Beyond the Hero’s Shadow: Reclaiming Agency in Kavita Kané’s Karna’s Wife and Sita’s Sister

Abstract
Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana have shaped cultural memory for centuries, but they often privilege the stories of men while silencing women. Female figures are remembered only in relation to their roles as wives, sisters, or mothers, and their inner subjectivity remains unarticulated. Kavita Kane, a contemporary writer of mythological fiction, seeks to correct this imbalance by rewriting epics from the perspectives of women historically relegated to the margins. Her novels Karna’s Wife: The Outcast Queen (2013) and Sita’s Sister (2014) recast the narratives of Uruvi and Urmila, respectively, offering them narrative authority and reclaiming their agency. Uruvi’s defiance in marrying Karna and her moral questioning of the Mahabharata’s violent order, alongside Urmila’s endurance and silent strength during Lakshmana’s exile in the Ramayana, reveal women as agents of resilience, resistance, and choice. This paper argues that Kane’s works destabilise patriarchal epic hierarchies by shifting the epic gaze and foregrounding female subjectivity, thereby transforming mythology into a site of feminist reclamation.

Keywords: Kavita Kane, Mythological Fiction, Feminist Retelling, Uruvi, Urmila, Women’s Agency, Epic Reinterpretation