Bad Mothers: Gender and Modernism in 20th-Century Indian Literature

My project considers the experimental, partial, and sidelong representation of mothers in 20th-century Indian women’s literature. Hemmed in by idealized images of motherhood in the culture at large, these writers used alternative representations of mothers – what I call “bad” mothers – as a way of rethinking the family in relation to Indian modernity. I argue that the literature of maternal deviance advances new representational practices that use the malleability of language and innovations in form to imagine motherhood anew. They tell us something about what a feminist modernity might look like in the absence of a widely accepted language of feminism, and they convey the centrality of the family to modernity, beyond the politics of feminist empowerment. In this way they demonstrate the creative process of imagining modernity, a term which has often been written off as imitative, elite, male, and Brahminical. I argue that these authors use bad mothers to imagine a vernacular, postcolonial modernism that, while located in the particular conditions of Indian modernity, has global relevance by centering formal and aesthetic experiment and compelling its readers to question the meaning and politics of literature, and what language can do – to imaginative, and sometimes surprising, ends.