Narratives of Resistance and Transformation in the Selected Novels of Bharati Mukherjee and Manju Kapur

Abstract

Resistance in the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee and Manju Kapur rarely looks like slogan-shouting on the street; more often it looks like a young woman saying “no” to an arranged marriage, or walking out of a house with a suitcase, or quietly refusing to perform the script that everybody else assumes is her fate, and yet these small acts, layered across their novels, amount to a sustained rewriting of the Indian female subject in late‑20th and early‑21st‑century literature. Mukherjee’s protagonists—from Dimple in Wife through Jasmine/Jyoti/Jane to Tara in Desirable Daughters and the call‑centre girls of Miss New India—enact non‑linear, often messy transformations whose central feminist theme is resistance to the patriarchal structures that confine women to predefined roles and fix their identities in place. Kapur’s women—Virmati in Difficult Daughters, Nisha in Home, Nina in The Immigrant, Astha in A Married Woman—resist in more domestically embedded ways, asserting voice and agency against family, marriage, and community norms, their journeys caught between conformity and defiance, and they often discover that partial empowerment is accompanied by new forms of solitude and psychic cost. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial criticism, this article traces how both authors construct narratives of resistance and transformation: it looks at the evolution of female subjectivity under pressures of migration, modernity and nationalism; it examines forms of resistance ranging from emotional withdrawal and clandestine love to adultery, abortion, madness and even symbolic violence; and it maps how these resistances reconfigure but do not simply abolish patriarchal and cultural structures. Two comparative tables summarise patterns of resistance and trajectories of transformation in selected novels such as Jasmine, Wife, Desirable Daughters, Difficult Daughters, Home and The Immigrant, and the tone throughout intentionally slides between the formal and the slightly conversational, with long, abrupt sentences and lightly imperfect grammar, to echo the turbulent, unfinished processes these narratives describe