Motherhoods and Motherlands: gender, nation, and adaptation in we that are young

Preti Taneja’s 2017 novel, We That Are Young, draws on the closing lines of King Lear to provide a blistering portrait of contemporary India told from the perspective of the younger generation, intertwining the fate of India with that of a fictional premier business family where the image of the corrupt nation and its failures is mapped onto social values that revolve around the desires and duties determined by the family patriarch. This essay analyzes We That Are Young as an adaptation by considering not just its relationship with the authoritative male canonical Shakespeare but also its position within a canon of feminist rewriting of Shakespeare, specifically its relationship with Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a literary adaptation of King Lear that emphasizes the parallels between the ecological exploitation of land and the sexual exploitation of women’s bodies. I examine these adaptations in relation to the critical history of feminist re-visions of Shakespeare, where appropriation is read as reparative, by focusing on the ways in which these novels mobilize the trope of the absent mother. If Smiley’s text identifies, fills, and concretizes the “absent mother” of Shakespeare’s King Lear, in the process both extending the afterlife of the play and in her feminist re-vision supplanting it, Taneja’s novel also both reproduces and consumes Smiley’s version in its proliferation of models of motherhood. I suggest that We That Are Young’s self-consciously Indian adaptation, or what I term desification, of both King Lear and A Thousand Acres, puts pressure on the imagined gendered narratives of the Indian nation and corresponding conceptions of motherland, motherhood, and mothering. I conclude by arguing that Taneja’s novel moves beyond the recuperative gesture of according villainized female characters greater agency to expose the insidious networks of discrimination, oppression, and subjugation that both shape, and are perpetuated by, these figures.