Karuna Rai

Karuna Rai is a woman of post-Independence India, caught between two kinds of modernity.  A mother, wife and daughter-in-law in an enlightened bhadralok Calcutta household; and a physicist, who leaves her family for a few years to pursue research in London.  Her London experience changes her in more ways than one: as a scientist, certainly, but also as a spirited, defiant woman admitted into the nuanced sanctorum of an upper-class English milieu.  She is caught between two loves, her sensible, understanding geologist husband who cares for their children in her absence, and an urbane, irreverent, iconoclastic English architect in London.

She is three times a minority: an Indian pursuing Western science; an Indian woman in a patriarchal Indian society; and a woman in the community of male-dominated science.

How does a woman in Nehruvian India respond to this web of cultural, social and psychological tensions? How does a woman cope with her ‘three times a minority’ status?  How does a woman resolve the conflict of two genres of modernity?  Karuna Rai tells the story of such a woman.

 

Agent: Anuj

Edit: Sharvani