Manju Kapur`s 'Custody': Analytical study of Disintegration of family

and its Consequences.

Jaydeepsingh Rao
Research Scholar At HNGU
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Aptly known as the Jane Austen of modern Indian English Literature, Manju
Kapur creates an edifice on two inches of ivory delineating the theme of upper middle
class families in her novels. She analyses the predicament of women in the conventional
patriarchal society wherein their psyche is disturbed causing marital discord. Her
protagonists struggle against such social conventions and taboos of the tradi
traditional
tional society.
Virmati in Difficult Daughters, Astha in A Married Woman, Nisha in Home fighting
against the conventional norms emerge as New Women with independent ideology and
complete transformation. Her novels are the portrayal of women's liberation and
a
autonomy. The modern woman has come out of the narrow socio
socio-cultural
cultural spaces and
paradigm. Being intellectually alert she is far more mature than her predecessors. Hence
the protagonists in kapur's novels do not submit to the age
age-old
old traditions and customs
custo of
patriarchal society. Her novels are chronicles of the Indian middle class families wherein
she discusses issues like lesbianism, infidelity, infertility, divorce, adoption, sexual abuse
and many more.
Manju Kapur's novels are set in the context
context of some important historical or
political events. Her novel Custody was set in the surge of foreign investment.
Globalization and economic liberalization lured bankers, industrialists, bureaucrats and
even the corporate in the economic and financial ggrowth.
rowth. Naturally the protagonists in
Custody are in the rat-race
race of the materialistic pursuits. She writes: "I obviously write
about the things I know well
well- I wouldnt be able to write about them otherwise. But my
novels are imaginative reconstructions. I feel uncomfortable writing about recognizable
situations. The one exception was my first novel when I used some of the details from my
mother`s life, but that was with her permission."
The plot of 'Custody' is set in the backdrop of the urban middle cla
class family in
Delhi, affluent but impoverished in moral values. Both Shagun and Ishita, the female
protagonists have been depicted with two aspects of feminine perspectives-
perspectives-infidelity and

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infertility respectively. Kapur also depicts the lives of the urban middle class Indians who
long for wealth, freedom and prosperity. It is also a tale of child custody and sluggish
Indian legal system.
Manju Kapur explores the hollowness of modern life through the four adult
characters: Raman, Shagun, Ashok Khanna, and Ishita, a childless divorcee and two
children: Arjun and Roohi. The novelist depicts how the marriage set up is disintegrated
ending in divorce and legal custody.
Raman is a father and a husband but to him his professional career is more
important than his wife and children. He is weded to his profession and is in the rat
rat-race
of making money. Shagun looks after children and shoulders domestic responsibility.
Raman's parents also believe that a woman's selfhood, status and respectability llie in
wifehood and motherhood. Shagun, the beautiful wife of Raman, falls in love with Ashok
Khanna, the handsome boss of Raman. Shagun is deep in love with Ashok Khanna and in
turn he also goes on conquering her mind, body and soul like a marketeer. She, being a
mother, a wife and at the same time a lover, is in dilemma and in constant conflict but as
the affair becomes passionate and fiery, Shagun has no regrets in lying to Raman and her
mother. She leaves children to her mother and goes off weekends with her lover. Not only
this she goes on brain-washing
washing her children against their own father. She finally decides
to go for divorce. Raman reacts violently as his male ego is hurt. Kapur lays bare the
force of extramarital affair which can break up the very foundation
foundation of a solid married life.
Moral and ethics do not matter when it comes to love. Shagun's mother does her best to
coax her to be faithful to her husband. Consequently she is agitated and warns her mother
that she would never confide in her. Shagun wants to come out of the protective
environment of the peaceful family set up. She rebels for freedom which was long denied
to her. The novelist artistically weaves the plot throwing light on the fate of the children
in such broken marriages. Kapur says:
"And here I have been thinking that although none of the characters come out
wholly shining, you do sympathise with them all! Misery, anxiety, tension does bring out
the worst in us- that would apply to any conflictive situation. Where children are
concerned,ones
oncerned,ones deepest feelings are at stake, and provokes all kinds of extreme
behaviour."

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 Family structure crumbles and falls apart into pieces as an aftermath of divorce.
Shagun has to bear a lot by the breakup of marriage just for the sake of ga
gaining
ining freedom
of will and individualism. The story moves closest to the society's traditional norms and
conventions but women like Shagun cross the threshold of marital status being shaped by
foreign impact such as extra marital affairs, materialistic pursuits
pursuits and so on. Here the
children become the material stakes. It is through Arjun and Roohi shown as to how a
perfect childhood can get messed up because of the parents' ego and their expectations
work upon the innocent minds of the children. Without taking
taking in to consideration the
children would be in,Shagun rebels to fulfill her desires as she had been much oppressed
and suppressed in the patriarchal set up since her childhood. But fact remains that the
unscrupulous domestic dispute ruins the lives of the two innocent children. They are torn
between two mothers, two homes and two countries. But Shagun neither cares for social
propriety nor does she conceptualize family shame. Manju Kapur has brought out in a
realistic manner the lack of understanding of th
thee views of children by the insusceptible
parents. To Raman, reaping the benefits of economic boom of the financial market costs
him his wife and the separation of children. Kapur states: "The family is where I see the
impact of what is happening in Indian Society. In my earlier novels it was who negotiated
this relationship. Here it is everybody
everybody-the
the children, the father, the wives. If you live here,
you pay the emotional price." How pathetic it is when the couple becomes strangers to
each other in the novel!! It brings to surface the hollowness the modern families
experience in the materialistic world.
In Custody parallel to Shagun's story runs Ishita's, who has been deprived of her
marital status. Kapur exposes the shallowness of conjugal life where a woman is
stigmatized because of infertility. She is subjugated to severe mental torture especially by
her mother-in-law
law who epitomizes the typical patriarchal society. The medical report
reveals Ishita's incapability to conceive pleases the in
in-laws as it is not their son who is
incompetent to beget but she. The callous mother
mother-in-law
law fails to respect the same gender.
The root cause is the patriarchal society where a male dominates but here a woman
antagonises another. The issue of woman's oppression has be
been
en controversial all over the
world. Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto mentions that the origin of women's
oppression is in the rise of class society. A woman is a mere instrument of production and
is to be exploited in common.
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 Kate Millet in herr Sexual Politics asserted : "One of the effects of class within
patriarchy is to set one woman against another creating a lively antagonism --- between a
career woman and housewife.
housewife.---Through
Through the multiple advantages of the double standard
the male participates
pates in both worlds empowered by his superior social and economic
resources to play the estranged women against each other as rivals---."
rivals
Simone de Beauvoir draws conclusion: "One is not born, but rather becomes woman."
A woman has been reduced to a docile person to whom home is a crucial site of
oppression. Men in the capitalist class address woman's work as non
non-productive
productive and
unpaid. Woman's subordination is a function of class oppression maintained because it
serves the interests of capital aand
nd the ruling class. Some socialist feminist believe that it is
based not only on economic system but on both patriarchy and capitalism. Ishita is only
body and nothing else. Simone de Beauvoir in her 'The Second Sex' states: "Women have
always been man'ss dependent if not his slave, the two sexes have never shared the world
in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped though her situation is
beginning to change."
Kapur's Custody is a tale of female woe, suffering as well as the fulfilment
fulfilm of their
aspirations and desires. The novel is a series of events and incidents encompassing
themes like separation, divorce ,remarriages of the four adults and with it follows a series
of legal procedure on the issue of custody . Manju Kapur has well portrayed the pangs
and the loneliness of the two children in the novel. The novel can be termed as a legal
drama of the Indian society. Kapur's women characters are bold enough to face the cruel
and slow turns of Indian judiciary and the way it functio
functions.
Manju Kapur's female characters have come out of the traditional values and dare
to oppose the conventional perceptions and doctrines of the patriarchal bonds of
inharmonious marriage. The daring female protagonists are presented as real women of
flesh and blood having emotions and sentiments of their own. Apart from this they also
yearn to be a part of the intellectual movement to establish their identity. Shagun revolted
against the married life in order to win her love. In spite of being married
married and having
children, she goes ahead to enjoy new love life. Ishita though stigmatized of infertility,
divorced, she engaged herself in social service to fill up vacuum in her life.
She hopes to find a new life in Raman's broken family and revives it by
b marrying
him. She unhesitatingly accepts Raman's daughter Roohi as her own child and showers
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love on her. Here Shagun and Ishita are portrayed in contrast. Ishita is happy even being
the guardian of other's child whereas Shagun even being the mother hunts
hunt for
independence and identity of her own.
The themes of Kapur's novels are based on female issues wherein she shows how
they bring forth themselves from the marginal position to independence by creating a
space through deviational behaviour. Custody, therefore is a novel about disintegration of
marriage with its cruel and heart rending consequences. But the novel goes a step further
describing the life of women, struggle for their basic rights, quest for identity and
survival. Kapur portrays how
ow women are suffering from economic and socio-cultural
socio
disadvantages in the male dominated society. They have been deprived of their
individuality, self-reliance
reliance and aspirations.
Custody, a riveting novel, represents an emerging group of young successful,
succ
educated female protagonists who can choose the direction of their destiny so easily, no
matter what the underlying moral implications are. Kapur's Custody depicts the marriages
that collapse, social hypocrisies and law suit for children's custod
custodyy that is a worldwide
reality denoting possessiveness and unequal power relations in normative patriarchal
families where there is constraint, oppression, violence possessiveness and disintegration.

References :
1. Kapur Manju. Custody. Noida: R
Random House India,Press, 2001.
2. Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. URBANA: University oof llinois Press,2000.
3. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Se
Second
cond Sex.TRANS & ed., H. M Parshley.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
4. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich.
Friedric The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Adult,2002.
5. Dr. Pew Maji, 'Feminism in Manju Kapur`
Kapur`s Custody'. The Criterion, An International
Journal inn English, Vol 4, Issue-IV,
Issue August 2013, ISBN 0976-8165.

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