From Silence to Speech: The Transformation of Mythological Women in Contemporary Indian Retellings

Abstract

This paper explores how the organising transformation of contemporary Indian retellings of myths is from silence to speech. It argues that silence in the Sanskrit epics is not one but a differentiated system, at least four forms of which can be distinguished, namely: (structural) silence, where a woman never gets a chance to speak in the narrative; imposed silence, where she is not allowed or even prevented from speaking, or where her speech is punished; strategic silence, where she decides not to speak because of her own self-protection or refusal; and unheard speech, where she speaks fully but is not heard by anyone. Each of these forms is answered by different narrative devices in contemporary novels like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s, Kavita Kane’s, Pratibha Ray’s, Volga’s, and others: first-person retrospective narration; expanding dialogue into argument; the insertion of the lament and the letter; and the sustained use of interior monologue. The paper follows Tillie Olsen’s description of unnatural silence, Audre Lorde’s notion of the transformation of silence to language, bell hooks’s theory of talking back, Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of subaltern inaudibility, and Adrienne Rich’s idea of re-vision and Uma Chakravarti’s account of Brahmanical patriarchy, to see how these retellings translate silence into narrative substance. It also claims that the genre’s most probing observation is the possibility of separating voice from power; the most potent voice in the Kuru assembly belongs to Draupadi, and only the retellings that acknowledge this—that is, that draw attention to the lack of impact, not just the presence of speech, but the failure of uptake—make a more sophisticated feminist statement than those in which a powerful voice is used as a proxy for a powerful consequence.