An Endless Winter's Night: An Anthology of Mother-Daughter Stories

This collection of 21 contemporary short stories and poems from various Indian languages reframes the mother-daughter relationship as a significant issue for women's writing from India. The daughter's place in the family particularly among the middle classes is often further complicated by the accelerating influences of education, travel, new forms of interpersonal relationship and reproductive technology. This has given many young women new mobility and freedom to travel, to live out new forms of sexuality, to make decisions about their fertility, their relationships with men and the power structures of their communities.

Some of the most interesting and representative examples of this new writing included in this volume manifest the shock of the new, as contemporary developments from the interpersonal to the technological impinge on age-old patterns of familial interaction and are mediated through cultural specificities and the emotional tangles of the mother-daughter relationship. This anthology foregrounds the critical significance of this relationship, and calls upon feminist scholarship in India to put the mother-daughter relationship front and centre, to permit new insight into what it means to be female in contemporary India.