Volume VI Special Issue VI September 2026

Name of Author : Dr. Nisha Thomji Varghese

Title of the paper : Voices without Subversion: Compensatory Feminism and the Limits of Agency in The Palace of Illusions and Karnas Wife: The Outcasts Queen

Abstract: Chitra Banerjee Divakarunis The Palace of Illusions 2008 and Kavita Kanes Karnas Wife The Outcasts Queen 2013 represent a significant strand of contemporary Indian English fiction that relocates the Mahabharata within a female consciousness. Received criticism has read both novels as feminist reclamations, crediting them with granting Draupadi and Uruvi the agency, interiority, and voice systematically denied by the Sanskrit source. The present article argues that such evaluations, though accurate at the level of narration, are insufficient both novels grant their heroines an affective and discursive presence while leaving intact every structurally decisive outcome of the source myth the disrobing, the war, the marriages, the deaths, and the caste hierarchies that organise the narratives world. Drawing on Helene Cixouss ecriture feminine, Judith Butlers theory of performativity, Julia Kristevas distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic, bell hookss critique of liberal feminist recuperation, and Gayatri Spivaks analysis of the subaltern subject, the article proposes the concept of compensatory feminism to name a narrative mode in which emotional redress is offered without structural revision. Close readings of key episodes in both novels demonstrate that the heroines interiority functions as what Sara Ahmed terms an affective economy sympathy circulates and accumulates around scenes of female suffering without converting that circulation into altered plot outcomes. The article concludes by reflecting on what a non compensatory revision of the epic feminine might require.

Keywords : compensatory feminism, ecriture feminine, performativity, affective economy, caste and gender

DOI :

Page Number : 27-33