The Serpent, the House, and the Female Body: Ecofeminism and the Ecology of Violence in K. R. Meera's “Sarpayatnam”

Abstract

  The serpent occupies an ambivalent position within cultural memory, symbolizing fertility, danger, wisdom, sacred power, and regeneration across diverse religions and cultures. In the South Indian context, beliefs surrounding sarpadosham and sarpashalyam reinforce its association with fear, anger, and misfortune. K. R. Meera's “Sarpayatnam” challenges and overturns these inherited cultural meanings by demonstrating that violence originates not from the serpent, which symbolizes the natural world, but from the patriarchal structures embedded within marriage. Drawing upon the ecofeminist interventions of Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Carolyn Merchant, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, and Bina Agarwal, alongside the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Silvia Federici, and Susan Sontag, this paper argues that women, domestic space, and the natural world become interconnected sites of patriarchal domination. This paper argues that the construction of the house and the institution of marriage are parallel manifestations of patriarchal ownership. Meera portrays the house as a colonized ecology and marriage as an ecology of violence, in which the husband's control over his wife's body, labour, and agency operates through the same extractive logic that governs humanity's relationship with nature. By reconfiguring the serpent against its dominant historical and cultural representations, Meera presents it as an ethical witness whose silent coexistence offers an alternative ecological imaginary rooted in care, shared vulnerability, and reciprocity. The paper demonstrates that, by repositioning ecofeminist inquiry from the natural landscape to the everyday domestic space, “Sarpayatnam” challenges patriarchal and anthropocentric binaries and reconceptualizes the relationship between women, ecology, and non-human life.