Reinterpreting “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao”: The ‘Educated’ Daughter and Intergenerational Reparation in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls

This article analyses Manjula Padmanabhan’s  Escape and The Island of Lost Girls to explore the equation between daughterhood  and education, with a special focus on the entanglement of the parental figures in such an equation. In the two novels, the trajectories of Meiji and her uncle(s), especially Youngest, later revealed  to be her biological father, offer the scope of such an inquiry. The article reflects on the question of formal education that shapes Meiji’s daughterhood in relation to the parental figures in the novels. Moreover, the study deciphers the significant reverberations of corporeal knowledge in Padmanabhan’s writings, a subversive narrative trope that is normatively eliminated in the shaping of daughter-father relationships, especially in the Indian context. It also traces the trajectory of the educated daughter towards intergenerational reparation, a trajectory that is congruent with the question of  hope as a form of resolution in a critical dystopia. Such discussions about the educated daughter also relate to the novel of education or  Bildungsroman as a genre, reconfigured through genre-blurring as a measure for writings of critical dystopia. In doing so, the article juxtaposes Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP), or Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter, initiative within the Indian socio-political context with the content of the novels where the interfaced education of  the beti (daughter) and the beti’s father becomes significant. Apart from the concepts of critical dystopia and  Bildungsroman, the study finds resolutions in theories of sensuous knowledge and intergenerational reparation.