Women Identity in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters

Abstract

Manju Kapur (born in Amritsar, India) is an Indian novelist. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, best first book, Europe and South Asia. She teaches English at Delhi University under the name Manjul Kapur Dalmia. Difficult Daughters is a charming novel about educating daughters, and facing the consequences when they learn to think for themselves and begin to question the basic values of society. It is the old conflict again between the demands of modernity and tradition, enacted this time in an upright, high-minded, middle-class Punjabi Lalaji family in the 1930s and '40s.