Reinterpreting Patriarchy: Feminist Consciousness in Kavita Kane’s Mythological Fiction

Abstract

Kavita Kane writes in a unique voice in English, Indian writing today. She has created an ongoing fictional universe in her seven novels since 2013 Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen, Sita’s Sister, Menaka’s Choice, Lanka’s Princess, The Fisher Queen’s Dynasty, Ahalya’s Awakening and Sarasvati’s Gift, in which girls are mentioned in passing, misrepresented, or not individuated at all in the Sanskrit epics. This paper proposes that rather than a series of discrete retellings, it should be understood as a cumulative anatomy of patriarchy, which isolates different mechanisms by which women are subjugated, as in caste endogamy and the marriage market in Karna’s Wife, erasure of the wife left behind in Sita’s Sister, the instrumentality of female sexuality in Menaka’s Choice, the punishment of the markers’ violated body in Lanka’s Princess, the dynastic ambition and the women’s bargaining in The Fisher Queen’s Dynasty, the moral scapegoating of the violated woman in Ahalya’s Awakening, and the displacement of female intellectual authority in Sarasvati’s Gift. The paper presents how feminist consciousness of the protagonists of Kane emerges through a cycle of three steps: the experience of injustice, the formulation of that experience in words, and the negotiation of a viable space in an unchanging system, as described by three theorists: Uma Chakravarti’s theory of ‘Brahmanic Patriarchy’, Gerda Lerner’s historical account of the construction of ‘Patriarchy’, and Adrienne Rich’s theory of ‘re-vision’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of ‘woman as the constructed Other’. The paper also looks at the major shortcomings of Kane’s feminism: the exceptional woman hero, the genre of romance, her definition of caste as personal prejudice and her expository style. These limitations are inextricably linked to the popular form that has allowed her work to attain an unparalleled reach.