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“It's My Story”: Revisioning of Myth in Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni by Poile Sengupta
Abstract
The imposing corpus of Indian mythology has long stood uncontested and unquestioned as a repository of narratives that demarcate the heroes and the villains with the collective sympathy leaning towards the former. The depiction of the antagonists in epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were carefully constructed to cement their positions as figures that would incite hatred and disgust and as foils to their infallible hero counterparts. The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider the character of Shoorpanakha as a victim of circumstance and masculine domination as opposed to the malevolent individual that she is portrayed in the epics, through the lens of subalternity and feminism, as represented in Sengupta's play Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni. The conscious decision of giving a voice to those who were vilified and shunned is an instance of revisioning. It defies conventional knowledge of the two crucial metanarratives and the dominating discursive practices. It does not lend itself to the restricting binary of good and evil and allows agency to own their narrative.
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