Between Rights and Reality: Investigating Women’s Lived Autonomy in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar through the Capabilities Approach

Abstract

This article discusses the novel Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Doshi 2020) in terms of the Capabilities Approach, framework developed by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2000) to investigate the gap between formal legal rights of women and their lived realities within specific socio-cultural contexts. Though, the existing scholarship on the novel has largely focused on themes of maternal ambivalence, memory, and psychological trauma. This study, however, shifts the critical lens towards the ethical, structural and feminist aspects of women’s autonomy. Based on the liberal feminist ideas and the model of human dignity introduced by Martha Nussbaum, the article argues that justice cannot be determined by legal equality alone; rather, it must be measured by the real opportunities people have to live meaningful and self-directed lives. The research uses a qualitative, theory-based textual analysis which utilizes four key capabilities that Nussbaum defines in her book Women and Human Development (Nussbaum 2000) as bodily integrity, emotions, practical reason and affiliation in order to investigate the lived experiences of the protagonist, Antara. The article demonstrates how childhood neglect, emotional deprivation, and the moral burden of care giving experienced by Antara shapes her life and reveal the systematic limitations placed on agency of women despite the presence of formal rights. Family obligations, cultural expectations and emotional inheritance are presented as major factors that curtail substantive freedom and self-determination. By applying the Capabilities Approach to the modern Indian fiction, this research advances feminist literary criticism by focusing on the ability of literature to reveal structural inequality, moral constraints, and the circumstances under which human beings can fully flourish.