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Title CELEBRATING PETIT RECITS: A POSTMODERINST PERSPECTIVE ON THE REWRITING OF THE VEDIC FEMALE SELF IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE INDIAN FICTION

Author(s) KAMRAN ZAMEER

Abstract This thesis is a postmodernist reading of the ancient Indian Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, and its three contemporary feminist rewritings based on the female character of Draupadi. It is delimited to Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni: The Story of Draupadi (1984), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008), and Saraswati Nagpal’s Draupadi: The Fire-Born Princess(2012). The main argument of this study is that the selected novels as petit recits subvert the phallogocentric metanarrative of Ved Vyasa’s Mahabharata and reclaim the Vedic concept of female self that underscores the strong culture of assertive female identities, and the cult of the feminine in the form of Hindu goddesses as glaring manifestations of the nari-shakti. Keeping the Vedic concept of feminism in view, this thesis also argues that the selected corpora of women’s writings reflects on the female character of Draupadi as an abject self and articulates a feminine voice of dissent against the patriarchal metanarrative of Mahabharata by using the postmodernist strategy of rewriting. The concept of abjection and its traits have been utilized to map out the subversion and transgressive traits of Draupadi in the selected feminist rewritings. As far as the theoretical constructs of this study are concerned, this thesis takes Jean Francois Lyotard’s concept of petit recits, Helene Cixous’s framework of ecriture feminine, Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s notion of revisionist mythmaking and Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and its three traits to foreground rewriting as a postmodern literary strategy. This research is exploratory in nature therefore, the research approach followed in this thesis is qualitative, and the research method employed is textual analysis. It concludes that the selected feminist rewritings as petit recits subvert the phallogocentric metanarrative of Mahabharata using abjection as a subversive retrieval strategy. Key Words: postmodernism, petit recits, Vedic, female self, abject, ecriture feminine, revisionist mythmaking, and rewriting.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2021-03-30

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