This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women's fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts.

Indrani Karmakar is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and prior to that, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her works have previously appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Wasafiri, and she is the co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love (2021).

Introduction: Of Motherhood, Metaphor and Materiality

Chapter 1

Reluctant Mothers? : Maternal Subjectivity and Ambivalence

Chapter 2

Cast(e)ing Motherhood: Caste, Marginality and Maternal Agency

Chapter 3

Mothering Daughters: Vicissitudes of Mother-Daughter Relationships

Chapter 4

Motherhood and Diaspora: Remembering and Remaking Home

Chapter 5

Maternal Non-mothers: Motherhood Beyond Biology

Coda

Moving the Maternal: Towards Solidarity