Title: Footnotes to the Mahabharata
Author K. Srilata
Publisher: Westland Books
Year of Publication: 2025
Seamstressing with a Woman’s Wise Needle: K. Srilata’s Footnotes to the Mahabharata
In the male-centric epic tradition of valour, heroism, community, war, and patriarchal models of masculinity, women have largely remained footnotes. Even when women are primary and integral to the plot, they have been treated as secondary figures, the vital business of deciding not just the affairs of history but the course of the lives of these women being naturally assumed by men.
In India, in particular, the mythological machinery has always weighed rather heavily against women. Women conceived, etched and narrated by men in the ancient past have been repeatedly held up to us as definitive models of Indian womanhood. Herein lies the danger not only of a partial and restricted viewpoint but also that of reading radically out of context, and forcing an unjust past upon a present that has altered unrecognizably. An interrogation and retelling of myths is, therefore, epistemologically vital in order to assess the place of the past in the present and to offer it its due in terms of historical accuracy, narrative ideology, and social justice.
To be erased from a narrative is one injustice, to have been radically misrepresented in it is another, and to have narratives pinned upon cultural memory in unalterable ways is yet another. K. Srilata’s Footnotes to the Mahabharata addresses all these feminist issues of narrative injustice by weaving together self-narratives of five important women from the Mahabharata whose characters in the original epic have been flattened to such an extent that in much of gender discourse they have continued to make their appearance as stereotypes – fixed in their behaviour and interpretation.
In the first poem of the collection titled ‘In Ink Invisible’, Srilata, in the epic convention of the Invocation, invokes the muse of absence, of invisibility, and erasure that offers her a feminist entry into this genre:
What of the voices Vyasa unheard,
Vaisampayana and Ugrashrava unrecited,
And Janamejaya unknew?
What of the upaparvas skipped over,
the ones Ganesha never wrote,
the ones in ink invisible?
It is important to politically analyse the cultural privilege associated with the fact of voice and voicing, and the power dynamics at work in any act of narration. Legitimizing its foray into the grand epic, Footnotes to the Mahabharata proceeds to conjure stories of the epic’s five largely silent women – Alli, Hidimba Draupadi, Gandhari, and Kunti. This, as one will realize, is a rare cohort for Alli appears only in the Tamil version of the Mahabharata and Hidimba is largely left out of its various retellings.
Srilata, however, does not claim to have accomplished this feat alone, for animating her imagination, empathy, and creative meditations she directs attentions to her various ‘source texts’: Vyasa’s Mahabharata certainly but also, its powerful retellings by A.K. Perumal, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Pratibha Ray, Irawati Karve, S.L. Bhyrappa, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. This makes the text an intense act of listening, thinking and feeling as Srilata resurrects her mythical women out of the literary echoes of the past and affords them a fresh opportunity to revisit their stories, decisions, and fates.
Keeping with the tradition of the dramatic monologue and the Tamil Sangam poems, Srilata introduces, in most poems, the convention of a listener—a female confidante or sakhi who not only offers an intimate communicative base for a cathartic conversation to take place but whose intimacy with the speaker affords an interesting narrative opportunity–that of taking the story further back in time and offering the vantage point for a fuller view into what has transpired. Also, by shifting, in some poems, the speaker between the protagonist and her confidante, Srilata succeeds in harnessing more (than five) women’s voices in her attempt to forge a feminist sisterhood beyond class and caste. Most importantly, in exchanging confidences as woman-to-woman, these narratives draw the legitimacy to speak with emotional urgency and in a shared register of longing and irony.
“Moving away from Western poetry-titling practices,” writes Srilata in her introduction to the book, “I have drawn on the titling tradition of Tamil Sangam Agananuru and Purananuru poetry, in which titles declare upfront who is speaking to whom.” This format of titling offers a deep dramatic shade to the poetic sequences, making way for clarity of context and also, a certain narrative coherence. One notes, even from the titles, that all the four women-protagonists in the book apart from Hidimbi, are granted sakhis to recount their pain and express their angst. A lone Hidimbi, caught between war, ethnicity, gender, and codes of cultural il/legitimacy remains sans compassion or community throughout, speaking either to her son Ghatotkach or to the void, her isolation epically marked out for posterity. In the semi-titular, one-lined and most poignant poem of the collection ‘Says Hidimbi to Herself’, Hidimbi says, “Are we but footnotes in the war?”
Just like Hidimbi is a victim of ethnic discrimination, the other women, also, have their own personal narratives of pain. In Alli is highlighted the issue of the price of female autonomy which in a patriarchal society, is inevitably punished by rape—the occupation of a woman’s body by force rather than by consent. Alli, little-known outside of the Tamil version of the epic, is brought up by her father like a warrior and though she succeeds in defending her kingdom in battle, she loses to the larger gender war that requires a woman to belong to a man and must be punitively violated for belonging to herself. There is domestic abuse—physical and emotional–in the case of Draupadi, not just in the famed courtroom scene but in the everyday violence of living with “my time and my heart/carved in five” (Srilata masterly ends her Draupadi sequence not with Krishna’s famed rescue of her honour but with Draupadi’s alienation from her own body), the conjugal fraud of being married without her knowledge to a blind man in the case of Gandhari, and reproductive in/justice in the case of Kunti, urged by her impotent husband, Pandu, to “sleep with a Deva if that’s what it takes/but give me a son”.
These, however, are not the only issues these protagonists and their narratives raise. There is the continuous mandate to give of themselves as women in some form or the other – as duty, service, obedience or sacrifice. Hidimba is married to Bhim only on the contract that she will have to return to the forest if she bears a child. Srilata portrays her with great poignancy as a single mother, placating her child for being fatherless and teaching him to take glory in an absent father. This is, however, not all, for Hidimba’s story ends with not just raising a child but burying him all alone, a collateral damage in the battle of Kurukshetra, but undeserving of the farewell of a warrior because he was a “forest-dweller” and had “the nature of a demon”.
Footnotes succeeds in seamlessly fusing the narrative modes of the epic with the poignancy of the lyric and in valorously inserting a feminist ethics in historical discourse. Without raising a rant or an accusation, it speaks with the confidence of facts, lived experience, and retrospective clarity. Neither angry nor regretful, Srilata’s women do not set out to be belatedly defiant or retributive, to settle scores or to be heard. They emerge out of history for companionship, to end their isolation, to enable themselves to think clearly, and to be seen for who they think they are.
There is a tenderness to these poems that succeeds in softening the harsh business of the Mahabharata, directing our attention to the youthful stream-tributaries that its mighty women might have been and filling us with the excitement of drawing them out, and knowing them anew. There is no feminist manual in these poetic sequences, no raising of banners or ideologies. Unique to Srilata’s poetic retelling is her ability to reveal these women in delicate strokes that unfetter them from fixed narrative and cultural configurations. Evoking them in the tender half-light between youth and maturity, beauty and ripeness, and subjectivity and ethics, Footnotes to the Mahabharata is a profound example of how we inhabit stories and are, in turn, inhabited by them.
The narrative thread that holds this collection is strong, taut, and as it vibrates in its intensity, it generates strong transverse waves of empathy and poetic pleasure. Srilata writes with an aching lyricism, a lilt that captures the cadence of Tamil Sangam poetry and the polish of contemporary English idiom. Her lines hold together the dramatic tension of a scene without letting go of the intensity of emotion or the musicality of language. The economy of these poems is not just a matter of brevity or verbal compression. Their candour, subtlety and emotional depth contribute to the sharp, searing quality of their expression, whether in joy or grief.
Footnotes to the Mahabharata is not just another one-way retelling of the grand epic. With its judicious imbibing of multiple narrative models and its keen sense of intertextuality, it keeps alive the semantic density of the epic while at the same time uncovering a deep stirring and angst for the untold. As its five poetic sequencessucceed in establishing, these are not narratives of personal loss. These are narratives of mis-seeing, mis-knowing and misunderstanding that are the cause of our collective cultural lamentation. To know these women as texts rather than as footnotes is an act of historical revision, of cultural repair and renewal, and of narrative seam-stressing with a woman’s wise needle, which as, readers will agree, is exactly what Srilata does. What makes the book an unforgettable read is to confront strong resonances between yesterday and today, there and here, they and we so that these women call out to us not in unrecognizable voices from a strange place and but from the midst of our own hearts and with our own defiance, helplessness, anger, resignation and sorrow.
