Umbilical chords and family ideologies

Over the past decade, in fiction and autobiography, South Asian women have begun to explore the stories of their pasts in an efflorescence of writings. Among others, Mrinal Pande, Manju Kapur and Suguna Iyer have accomplished this through the medium of fiction, while Sara Suleri, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mira Kamdar stand out for their memoirs. This proliferation has to do, in part at least, with such authors' complex historical situation. Tied to the Subcontinent, either by birth or ancestry, many South Asian women, particularly those of the middle class, have moved so far beyond traditional gender roles that their present-day 'liberation' and achievement lies in sharp contrast with the lives of struggle and confinement led by their mothers and grandmothers. This produces not only the lived contradictions of their lives but also the burden of an intimate knowledge of a past through the lives of the women they have known and loved, women from whom they have derived their beings, no less. It is this situation that provokes their search for understanding, both of the self and of history.  

Parita Mukta's memoir derives, at one level, from the wish we have all known at some point in our lives to ask: In what way am I a part of history? Indeed, am I, obscure, alone, driven along by circumstances, of any consequence in the larger movement of forces? It is in the intricate weave of individual lives with the community's, the precise placement of human beings within larger events, the acute sense of the shaping of people's everyday choices by historical forces – without leeching their lives of agency – that the rich narrative texture of this book is produced.