The grind of hard labour is inescapable for Shakuntala, a help in a rich household in rural Odisha who supplements her meagre income with a second job as a peon at a private school—all so that she can one day give her infant daughter, Bharati, the gift of education and the promise of a better life. Shakuntala’s life mirrors that of millions of other women living on the fringes of Indian society, battling poverty, unpaid domestic work and sexual abuse.

When Bharati turns six, Shakuntala must fight the school headmaster who refuses to admit the girl without the father’s name, throwing up questions of identity and personhood—after all, in a patriarchal society, whom do children belong to when fathers forsake them?

Coming from the seasoned pen of popular Odia writer Iti Samanta, Shakuntala’s Daughter challenges easy assumptions about feminist narratives where self-assertion does not occur in congealed moments of grand statements and rebellions but through the persistent will to survive, punctuated by as many subversions as compromises.