Published Paper Details:

The Ramayana, while foundational to Indian cultural and spiritual life, has long centered male narratives and selectively highlighted female characters who conform to idealized patriarchal roles. While Sita's story has been revisited across literary traditions, figures like Ahalya, Mandodari, and Tara remain structurally marginalized--either reduced to symbols of transgression or cast into narrative silence. This paper engages with contemporary feminist retellings, particularly Koral Dasgupta's Ahalya, Mandodari, and Tara, and Volga's The Liberation of Sita, to explore how these characters are reclaimed through what Adrienne Rich terms "re-vision"--the act of rereading and rewriting as a form of feminist survival. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's theory of the subaltern and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's critique of universalizing Western feminist models, this study situates these retellings within the complex gendered, cultural, and mythological codes of South Asia. The paper argues that through narrative restoration, these women are transformed from silenced archetypes into agents of critique, resistance, and interiority--revealing not only the gendered erasures of classical epics but also the power of feminist storytelling to correct them.