Cultural Values and Human Relationships in the Select Novels of Sudha Murthy

Abstract

Sudha Murthy occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Indian English writing because her fiction speaks in a plain, accessible idiom while engaging with the deepest anxieties of the Indian middle-class family: the pull between tradition and modernity, the value placed on money against the value placed on relationships, and the quiet negotiations that hold households together or pull them apart. This paper undertakes a thematic and textual study of cultural values and human relationships in four of her select novels - Dollar Bahu, Mahashweta, Gently Falls the Bakula, and House of Cards. It examines how Murthy uses ordinary domestic situations - a mother-in-law comparing daughters-in-law, a wife abandoned after an illness, a career woman drifting from her husband, and a family corroded by ambition - to dramatise the collision between inherited cultural values such as sacrifice, loyalty, and filial duty and the pressures of migration, materialism, and professional ambition. Using a qualitative, interpretative method grounded in close reading, the study argues that Murthy neither romanticises tradition nor uncritically celebrates modernity; instead, she locates ethical worth in characters who sustain relationships through empathy, patience, and self-respect, regardless of whether they are termed traditional or modern. The paper concludes that Murthy's novels function as moral narratives for a transitional Indian society, offering a humanistic framework in which cultural values are validated not by their antiquity but by their capacity to nurture genuine human relationships.