Beyond the Hero: Deconstructing Karna through Uruvi’s Lens in Kavitha Kane’s Karna’s Wife – The Outcast Queen

Abstract
Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen (2013) presents a revisionist retelling of the Mahabharata through the eyes of Uruvi, Karna's fictional wife. While Karna has traditionally been celebrated as a tragic anti-hero, Kane shifts the epic’s gaze to a neglected female voice, thus dismantling patriarchal heroism and reconfiguring epic subjectivity. Uruvi’s perspective challenges Karna’s loyalty, interrogates his complicity in moral compromises, and foregrounds the silenced emotional and ethical struggles of women in the epic. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and subaltern studies, this paper argues that Uruvi is not
merely a companion to Karna but a narrative agent who destabilises the idealisation of epic heroism. Through a close reading of Kane’s novel, alongside secondary feminist critiques of myth, this article explores how Kane humanises Karna, critiques epic morality, and inserts feminine dissent into India’s cultural memory.

Keywords: Kavita Kane, Karna, Uruvi, Feminist retelling, Mahabharata, Hero deconstruction, Subaltern voice, Myth and gender.