Unmothering the Nation: Female Subjectivity and the Maternal Body in Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar (2020)

Abstract

Avni Doshi's Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Burnt Sugar (2020) unsettles the sanctified figure of the Indian mother, replacing devotion with doubt and tenderness with resentment. This paper examines how the novel's narrator, Antara, and her mother, Tara, dramatize what feminist theorists call maternal ambivalence, the coexistence of love and hostility within the maternal bond, against the backdrop of a culture that elevates motherhood to a near-sacred civic duty. Drawing on Adrienne Rich's distinction between motherhood as institution and motherhood as experience, Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and recent Indian feminist scholarship on maternal fiction, the paper argues that Doshi performs a deliberate “unmothering”: a narrative strategy that strips motherhood of its nationalist and mythic associations, echoed in tropes such as Bharat Mata, and relocates it within the fallible, desiring, forgetful female body. Reading Tara's encroaching dementia, Antara's compulsive self-portraiture, and the novel's unreliable, embodied narration, the paper shows how Doshi reframes memory and the body as unstable archives of female subjectivity rather than vessels of inherited virtue. Ultimately, Burnt Sugar emerges as a text that refuses redemptive closure, insisting instead that daughters, like nations, inherit not purity but a complicated, embodied history.