89. Gorvika Rao

Abstract 89

Gorvika Rao              

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions: Dissenting through re-writing Mahabharat

Abstract:

Poststructuralist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays described intertexuality in a text through the terms “heteroglossia” and “dialogism” which define a text as composed of unheard, multiple voices. The pathbreaking essays invited informed critical thinking hence, exposing oppressive, hierarchical, exclusionary interpretative practices of the patriarchal society. These voices, heard by feminists dislodged these masculine interpretations, uncovering the phallogocentric universe of men which does not allow these voices to come out. French feminists like Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig questioned these practices and raised questions pertaining to the conditions of subjectivity, identity, representation and agency. They treaded the path of psychoanalysis and philosophy through which they resisted these laws of patriarchal thinking. These thinkers of third wave of feminism came out with the French term ecriture feminine which throughout the whole feminist movement, feminists from all around the world have explored, questioned and problematised to explain different subjugated practices against women using discourses of religion, culture and tradition.

I propose to explore, question and discuss the problematics of ecriture feminine and hence, different feminist theories which evolved from it to uncover the dissent of women through Draupadi in the epic Mahabharat as described in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions. Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions is a text written from the perspective of Paanchali or Draupadi. Mahabharat holds an important position in Indian cultural milieu and defines the idea of Indian literature and Indian consciousness. Divakaruni narrates Mahabharat from Draupadi’s point of view and gives characters of the epic a different dimension altogether. Seeing through the gendered lens of Draupadi, Divakaruni has raised pertinent questions of agency, sexuality, sexual desire, pleasure and power which are unheard or gets curtailed in the masculine epic Mahabharat.

I also propose to critically engage with the novel to analyse and explore the tradition of dissent which takes a different mode of expression here. Should we say that by re-writing Mahabharat, Divakaruni has shown her dissent towards the masculine text? Does it then becomes a new tool in the hands of feminists who would re-write the texts to assert themselves? Can this novel be taken as the space or the world created by a woman to protest against the man’s world in which women did not have any agency? Is it then a new platform on which phallogocentric text can be questioned and exposed? Could we call this feminine narration as narration of dissent? These are some of the questions which I would like to interrogate in my proposed paper.