Until recently the mother daughter relationship in contemporary Indian fiction was the subject of highbrow literature. Over the last decade, however, a large number of short stories, novels and memoirs have taken up this subject with new urgency. The narratives are written mainly from the daughters’ perspectives, though occasional representations of maternal subjectivity can also be found. Although the mother-daughter bond draws from an idealising impulse, it is often, and at once, intensely ambivalent, redemptive and painful. The mother who intuits a connectedness between herself and her daughter still has to struggle with layers of cultural and social conditioning that thwart such connection; reciprocally, the daughter is frequently shown as having to struggle againts the mother whose life she seeks to understand.

Through a selection of short stories, folklore, plays and poems, and extracts from novels, memoirs and autobiographical writing, this collection seeks to trace the complex intergenerational dynamic of continuity and rupture between mothers and daughters. With a substantial critical introduction by the editors.