Book review: Of mothers and daughters

Book: Daughters: A Story of Five Generations
Bharati Ray
Penguin
318 pages
Rs399

In Daughters: A Story of Five Generations, translated from the Bengali bestseller Ekaal Sekaal, author Bharati Ray traces the lives of five generations of women in her own family, chronicling events and stories spanning over a 100 years, from the late 19th century to the early 21st century.

It starts with great-grandmother Sundar-ma, married at age 11, matriarch of a huge family, who taught herself to read and write.

Her daughter was Ushabala, the author’s grandmother, married at 12, adept at making her college lecturer husband’s income go a long way, who shared her mother’s passion for books despite no formal education. The author’s Ma was Kalyani, beautiful, devoted to her husband, a keen traveller, the first woman in the family to get a college degree though she never took up a job.

Then there is Bharati Ray herself, married into a joint family, determined to have a career, a well-known academic and professor, who went on to become a Rajya Sabha MP. And finally, her daughters, Khuku and Tista, highly educated, living and teaching at foreign universities.

This biography is also a narrative of social history. And as Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen writes in the foreword, “we simultaneously gather a clear picture of the progress being made regarding a particular aspect of Bengali society.”

Ray’s family tree is blooming with stories and characters and she lovingly details their lives, though the names of all the Ma’s, Da’s and Pishi’s tend to run into each other. She combines personal anecdotes with social commentary, particularly for the first three generations of women, perhaps because it’s easier to be objective about people who are no longer living. But the same tone is missing in her own story and that of her daughters; the book starts off engaging but becomes a rather academic rattling off of achievements and events.

While the narrative could have benefitted from more emotion and less fact, it does not diminish the extraordinary stories of the women themselves, and, in a way, those of any family of women in India. Of mothers and daughters, the times they lived in, the families they grew, the choices they had, and the legacies they passed on. And these are stories that deserve to be read.