Date of Award

20-8-2024

Document Type

Thesis

School

School of Arts, Sciences, Humanities & Education

Programme

Ph.D.-Doctoral of Philosophy

First Advisor

S.Barathi

Keywords

Indian Mythology, Cultural Hegemony, Hybridity, Gender Performativity, Identity

Abstract

Mythology cannot be defined as a set of stories but these stories culturally bind, and make people understand their tradition. It also serves as a conduit of worldview and makes people realise their position in the cosmos. Mythopoeia is the art of myth-making that either a new myth is created or some alterations are made in the point of view or identity of the characters after adapting the framework from the original. The present research aims to explore the presence of cultural hegemony in the select works of the Indian mythopoeic writer Kavita Kane.

Kavita Kane (1966) is a former journalist and writer who aims to write adaptive mythopoeic fiction by making the characters in the periphery as protagonists. She has written eight novels so far, out of which five were selected for study. The selected novels are Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen (2013), The Fisher Queen’s Dynasty (2017), Lanka’s Princess (2017), Ahalya’s Awakening (2019) and Sarasvati’s Gift (2021). All these novels are written from the perspective of female characters that are silent and are left in the periphery.

An elaborate Literature survey highlights the previous research in the works of Kane which include research articles and theses analysing feminism, hermeneutics, psychoanalytic and narrative styles. Previous research demonstrates that nothing much is discussed using mythopoeic theories and hence, there is a need to analyse the selected works through hegemonic lens by applying Gramsci's (1891— 1937) theory. as well as to explore Socio-Religious hegemony and subversion using the theories of Judith Butler (1956–present), Homi K Bhabha (1949 — present), and Ian Hacking (1936 - 2023).

The objective of the study is to explore Cultural hegemony, a concept that is usually explored in the postcolonial and political fiction in the selected mythopoeic novels of Kavita Kane. The study appreciates Kane’s fictional endeavour in penning mythopoeic novels as an attempt to cultural survival. The writer has ontologically reconstructed the identities of the silent women characters in the original mythology and thereby transformed the fiction into counterhegemonic narratives.

The thesis is built on the frameworks designed by the researcher applying the theoretical concepts of Antonio Gramsci, Homi. K. Bhabha, Judith Butler and Ian Hacking. This framework is a triangulation in which the apex of the triangle represents cultural hegemony and then it bifurcates into two vertices representing Socio-Religious hegemony and Patriarchal hegemony respectively. The base of the triangle represents social construction of identity. The midpoint in the baseline is directly connected to the apex leading to the question of the chickenegg paradox phenomenon of hegemony leading to identity creation or identity creation leading to hegemony.

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