Another in the series of GALF2014's exclusive sessions on significant books of the year, Advocate (and Padma Shri awardee) Norma Alvares joins Ratna Vira to discuss 'Daughter by Court Order' (http://www.daughterbycourtorder.com). Review from the New York Times attached below.
http://youtu.be/iEL1uuRAdXU Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/world/asia/families-feud-over-delhi-estates.html By ELLEN BARRY SEPT. 9, 2014 NEW DELHI — Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy once noted, but there is something uniquely nasty about an upper-crust family fighting over real estate in Lutyens’ Delhi, the lush, spacious bungalow zone at the heart of India’s capital. This is the principal message of“Daughter by Court Order,” a novel published this spring by Ratna Vira,about a woman who has been cut out of her inheritance by her relatives, among them prominent political and intellectual figures. Ms. Vira says her book is a work of fiction, but the buzz around it is driven in part by the fact that her own relatives are prominent political and intellectual figures: her mother, Nalini Singh, is a well-known television journalist; her uncle is Arun Shourie, who has held cabinet-level posts; her grandfather was governor of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Ms. Vira, a first-time author, skewers the whole fictional family. In her book, the family’s compound is a petri dish of greed and ambition, where daughters and daughters-in-law compete to insinuate themselves into the affection of the patriarch, all the time plotting like five-star generals to channel the inheritance to their own children — or, anyway, to the children they prefer. As the women go to war, men in the family mainly observe from the safety of the veranda, and it’s hard to blame them. Ms. Vira has created characters of transcendent shrewishness, whose preferred form of combat is reputational damage, often perpetrated over cafe tables. They snipe about their rivals’ padded bras, their provincial accents, their cooking and their sexual history, lapsing when necessary into expressive Hindi. (“Apparently, she was quite a cheez, and found comfort in many arms before landing up with your brother.”) Like children of a feudal lord, each worries she will be supplanted as the favorite, ensuring “that the joint family was always brittle and on edge.” Feeling unloved and aggrieved, the fictional heroine finds her redemption in court. It is impossible to say whether Ms. Vira’s story resembles the truth. Mr. Shourie and Ms. Singh, reached by telephone, would not comment on the book, and Ms. Vira, who herself fought a legal battle for a portion of the proceeds from a family estate, said she “couldn’t care less” what her relatives think of the novel. “To me, this is clearly fiction, so whoever takes offense, we will deal with it,” she said. Still, it touches on a theme that runs like an underground current through New Delhi. When the British withdrew from India in 1947, they left behind a city that had been laid out for imperial rulers, its center occupied by spacious bungalows surrounded by gardens. Nearly 70 years later, these residential compounds still fill the city’s heart; consequently, they are insanely valuable. It is hard to say that these houses have proved an unalloyed blessing, even to the Indian families who came to own them. Walk through this city’s sought-after neighborhoods and you will find houses worth tens of millions of dollars that are shut up, sometimes for decades, as property disputes wend their way through the court system. When he was doing research for“Capital,” his recent book on Delhi, the author Rana Dasgupta encountered families whose members did not work because they were so busy with court dates in property disputes; others resorted to petty intimidation or violence. One reason is that property has become a huge portion of family wealth, Mr. Dasgupta said in an interview. But another, more visceral one is that many Delhi families were driven here from what is now Pakistan after the partition. It is, he said, “a city of the dispossessed, people who lost all their property at one point in time, so not losing it again becomes a huge obsession, which will even transcend your relationship with your brother or sister.” Ms. Vira, for her part, said she wrote her book to inspire women to use the courts to insist on their rights — a laudable goal, since many families sought to ignore daughters’ claims even after 2005, when the government amended its inheritance laws to include them. But the strongest impression left by her book is of a family that has been hollowed out by fighting. In 368 pages there is only one subject that regularly provokes the author to affectionate, wistful reminiscence, and it is real estate.