The Daughters of Madurai - Rajasree Variyar - ★★

AUTHOR: Rajasree Variyar

GENRE: Indian Fiction, Drama.

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A highly relevant topic that loses its impact due to the simplistic writing style and glossing over of key events. Good description of places, but shallow exploration of people.

Story Synopsis:

1992, Madurai, India. Janani knows that unless she bears a son, her future isn’t secure in her husband’s family. She was allowed to keep her first daughter, but the ones who came after were taken away soon after birth and murdered. How long can Janani survive in the face of such a situation, being insecure about herself, her daughter, and her unborn child?

2019, Sydney, Australia. Twenty-five-year old Nila has a secret that she hasn’t told her parents yet. Just when she decides to let them know, her grandfather in India falls ill. On a trip to Madurai, a place she hasn’t visited for more than a decade, Nila discovers that she isn’t the only one with secrets.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Nila and third person perspective of Janani.

Where the book worked for me:

🌷 I truly appreciate the topic. I wish I could say it was no longer relevant, but the fact is that many Indians are still crazy about having a boy child. Female infanticide is a shameful occurrence, so full marks for attempting to highlight the issue. I hadn’t heard about the Cradle Baby Scheme of the TN government, so learning about that was enlightening as well.

🌷 The author clearly knows both the locations and it shows in her writing. I don’t know Sydney, but I do know Madurai, and and it felt like she captured the pulse of the ambience without denigrating it. The crowds, the travel, the cityscape,… all felt genuine. (Mind you, this point applies only to the past timeline and only to the portrayal of location, not that of the people.)

🌷 Unlike many contemporary Indian-origin authors who are no longer residents of the country, and unlike many debut writers, this author doesn’t attempt to dump everything and the kitchen sink in the plot. Her focus is on two-three primary issues (priority towards sons, caste & wealth discrimination, and a minor but relevant topic connected to Nila’s secret) and she sticks to these.

🌷 Janani’s character growth is interesting, especially in the past timeline. She isn’t shown as perfect, but as someone who knows her limits and tries to push them to the fullest. I also liked the author’s choice of name for her. ‘Janani’ means ‘mother’ in Sanskrit, so it felt like an apt name for a character whose entire identity stems from her ability to be the mother to sons while all she pines for is her lost daughters. Even Shubha and Kamala were good characters. I wish there had been more of them in the book.

🌷 A part of the narrative also deals with the pressure on men to choose ‘viable’ careers such as medicine or engineering, and continue the ‘family name’. Most Indian fiction novels focus only on the women, so it was a pleasant surprise to see this being included.

🌷 I am not sure if this a good point or bad, but all the references to South Indian cuisine kept me salivating. My stomach kept growling, but my heart was happy to see all those references. (I love South Indian food!)

Where the book could have worked better for me: (Oh boy! Here we go!)

🌵 When there are two timelines and one of them is in first person, we automatically expect to know more about that character’s feelings. In this book however, we know more about Janani than Nila. Nila’s arc is very underwhelming, and her emotional trajectory seems more surface level. The contemporary timeline is too simplistic and brushes aside any scene where there was a scope for deeper introspection of the characters.

🌵The representation of the Indian locations in the contemporary 2019 timeline felt like wishful thinking than realistic. I don’t know if this was to cater to the American market, but bowling isn’t a popular pastime activity in India at all. So to see characters choose bowling as their option one made me laugh. And please, what in the world is ‘Thank Bhagavan!’ Phrases aren’t translated verbatim across languages. There are many cultural inaccuracies as well. I wish authors didn’t bend facts so much just to cater to the target market.

🌵 The prologue has got to be among the worst I have ever read. Doesn’t add to the story, doesn’t connect to a relevant scene, is brushed aside with a quick reference later in the narrative. Its only purpose seems to be to create shock value. The data therein would have served better as an introductory note than as a prologue.

🌵 There are too many unnecessary descriptions, especially in the initial chapters of the past timeline. This pulls down the pace.

🌵 The connection between the two tracks is obvious within the first few pages, and even what's supposed to be a mystery (Nila’s secret) is quite obvious. So we already know the whats when we are reading the book, we just need to wait to discover the hows and whys. Unfortunately, the hows aren’t revealed even until the ending. There is this huge buildup to the Sanjay-Janani track, and then bamm…Everyone is in Australia! What? How? What happened in between? Such a flimsy ending!

🌵 Without going into spoilers: Lavanika is five and had no living siblings. Nila is two years older than Rohit. This data won't make sense to you now, but if you read the book, you'll realise that this simple maths will reveal much in advance, a supposedly surprising twist. I am one who likes characters’ ages being mentioned, but in this case, they were a spoiler to what should have been a ‘Oh my!’ moment.

🌵 This will be a doozy of a point, so please bear with me. We Indians have distinct relationship words for almost every relation. Unlike English that has a simple grandmother, grandfather, sister-in-law, uncle, aunt, younger sister, and so on, most Indian languages have a specific word for each relationship. So a dad's sister and a mom's sister and an uncle's wife--all "aunts" in English--will be called by different words as per the specific relation. The issue is further complicated by the fact that India has a multitude of languages. So an elder brother will be called ‘Chetta’ in Malayalam, ‘Anna’ in Tamil, ‘Dada’ in Marathi and so on. So imagine throwing this complicated network of relations on unsuspecting Westerners! Forget Westerners, even I felt lost at times amid all the Acchachas and Veliammas and Ammayis and Kochachans. Having words from two languages—Tamil and Malayalam—added to the difficulty. I wonder how the intended readership in the US will cope with these.

🌵 I must add that there is a glossary at the end of all the Tamil and Malayalam words, but I discovered this after struggling through the whole book! In digital editions, people can’t flip through the pages, nor do they necessarily read the table of contents. So it is always helpful to have the glossary at the start, or to provide the meanings as footnotes. Even a mention of the glossary towards the start would have been better.

All in all, I can just sum up by saying that this was a disappointing experience to me. While the topics were relevant, the approach was bland. It was a simple story needlessly convoluted. As it is a debut novel, I am truly sorry this was a dud for me, and I wish the author the very best for her future works.

This might work better with those who know just a little about India. So yeah, the target market can still try this out.

My thanks to Union Square & Co. and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Daughters of Madurai”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.