Digital Object Identifier
Anita Nair’s Mistress (2005) is an important novel in Indian English literature. It looks closely at how women feel desire and how they gain control over their own lives. The story is set at a riverside resort in Kerala. It follows two people: Koman, a retired Kathakali dancer, and his niece Radha, a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage. The novel centres on the nine navarasas, or emotions, of Kathakali. Nair uses this classical dance form to explore human feelings and the relationship between men and women. This paper looks at how Nair shows female assertion in Mistress. It argues that the novel shows a change. Earlier, women in fiction were shown only as victims of a male-dominated society. In this novel, Radha is shown as a woman who makes her own choices and builds her own identity, even while she stays within her family and traditions. This paper looks at three things: Radha’s journey from being trapped to being free, how she uses desire to resist control, and how Kathakali becomes a way for her to find her voice. The paper uses ideas from Simone de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter to study the novel. It shows that Nair is not asking women to reject their family or culture completely. Instead, she is asking for the right to control one’s own body and self. This paper adds to the understanding of the modern Indian woman in twenty-first-century fiction.
Ms. Nivedita Hembrom. “Female Assertion in Anita Nair’s Mistress: From Confinement to Choice.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 710-721. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.43.
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