Direction () : Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.
When it comes to English books, it is authors like Kavita Kané, Utkarsh Patel, and, more recently, Saiswaroopa Iyer, who seem to have passionately taken up the cause of feminist revisionist mythology.
Kané has written a string of books over the years that are determinedly feminist in nature. She picks the most unusual characters (sometimes even creates them!) to tell her readers what-may-have-been. Her first was titled Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen (2014), which told the story of Karna through his (fictional) wife, Uruvi.
It is interesting that Kané chose to introduce an entirely new character to tell Karna’s story in the space of mythological fiction. The Mahabharata speaks of no one called Uruvi. Karna is married to Vrushali, Duryodhana’s charioteer’s sister, and to another woman named Supriya. Both are blink-and-miss characters, with little to say or do in the epic. But in Kané’s re-imagined world, Karna’s second wife is Uruvi. She is a woman passionately in love with her husband and plays an active role in his unfolding narrative.
Here, we deal with not one but two subaltern voices – of the woman and of the low caste. Kane’s inspiration for this name seems to have come from some references in later Tamil literature, where Karna’s wife is named Ponnaruvi. However, it is conjectured that Ponnaruvi was an epithet for either Vrushali or Supriya or both. Kané’s next was Sita’s Sister (2014), where she constructed the life and character of the little-known wife of Lakshmana, Urmila. The Ramayana takes scant notice of her, and when it does, consigns her to what is essentially a 14-year long coma. But Kané imagined her as a living, breathing heroine who holds the fort when everything is crumbling and everyone important has left.