Book: Hunger’s Daughters
Author: Nirmala Govindarajan
Publisher: Om Books International
Pages: 298; Price: Rs 295
After the success of the The Community Catalyst, Hunger’s Daughters is another novel by journalist, social documentarian and writer Nirmala Govindrajan. The Community Catalyst was inspired by civil servants and is a must read for the UPSC aspirants.
Hunger’s Daughters revolves around little girls like, Susanthi Bodra. Susanthi lives in a hamlet in Odisha. She is compelled to earn a living at 12 when most of the children of her age are still on their parents’ lap. The reason? Her father is presumed dead and the mother missing.
Another little girl, Nelli, who is just eight, runs away from her mistress’s home. She reaches in the hands of her kidnappers and is being sold in a brothel in Nagpur. Two decades elapse, but her mother continues to wait for her daughter to return to their Kithapur home. The novel is based on the stories of little girls who become breadwinners at a tender age due to abject poverty prevailing in the remote districts of the states such as Odisha, Jharkhand and Karnataka.
The author has scored some brownie points when she describes how the poverty-stricken people in India live and make ends meet, how families survive in small hutments. She has narrated the tales using poetry, which must go down well with the readers. The selection and use of words in describing the event is also good.
She has successfully tried to give an emotional touch when she says, “The now YUPAP volunteers are trying their best to divert the near thirteen-year-old child’s yearning to return home. Susanthi (Bodra) is fast losing the will to convince her foster parents to take her home.”
All the stories are based on a similar theme—poverty. The use of natural setting when the writer describes the social statuses of people, their present surroundings and the description of time of the day when the event is taking place is equally good.
Though the book is enjoyable and worth a read, one may have a feeling that the author has elongated the end and tried to stretch it. However, the language used is pretty good. As the stories are based on present day situations in the countryside, it is advisable to read the book, which will definitely take your knowledge about the country we live in to a next level, and try to show you a real picture of the “poor India”. Govindarajan has fictionalised the harsher realities and real stories of the rural India, which in fact, also show how beautiful India actually is.