Feminizing Myths, Re-writing Identity: Assessing the Deconstructive Potential of Smita Agarwal’s ‘Lopamudra’, Revathy Gopal’s ‘Yashodhara II’ and Sampurna Chatterjee’s ‘Conversation’

Abstract

“The transfer of political power from oppressor to oppressed brings in its wake the appropriation and reworking of mythological material. As new governments rewrite their people’s history, so too do their novelists and poets recover and re-vision the cultural identity embedded in their people’s myths.” (Chait 17) “Women live their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the importance of woman’s function, even its ‘superiority’) and redefine it. Thus, women live a duality – as members of the general culture and as partakers of women’s culture.” (Lerner 52)