Motherhood and Feminist Guilt: Emotional Labour in the Works of Anita Desai and Githa Hariharan

Motherhood has long occupied a privileged position within nationalist and cultural discourse as the highest expression of feminine virtue, moral endurance, and self-sacrifice. Feminist literary texts from India, however, repeatedly complicate this ideal by foregrounding the emotional labour, guilt, and ethical exhaustion embedded in maternal roles. This paper examines representations of motherhood in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Clear Light of Day, and Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night, to analyse the tension between motherhood as moral obligation and feminist selfhood. Drawing on feminist theories of emotional labour, ethics of care, and nationalist ideology, the paper argues that motherhood in these texts is not a stable or fulfilling identity but a coercive moral structure that produces feminist guilt. By resisting the nationalist glorification of maternal sacrifice, Desai and Hariharan reveal how maternal identity is sustained through silence, erasure, and unacknowledged labour. The paper positions feminist guilt not as individual failure but as a structural consequence of ideological motherhood, thereby reframing maternal dissatisfaction as a legitimate feminist critique rather than moral deficiency.