Pom represents the subaltern voice—someone without caste privilege, education, or family. Her multiple names reflect her loss of identity and her strategic reinvention. She embodies the theme of survival through literacy and self-definition.

Mrs. Hamilton gives Pom shelter and education, but with the goal of converting her to Christianity and molding her into a “proper” domestic servant. She is kind but condescending, unable to see Pom’s agency.

Pom begins as a village girl from a tribal community in the Sundarbans, orphaned after a flood. She is sold into servitude and then into a brothel in Calcutta. Her intelligence and resilience allow her to escape, first to a missionary school, then into the world of publishing. She eventually becomes a secretary for a British publisher and later a novelist herself.

Shrimati Dutt embodies internalized social prejudice. Her character shows that oppression is not only colonial but also patriarchal and caste-based within Indian society. 8. Mrs. Thorne (Caroline) – Captain Thorne’s Wife Role: Unwitting rival. Background: A British woman married to Thorne, unable to have children.

Hannah is raised by Pom with the help of a nanny. She becomes a point of tension: British society sees her as illegitimate, while Indian society sees her as foreign. Pom’s determination to raise her alone, without revealing the father’s identity, drives much of the plot’s second half.

Caroline believes Hannah is an orphan and wants to adopt her. She is sympathetic as a woman but represents the British assumption of racial and class superiority—she never considers that Pom, as the biological mother, has rights.

Thorne does not appear extensively but looms large in Pom’s memory. He abandons her upon learning of the pregnancy. Later, he tries to claim Hannah, not out of love but because his British wife cannot bear children.

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