Gunga represents today's Indian woman. While appreciating the benefits of the upper-class status of her family, Gunga nevertheless seeks freedom to make her life choices about love, sex, marriage, career, and family relationships. In the process of coming to terms with her own choices and her mother's obvious sadness, Gunga discovers some harsh truths: her family's wealth is based on the 1943 famine (through their investments in a company that stockpiled grain and sold it on the black market); her father and aunt are family-arranged lovers; her mother financially supports her father's debt; and her mother abandoned the only man she loved because of parental disapproval. Gunga is literally caught in the middle of India's seemingly slow transition from imperial, chauvinistic conditions to a democratic state. Mahindra's writing is graceful and intimate. Her perception is both reflective and future-minded. The reader gains a strong sense of India and modern men and women's struggle there to put the past to rest and to find a new way to move forward, creating in the process a new and necessary vision.
Janet St. John