Abstract
Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters (1998) revisits the Partition of India through the domestic and emotional life of Virmati, a young woman from Amritsar who seeks education and autonomy in a society that treats a daughter's life as family honour. This paper argues that the novel presents Partition not only as a political rupture but as a continuum of gendered constraint, in which nationalist aspiration and patriarchal control operate side by side. Drawing on feminist theory and Partition scholarship, it examines how Virmati's pursuit of education, her relationship with the married Professor Harish, and her eventual position as a second wife expose the limited freedoms available to women within both the family and the nationalist movement. It further considers the novel's framing narration by Ida, Virmati's daughter, as an act of retrieving a silenced maternal history. The paper concludes that Kapur dismantles the idealised image of the "new woman" of the nationalist era by showing the cost of her choices.
