Narrative Voice, Stylistic Subversion, and Feminist
Rewriting in Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen by Kavita
Kané
Dr. Aruna Kumar Behera
ABSTRACT
Kavita Kané’s Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen
(2013) retells the Mahabharata from the perspective of Uruvi, a
princess who stands at the margin of the epic tradition. In modern
Indian mythological stories, the novel reimagines the Mahabharata
from the perspective of Uruvi, an oppressed woman who is rarely
mentioned in the traditional epic. This paper contends that Kané
employs first-person, autodiegetic narration, lexical patterning,
dialogue, figurative language, and syntactic variation in her
novels. These narrative strategies provide alternative forms that
subvert patriarchal and caste hierarchies within the epic. Based on
literary stylistics and feminist narratology, discourse theory, and
postcolonial criticism, the essay posits that the novel's voice
serves to represent one's character and to function as a form of
resistance. The story’s linguistic texture shifts myth from a static
historical record into a space of debate, filled with interpretive
and self-disclosure questions. By prioritising affective interiority
and feminine subjectivity as the main modes of negotiation, it
undermines received notions of sociality, legality, and gender. It
further situates Kané’s Karna’s Wife alongside revisionist texts
such as Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions and Tharoor’s The Great
Indian Novel. It shows how different it is from feminist
mythological fiction in Indian English literature. Ultimately,
though, the essay argues that Kané writes in a literary form in
which cultural remaking and criticism are part and parcel of her
art.
Keywords: feminist narratology; mythological retelling; autodiegetic
narration; literary stylistics; Kavita Kané; Mahabharata;
postcolonial feminism.
