The Price of Freedom: Female Agency and Emotional Inheritance in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar

Abstract

Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020) reconfigures the notion of womanhood in twenty-first-century India by exposing the tensions between memory, motherhood, and freedom. The novel’s portrayal of a daughter’s fraught relationship with her mother becomes a lens through which the emotional legacy of patriarchy is examined. Situated within the larger framework of Developed India @2047: An Initiative to Transform the Nation, this paper argues that Doshi’s narrative offers an intimate metaphor for the nation’s psychological transformation. Just as India envisions a future of gender equality and inclusive growth, Burnt Sugar confronts the residues of emotional inequity and generational trauma that hinder women’s autonomy. Through an analysis grounded in feminist theory—drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of “the Other,” Gayatri Spivak’s idea of the “subaltern voice,” and Julia Kristeva’s exploration of abjection—this paper interprets Doshi’s work as a psychological allegory of women reclaiming selfhood from inherited oppression. The study emphasizes how emotional agency, memory, and forgiveness become tools of empowerment, and how such microcosmic liberations align with India’s macrocosmic vision of social and moral advancement by 2047.

Keywords: Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar, female agency, emotional inheritance, memory, empowerment, gender equality, Developed India @2047