Seven decades. One grand house on Bishnutola Street. And the unsung women who held its crumbling world together.
In 1927, twelve-year-old Kumud arrives in North Calcutta as a child bride, carrying a brass trunk full of red lac bangles and little understanding of the quiet tragedy brewing inside her new home. Over the next fifty years, behind the grand red-brick arches and slatted green shutters, she endures physical abuse, devastating financial ruin, and the loss of five infants—forging herself into an iron-fisted matriarch to ensure her family’s survival.
Decades later, Shalini enters the same house as a young tenant on the top floor. When a forbidden love across caste lines leads her own family to perform her funeral rites while she is still alive, Shalini is cast out into the cold and forced to make a life inside the very family that once rejected her.
As the men of the family fall to ambition, vice, and tragic misfortune, the joint family fractures into five competing kitchens under one roof. Facing structural collapse, legal eviction, and total ruin, the ultimate salvation of the estate rests not on the fallen patriarchs, but on an unlikely alliance between a blind, aging matriarch and the disowned young woman who saved the hearth.
Spanning from the twilight of the British Raj to the late twentieth century, Daughters of the Broken Hearth is a poignant, multi-generational saga of domestic resilience, quiet sacrifice, and the enduring power of women in a changing India.