Women, Myth and Resistance: Reimagining Female Agency in Indian Mythological Fiction

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the most important contribution of the genre of contemporary Indian mythological fiction is to expand the definition of what resistance is. This repertoire is far more complex than the liberal feminist criticism, which has been focused on open defiance and which has tended to take anything but rebellion as an attitude of submission. Close reading of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions and The Forest of Enchantments, as well as Karna’s Wife to Sarasvati’s Gift by Kavita Kane and Volga’s The Liberation of Sita by Pratibha Ray, reveals six modes of resistance that are repeated throughout the corpus: the curse, which turns powerlessness into deferred consequence; the vow, which binds the future; refusal, including refusal of restoration; withdrawal, into silence, austerity or towards the earth; negotiation, the woman’s ability to bargain within a system she cannot escape; and solidarity, the rarest and most politically significant mode of resistance. Drawing on James C. Scott, Michel Foucault and their argument that power produces resistance within it as they go, on Uma Chakravarti’s critique of the liberal equation of agency with subversion, and Judith Butler’s theory of performative subversion, the paper suggests that these novels are of most value in their resistance to the notion of converting their heroines into a modern liberal subject, and least useful when the individual is empowered as a substitute for structural analysis of the resistance. It ends by highlighting caste, collective action, and the traditions of the regions languages as the main unfinished tasks of the genre.