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House/Daughter/Nation: Interiority, Architecture, and Historical Imagination in Janaki Majumdar's “Family History”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Antoinette Burton
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My mother grew up in a small Punjabi village not far from Chandigarh. As she chopped onions for the evening meal or scrubbed the shine back onto a steel pan or watched the clouds of curds form in a bowl of slowly setting homemade yoghurt, any action with a rhythm, she would begin a mantra about her ancestral home. She would chant of a three-storeyed flat-roofed house, blinkered with carved wooden shutters around a dust yard where an old-fashioned pump stood under a mango tree.… In England, when all my mother's friends made the transition from relatives' spare rooms and furnished lodgings to homes of their own, they all looked for something ‘modern. ’ “It's really up to date, Daljit,” one of the Aunties would preen as she gave us the grand tour of her first proper home in England. “Look at the extra flush system … Can opener on the wall … Two minutes' walk to the local amenities …” But my mother knew what she wanted. When she stepped off the bus in Tollington, she did not see the outside lavvy or the apology for a garden or the medieval kitchen, she saw fields and trees, light and space, and a horizon that welcomed the sky which, on a warm night and through squinted eyes, could almost look something like home.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , November 1997 , pp. 921 - 946
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1997

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