Published Paper Details:

The paper presents a critical analysis of how the Feminist re-telling of Indian mythologies by Kavita Kane reconfigured the marginalised women, namely, Uruvi, Urmila, Menaka, Surpanakha, and Ahalya, in a manner that allowed the latter to re-negotiate the sources of identity and power in the patriarchal formations. It attempts to highlight how the discourses of feminism in India are challenged by the narratives produced by Kane, and to expand feminist literary debates in India. A thematic and textual, as well as a qualitative analysis, was used. Karna Wife: The Outcast Queen, Sita Wife: The Sister of Karna, Lanka Wife: Princess of Lanka, Menaka Wife: The Choice of Awakening, and Ahalya Wife: The Awakening are 5 of the books by Kane that were chosen intentionally and used as main texts. The two frames of analysis were close reading and feminist criticism, respectively, and academic articles and critical reviews, respectively, helped in justifying close reading. Agency, resistance, silence, autonomy, and intersectionality of gender, caste, and morality were coded and analyzed as themes. The discussion shows that Kane heroines cross or bend down the traditional archetypes associated with submissive female or demonised women by exercising agency through silence, intelligence, emotional resiliency, and political power. Rather than strengthening binary ideas of what are perceived as ideal and fallen women, Kane remakes them as non-stereotyped, morally ambiguous individuals who challenge the standards that the patriarchal system should maintain, but must operate within the framework of structural pressures. The mythological center upon which she migrated ceases to be the cult of men, and rather the multiple-dimensional human events where the voices, feelings, and ethical concerns of women become central. The study contributes to theory in the sense that it explicitly expands feminist literary treatment, to mythological re-telling, to demonstrate that myth can be turned into a living story space, within which gender can be renegotiated. In the performance as it actually is, it is a performance structure or a form of performance enactment by academic practitioners and students in which canonical works can be revisited in these non-canonical forms. It is a policy issue because it says that good-better-best policies must be put into something in order to modify feminist rewrites of mythology in school and in cultural production in order to render all this more gender-conscious and empowering in its imagery.