Negotiating Women’s Desire: Desire, Autonomy and Destiny of Ahalyain Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri’s “Ahalyamoksham: Uyirthezhunnetta Sthree”

Abstract

An overarching urge to manifest the needs of mind, body and spirit, desire has been an invariable category of human existence. The disciplinary standards proposed by the society delimited the expressions of human desire and tamed human entities to repress and adapt as per the requisites of context. Both in the formal and conceptual formulations of desire across Indian society, desire has been conceived as a forbidden territory for women, while it operates as a legitimate token of masculinity in the dominant social discourses. The current paper examines the intricacies of the execution of desire and the consequences in the light of“Ahalyamoksham:Uyirthezhunnetta Sthree”by the Malayalam poet Vishnu Narayanan Namboothirianalyzing it using paradigms of micropolitics of desire. The objectives of the study include analyzing the evolution of the parameters setting a conventional value system which conceives and propagates the notion that desire is a psychotic excess from which women have to abstain, as well as the writer’s intention to transgress the boundaries created by the social paradigms.