Why are we shying away from portraying the grey shades of mother-daughter relationships?

A new wave of women writers and creators are gradually steering clear of stereotyping the narrative that drives the equation between mothers and daughters

Avni Doshi’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Burnt Sugar (2019) knocks you out for good, and refreshingly so, with its opening line: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”

When Aastha, a 29-year-old content writer from New Delhi, first read this line, her eyes immediately welled up. Not necessarily because the force of a brutally honest sentence was new in a book about Indian mothers and daughters but simply because this was a sentence that summarised what she’d felt about her mother all her life.

“Guilt works in strange ways,” she tells The Established. “My mother passed away three years ago but ruined my mental health in irreparable ways. For the longest time, she made me doubt my talents, put me down for being fat and always gaslighted me when I raised these points as an adult. I wouldn’t trust my own shadow.”

Aastha could never muster the courage to express what she truly felt about her mother. Her passing didn’t make things easier. With her own therapist, the words wouldn’t come up. Aastha’s grouse also lay with the “distorted, over the top and super happy” portrayal of mothers and daughters in Indian cinema and pop culture. She blames the lack of nuanced portrayals of mother-and-daughter relationships for not equipping her with the vocabulary with which she could express, in precise words, what she felt about her mother.

The battle for nuance

In this context, Renuka Shahane’s Netflix film Tribhanga (2021) received near-unanimous praise for portraying the many complexities of intergenerational mother-daughter relationships. One of the mothers in the film, the character named Nayan, dares to prioritise her writing life over investing fully and unconditionally in her daughter. Doors are banged and accusations are made about lives being spoiled. Why don’t we see such portrayals more often on our screens? In an industry saturated with overly patriotic content and war films, where are the mothers and daughters, who resemble the ones in our own homes?

“For the longest time, the main roles were only going to men and there was a fixation with the mother-son relationship such as the one Rakhi had with her sons in Karan-Arjun or even the case of Nirupa Roy,” Shahane tells The Established. “But now, you see the mother as mothers not just for heroines but also characters who are flawed. In the Vidya Balan-starrer Shakuntala Devi (2020), we look at the mother through the prism of a daughter who feels wronged by her even though the mother was very famous in real life.” She adds that putting mothers on a pedestal of morality, as if they signify only all the good in the world, is far removed from reality. Only recently have movies started looking at them as nuanced, complicated characters.

“The basis of it all is writing,” Shahane explains. “Writers need to look at mothers and daughters from different perspectives. Sure, we have movies that do look at queer relationships or show relationships that push the envelope. But these changes are only reflected in the young in cinema. This is the reason why it was important for me to show three generations of mothers and daughters in Tribhanga.”

Complicated motherhood

Unlike Aastha–who seeks recourse in books such as Burnt Sugar and Anindita Ghose’s The Illuminated (2021) where we understand the spiritual and socio-political dimensions at play in the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the story–Nida, a 39-year-old mother, looks at motherhood as a curse.

“I’ll admit that I didn’t sign up for this,” she says. “I’m not talking about the anxiety that comes with it, but often, you realise the deeply patriarchal mores attached to motherhood only after becoming one, regardless of how progressive your family might be.”

Nida says she is only seconds away from having a full-blown nervous breakdown. Her husband, on the high seas for the better part of the year, thanks to his merchant navy job, is clueless about her plight. And the constant nagging by her in-laws doesn’t make life easy.

Sometime in January 2022, a group of young mothers met in a school field in Boston and screamed at the top of their lungs. Much like Nida, they were all exhausted and burnt out–fresh from the horrors of the pandemic.

In the Indian context–particularly in middle-class households where the aspirational value attached to one’s dreams may be high–mothers who dare to pursue a life beyond just their immediate maternal responsibilities have almost always been looked down upon. A working woman, in some cases, is allowed to work by her in-laws, with the condition that she finishes all the household duties before leaving for work, thus adding to her burden and making her pay a price for daring to work beyond her domestic duties. The children of such a “working mother” are usually considered spoiled, uncared for and aimless.

“Such mothers deal with an internalised sense of guilt,” Shahane says. “So do I, despite my husband never making me feel guilty for working even for a single day. We’ve grown up with this so we end up looking at ourselves with those guilt-laced lenses, regardless of how evolved we are. Nobody expects men to know anything about their children; it’s a running joke in our society that the father forgets which class his children are in. So in Tribhanga, it takes a lot for the mother character of Nayan to say that she’s a writer first.”

Women storytellers

According to Anindita Ghose, journalist and author of The Illuminated, as long as men are the storytellers, making films, ads, writing stories, the mother-daughter relationship will be either underrepresented or in non-nuanced ways. “If women are telling stories, how can the mother-daughter relationship not come up? As more women start making films and writing novels, the mother-daughter relationship is bound to come up because it’s the primary relationship a woman has with another. We might not all have daughters and sisters but all women have mothers,” she says.

She adds that the mother-daughter relationship in movies such as Tribhanga have sharp edges to them because it’s a reaction to the rosy portrayals of both mothers and daughters in movies over the years. “More and more women are now challenging this portrayal and want to highlight how there are also mother-and-daughter relationships that are complex, filled with resentment, jealousy, competition and angst,” concludes Ghose.

Also Read: Are Bollywood films finally normalising divorce?

Also Read: Is Bollywood really inclusive in their trans representation?

Also Read: Powerful women of Bollywood who are changing the narrative