Rewriting the Mahabharata: Mythic Revisionism and Gender in The Palace of Illusions

Abstract

This paper discusses Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) as an example of mythic revisionism, which re-narrates the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata from the perspective of its most marginalised central character, Draupadi, renamed Panchaali. Whereas the traditional epic depicts Draupadi as a catalyst for male conflict and dynastic war, told from an external perspective through the voices of sages, warriors, and kings, Divakaruni’s retelling reconfigures her as the novel's sole narrator, redistributing narrative authority along explicitly gendered lines. The study argues that Divakaruni’s revisionist project is located at the level of both form and content: formally, through the deliberate transformation of a multi-vocal, episodic epic into a sustained first-person novel that grants its female protagonist the kind of psychological interiority that has historically been reserved for epic heroes; and thematically, through the reclamation of Panchaali’s voice at moments of profound gendered violence, most notably her public humiliation in the Kaurava court, where the novel insists on foregrounding her subjective experience rather than its consequences for the men around her. The paper also addresses the more ambiguous area of female desire and agency in the text, following the ways that Panchaali’s personal ambitions, her rebellious intervention in her own swayamvar and her long-held hidden love for Karna, point to a heroine who resists patriarchy even as she is caught in the web of caste, marriage and dynastic obligation that bind her. This study builds on detailed textual analysis and existing feminist work on the novel to argue that Divakaruni's retelling does not just offer a feminist triumphalist narrative, but a more complex re-imagining of myth in which female interiority, voice, and desire, structurally absent from the source epic, are re-inserted without effacing the limitations that still constrain them. Finally, this paper contextualises The Palace of Illusions within contemporary practices of mythological revisionism as a feminist literary strategy.