The Illuminated is a perfectly timed book. It comes at a time when we, readers everywhere, have lived through a uniquely distressing year,...
The Illuminated is a perfectly timed book. It comes at a time when we, readers everywhere, have lived through a uniquely distressing year, agonising over forced isolation, dealing with unexpected, unprecedented loss. The terrible tragedies of the pandemic have intersected with the surprising validation of an extreme right-wing ideology in India, with its insistence on silencing any and all minorities, and the curbing of all voices of dissent.
Anindita Ghose’s debut novel traverses the difficult territory of grief and grieving; how loss is experienced differently by those connected to each other by kinship and emotive ties. It is also quietly, non-performatively political, exploring the possibilities of a world sliding into increasing iniquitousness.
The book tells a story, or multiple stories, and tells them well, but what draws the reader in is not a plotline but the intimate immersion into the lives of its protagonists – mother and daughter, Shashi and Tara. Canonical literature has frequently celebrated the mother-son relationship, layering it with sacrifice and eulogising self-abnegating motherhood, setting up motherhood as a cult and the mother as its resident deity.
“There were so many sayings about a mother’s love for her son, a son’s love for his mother. So little about mothers and daughters”, Shashi...
