Myth and Feminist Discourse in the Selected Works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Keywords:
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, feminist retelling, Indian mythology, Draupadi, Sita, female agency, cultural memory, narrative voiceAbstract
This paper examines the feminist reinterpretation of Indian mythology in the fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, focusing on her retellings of the two great epics of the subcontinent, The Palace of Illusions (2008) and The Forest of Enchantments (2019). Drawing on feminist literary theory and the study of myth as a cultural construct, the paper argues that Divakaruni transforms the epic heroines Draupadi and Sita from objects of narration into narrating subjects of their own stories, thereby reclaiming female voice and agency and challenging the patriarchal assumptions embedded within traditional tellings. Through the adoption of the first-person female perspective, Divakaruni recovers the interiority of her heroines, rendering them complex and psychologically resonant individuals rather than flat archetypes of feminine virtue. The paper demonstrates that her project constitutes not a rejection of tradition but a critical engagement with it, one that discovers within the mythic heritage itself the resources for the empowerment of women. It further shows that Divakaruni’s feminism is at once committed and nuanced, portraying her heroines as agents who exercise meaningful choice within genuinely constraining circumstances and whose acts of resistance carry real costs. The paper concludes that Divakaruni has made a significant and distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and mythological fiction, reshaping the collective memory of Indian civilisation to accord women their proper place within its foundational narratives.
References
Assmann, J. (2019). Cultural memory and early civilization: Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge University Press.
Banerjee, S. (2021). Reclaiming the narrative: Voice and agency in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s mythological fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 57(3), 342–356.
Bose, B. (2017). Gender and narrative in the Indian novel in English. Oxford University Press.
Chakravarti, U. (2018). Rewriting the epic woman: Draupadi in contemporary Indian fiction. Indian Literature Review, 42(2), 88–104.
Das, R. (2023). Home, exile, and the feminist icon: Sita’s journey in Divakaruni’s fiction. Journal of Contemporary Literature and Aesthetics, 9(2), 67–82.
Doniger, W. (2019). Against dharma: Dissent in the ancient Indian sciences of sex and politics. Yale University Press.
Ghosh, T. (2023). The epic reimagined: Voice, memory, and resistance in twenty-first-century Indian retellings. Journal of South Asian Literature, 48(1), 23–41.
Iyer, N. (2019). Patriarchy and its discontents: Reading gender in the Indian epic retelling. South Asian Review, 40(1), 55–71.
Krishnan, R. (2022). From pativrata to protagonist: The reinvention of Sita in The Forest of Enchantments. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 16(2), 201–218.
Mehta, A. (2022). Feminist mythmaking: Empowerment and its limits in Divakaruni’s novels. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 57(4), 611–628.
Mishra, P. (2018). Diaspora, accessibility, and the popular retelling: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and the global reader. Studies in the Novel, 50(3), 377–393.
Nair, L. (2021). Desiring subjects: Female interiority and the erotics of the epic heroine. Feminist Studies in Literature, 12(1), 44–62.
Pattanaik, D. (2017). The girl who chose: A new way of narrating the Ramayana. Penguin Random House India.
Rajan, R. S. (2018). Real and imagined women: Gender, culture, and postcolonialism. Routledge.
Ramaswamy, S. (2021). Myth, gender, and the nation in contemporary South Asian fiction. Modern Asian Studies, 55(5), 1502–1525.
Richman, P. (2020). Many Ramayanas: The diversity of a narrative tradition in South Asia. University of California Press.
Sengupta, M., & Roy, A. (2020). Rewriting collective memory: Feminist interventions in Indian mythological fiction. Journal of Gender Studies, 29(6), 703–717.
Sharma, P., & Kaur, H. (2020). Agency within constraint: The feminist realism of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 12(4), 1–12.
Showalter, E. (2019). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Rev. ed.). Princeton University Press.
Verma, S. (2022). Reading Panchaali: Selfhood and suffering in The Palace of Illusions. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 16(1), 130–145.
Downloads
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 International Journal of Engineering Science & Humanities
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
