Title: From Stone to Woman and Woman Back to Stone: Myth, Memory, Female Subjectivity, and the Paradox of Redemption in Bipin Nayak's "Ahaly?"
Authors: Dr. Santosh Kumar Nayak
Volume: 10
Issue: 8
Pages: 158-167
Publication Date: 2026/08/28
Abstract:
Bipin Nayak's "Ahaly?," collected in his Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poetry anthology Swarachitra, is a remarkably compressed modern reconfiguration of one of the most enduring female figures of the R?m?ya?a tradition. Rather than retelling the familiar narrative of Ahaly?'s curse and liberation, Nayak extracts from the myth a series of paradoxical transformations through which stone, woman, love, innocence, history, nature, marriage, and memory become mutually implicated. The poem begins by distinguishing between touching with the hand and touching with the foot-"This / is not a matter / of touching with the hand, / but of touching with the foot"-and its Odia counterpart, "Ie / H?ta nuhen / P?dare chhuinb?ra kath?," immediately foregrounds the corporeal and hierarchical dimensions of the myth. The poem then performs its decisive reversal: the stone once transformed into a woman "has turned into stone again," corresponding to "Hele jeun pathara?i dine / P?lati thil? n?r? / Iti madhyare se puni / P?lati gal??i pathara". This return to stone radically unsettles the conventional teleology of divine redemption. The article argues that Nayak transforms the Ahaly? myth from a narrative of miraculous liberation into a meditation on the instability and incompleteness of liberation itself. Drawing upon feminist criticism, myth criticism, post-structuralism, theories of the male gaze, reader-response, intertextuality, and philosophical approaches to identity and becoming, the study examines Ahaly? as a figure of female subjectivity repeatedly constituted by external forces. Particular attention is given to the poem's final images of moss and vermilion-"sometimes moss / on her body, / sometimes / vermilion on her forehead"-which establish a profound dialectic between natural inscription and social inscription. Comparative readings of modern revisions of Ahaly? and related mythic female figures, including works associated with Pudhumaipithan, S. Sivasekaram, K. B. Sreedevi, Carol Ann Duffy, Rita Dove, and the wider tradition of revisionist mythmaking, demonstrate the distinctive character of Nayak's intervention. The study concludes that "Ahaly?" is not simply a feminist retelling or an anti-mythic poem but a philosophically charged meditation on the relationship among body, identity, memory, history, and agency. Its ultimate paradox is that Ahaly? is liberated from stone only to reveal how easily womanhood itself can become another form of petrification.