense? No. Inspite of her initial revolt against the family and firm stand against the Professor, she succumbs to his implorations and passion in Lahore . Loss of virginity pricks her conscience but then she overcomes the guilt by rationalizing it as “outmoded morality”. (114) She had come to Lahore to broaden her horizons but instead she gets involved in a useless love, doubtful marriage and unwed pregnancy. The initial tenacious and assertive self gradually wanes away into a pawn whom the Professor tells “just what to look for, what to admire, what to criticize”. (119) She wants to spread her wings like Swarnalata, her roommate, who is committed to “meaningful activities” regarding the freedom movement and women’s emancipation. But her emotional dependence on the Professor who constantly evades the question of marriage, stops her from doing anything that he disapproves --- “may be I could be like Swarna from the inside, secretly”. (124) At the Punjab Women’s Student Conference, she is amazed at “how large an area of life women wanted to appropriate for themselves”. (132) But these larger spaces are not for her. She wastes her time awaiting the furtive meetings with the Professor in spite of the awareness that there were “myriad instances of where she felt she had been weak or wronged”. (129) she is being used and the Professor wants to have the cake and eat it too.. He enjoys the best of the two worlds and is not there even at the most crucial time when she undergoes the termination of the pregnancy. Even afterwards when the Professor eventually marries her very reluctantly, she is given a pariah status and faces exclusion from hearth etc. Which is the sole domain of the Professor’s first wife, Ganga . Virmati lives in a cramped space and if forced into submission thought in a very subtle manner as Jaidev (1992 : 57) writes in another context “Indeed, any sophisticated structure today functions not by direct, visible exploitation but by making the victims willingly, freely and happily give in to its imperatives ...” Professor Harish’s attitude towards her is patronising and demeaning. His interest in her is an extension of sell love ... awakening her intellect and emotions inflates his ego. Undergoing a gradual process of self-effacement, her energies are directed towards pleasing him while she herself remains parched. She finds M.A. in Philosophy dull, abstract and meaningless but studying it was her only means of escape. She wished “Harish had thought another subject suitable for her. She also wished it was not such an uphill task, being worthy of him”. (237). In fact, she remains ‘difficult’ only as a daughter towards her grandfather who always championed her cause, her father who was very understanding and allowed her to study further and towards her mother who certainly had Virmati’s good at heart.

Thus, though she dares to cross one patriarchal threshold, she is caught into another where her free spirit is curbed and all she does is ‘adjust, compromise and adapt’. She could have put her foot down saying ‘she will be her own mistress and relate to him with dignity or not at all. Perhaps the words were at the back of her mind, teasing her tongue with their shadowy sounds (236) but she does not. May be her mind had gone “soft and pulpy with repeated complying”. (236) Thus, in Virmati we see the incipient New Woman who is conscious, introspective, educated, wants to carve a life for herself, to some extent she even conveys a personal vision of womanhood by violating current social codes yet she lacks confidence, self control, farsightedness and is psychically imprisoned with an underlying need to be emotionally and intellectually dependant on a superior force ....... Professor Harish and it is precisely this knowledge through which the patriarchy works. She fails to break the ‘dependence syndrome’ (Nahal : 1991 : 17) and halts on the path to full human status.

Trampling patriarchal norms, Virmati defies societal expectation to assert her individuality and hopes to achieve self- fulfillment. But what does she really get? She is a loser whose acts totally alienate her from her own family and she fails to create a space for herself for which she had been striving all along. Perhaps it is this inability of Virmati to strike independent roots and grow that makes Ida remark ‘The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother’.

It is possible to trace the feminism implicit in the novel through Ida’s impatience towards her mother’s weaknesses. When her Parvati Masi says that Virmati was a simple girl at heart, Ida says “I hate the word ‘Simple’. Nobody has any business to live in the world and know nothing about its ways”. (207). No woman, who dares to spurn patriarchal protection can afford to be ignorant, simple or naive. Surely, Virmati’s unwed pregnancy and then its heartless termination is unpalatable to Ida who finally breaks up with her husband. Prabhakar, because he had forced her to have an abortion --- “In denying that incipient little thing in my belly, he sowed the seeds of our break up”. (144) And then, does passion so transform an individual that Virmati fails to see things in the right perspective? She not only disregards her filial duty but also becomes a victimizer by usurping what rightfully belongs to Ganga, the Professor's first wife, thereby giving a set back to the much needed feeling of sisterhood among women. The concluding lines of the novel reiterate Ida’s rejection of Virmati, not as a mother but as a woman. “This book weaves a connection between my mother and me, each word a brick in a mansion I made with my head and my heart. Now live in it, Mama, and leave me be. Do not haunt me any more”. (258) Ida, who grew up struggling to be the model daughter, does not have the heart to reject Virmati, the mother, but her head, the rationale, rejects her as a woman after having an insight into Virmati’s past.

Through Ida’s admiration for Swarnalata, who enters into a wider sociopolitical sphere, the novelist seems to be saying that a woman can maintain her individuality and pursue her interest without threatening the family structures. Thus a woman should basically strive towards a fine interdependent partnership. But if she feels suffocated, then a voice ought to be raised and there should be a total breaking away, like Ida. But merely transcending societal norms is not enough. A woman should be aware, self controlled, strong willed, self reliant and rational, having faith in the inner strength of womanhood. A meaningful change can be brought only from within by being free in the deeper psychic sense. Thus Manju Kapoor’s Difficult Daughters is a feminist discourse not because she is a woman writing about women but because, as Jaidev puts it she “has understood a woman both as a woman and as a person pressurized by all kinds of visible and invisible contexts”. (68). She presents feminism at its most same keeping in mind the Indian context.

References Jaidev, “Problematizing Feminism”, Gender and Literature, ed., Iqbal Kaur, Delhi : B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1992. Kapur, Manju, Difficult Daughters, New Delhi : Penguin, 1998.Nahal, Chaman, “Feminism in English Fiction : Forms and Variations”, Feminism and Recent Fiction in English ed., Sushila Singh, New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1991.
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Contributed By:  Dr. Ram Sharma, Lecturer in English, Janta Vedic College MEERUT, U.P. dr.ram_sharma@yahoo.co.in

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