What We Inherit, What We Resist: Independence
On Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Some books linger not because they shout, but because they carry a quiet urgency that stays under your skin. Independence is one of those novels.
Set against the backdrop of Partition, it tells the story of three sisters, Deepa, Jamini, and Priya, each navigating what freedom means when the world around them is fracturing. Political freedom. Familial freedom. Bodily freedom. The story begins in Bengal in 1947, but what it traces moves far beyond history. It’s about what happens when the structures holding your life together, family, country, and tradition, begin to fall apart, and you must decide what to carry forward and what to let go.
What stayed with me most wasn’t just the setting or even the plot. It was the intimacy. The way the novel handles sisterhood is not as harmony but as tension, devotion, misunderstanding, and love. How it explored the pull of duty and desire, of self and family, of care and resentment. Divakaruni writes relationships with such emotional texture that even in their silence, the sisters felt vivid, tender, frustrating, and real.
Each sister is drawn differently toward the idea of freedom. One wants to heal, one wants to love, and one wants to rise. None of their paths is simple, and none is untouched by violence, but none of them are passive, either. Even in loss, they choose, they act, and they survive.
What I appreciated most was that the novel didn’t flatten its characters into symbols of Partition or trauma; instead, it let them live through it, and let them contradict themselves. Their choices weren’t always admirable, but they were always human.
There’s a particular kind of grief in the novel, grief for what might have been, what should have been, what was never named. But there’s also resilience. Not the kind that feels forced or triumphant, but the kind that lives in the small, quiet moments: the willingness to go on, to stay, to imagine something else.
Independence isn’t just a historical novel. It’s a story about what we inherit, what we resist, and how we come into ourselves, sometimes through pain, sometimes through hope, often through both.
Until we meet again.
