A Mythical Reading of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Abstract

This paper examines Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night through a mythical and feminist lens, exploring how the novel reinterprets Indian myths, epics, and folklore to critique patriarchal ideology and redefine women's identity. Rather than employing myths merely as cultural embellishments, Hariharan reworks the stories of Amba, Gandhari, Damayanti, Ganga, and other mythological women as symbolic and interpretative frameworks through which the experiences of contemporary women such as Devi, Sita, and Mayamma are illuminated. The paper argues that the novel's non-linear narrative structure mirrors the fragmented realities of women's lives, where memory, trauma, silence, and inherited traditions continually shape identity and subjectivity. By juxtaposing mythical narratives with contemporary experiences of marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and resistance, Hariharan demonstrates the persistence of patriarchal oppression across generations while simultaneously reclaiming myth as a powerful site of female agency, self-discovery, and resistance. Furthermore, the novel transforms storytelling into an emancipatory act that enables women to question patriarchal structures, reinterpret inherited cultural narratives, and recover voices that have long been suppressed. Ultimately, The Thousand Faces of Night presents myth not as a static repository of tradition but as a dynamic and transformative discourse through which women negotiate identity, challenge gendered power structures, and imagine alternative possibilities of existence.