Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Set in post-independence Bombay
Parul Kapur’s debut novel, Inside the Mirror, winner of the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award in the first novel category, and the 2024 AWP Prize, follows twin sisters Jaya and Kamlesh Malhotra as they navigate post-independence Bombay, the traumas of Partition, and the expectations of their Punjabi Khatri refugee family from Chiniot, now in Pakistan.
A serendipitous connection
The novel, on reading it, felt serendipitous, almost as though I had stepped into a parallel life. It brought back vivid memories of my medical training in Bombay, alongside a desire to be an artist. I continued painting at home under my mother’s guidance; she was skilled in the Bani Thani style of miniature painting.
In the novel, likewise, Jaya is a medical student with a passion for painting, while Kamlesh studies at Sophia College, completing teacher’s training, excelling in Bharat Natyam, and dreaming of an acting career. Their father, Harbans, views these careers as respectable and safe, suitable for marrying into a “nice” Punjabi family, and sees art as a mere pastime.
I connected deeply with Jaya. While I disliked the formaldehyde in dissection halls and dreaded carrying my satchel of bones on crowded buses, Jaya drew inspiration from such surroundings, painting patients, factory workers, and cadavers in a Fauvist style influenced by Rouault and Derain. Eventually, Jaya’s art exhibition caused a scandal and led to her expulsion from medical school. Jaya’s study of human anatomy strengthened her art, as she used Kamlesh as a live model to refine her grasp of structure and form, yet the very world that deepened her talent rejected her.
Inheritance and ambition
The novel is as much about inheritance as ambition, with the grief of Partition always present. Kapur captures Punjabi domestic life with precision: the dhai ghare Arya Samaji culture, whispered conversations over tea and cucumber sandwiches, china clinking in sunlit bedrooms, and ceiling fans spinning lazily overhead.
Harbans reminded me of my father, principled and protective, while Vidya, their mother, with coiffed hair, wearing shimmering georgette sarees and pearls, echoed my mother’s elegance. The scandalized Punjabi aunties, oblivious to their Mesopotamian heritage, were strikingly familiar.
The twins’ shared bedroom, divided by a curio cabinet, serves as a metaphor for intimacy and separation. I, too, shared a room with my sister in a home where the arts were encouraged but never seen as a viable career. Like Kamlesh, my sister was inclined to music and dance, and our father, like theirs, kept us away from Bombay’s entertainment world, wary of its instability and its dangers for girls from “good” homes.
Kapur’s descriptions are rich and cinematic: Jaya’s portrait of Heerabai, the family maid, with vine-like tattoos curling along her arms; her bond with Sringara, the only other female in the fictional Group 47, wearing a bold bindi against austere widow’s whites; Kamlesh’s arangetram in Matunga, filled with grace, discipline, and beauty, reminiscent of performances I attended at Shanmukhananda Hall.
Among the most influential figures is Nihal Devi, the twins’ grandmother, her face deeply lined and her frame frail yet hiding a fierce spirit. She transforms from a despondent elder into an activist, securing water, electricity, and education for shantytown workers on the Thana-Belapur Road, embodying both history and resistance, bridging past and future in a way that foreshadows her granddaughters’ independent intellect. The twins were accepted by their family for intellect, resilience, and creative strength rather than conformity.
Kapur captures the rawness of sisterhood, with its secrets, fights, wounded egos, and eventual reconciliation. In a brief conversation, she told me the novel developed over decades. A Columbia MFA graduate, she began with short stories, later weaving them into a novel after working as a journalist in Bombay.
Her research included interviews with doctors, artists, members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, and her father, who fled Lahore during Partition as mine did, giving the work layered authenticity. Group 47, her fictional artists’ collective, pays tribute to the Progressive Artists’ Group founded in 1947. Like Amrita Sher-Gil, Jaya seeks not only to create art but to claim a self shaped by history yet unbound by it. As one character observes, “All art is history.”
This novel is a shared history, animated not by dates but by desire, conflict, and becoming. Its non-linear structure mirrors memory. Fractured, looping, and intimate. Producing a portrait of a family, a city, and two young women resisting the roles assigned to them. For those who came of age in India after partition, Inside the Mirror is a time capsule, reminding us of what has changed and what endures. It is a lush, nuanced, and quietly powerful work that lingers like a painting long after the gallery lights have dimmed.