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Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra undertakes a critical revision of the Mahabharata by foregrounding the lived experiences of women and marginalized communities rendered invisible sites of traditional epic narratives. Moving beyond the canonical celebration of dharma and royal heroism, the collection reconstructs the post-war world as a space of systemic violence, caste oppression, and subaltern resilience. This study applies postcolonial and subaltern theoretical frameworks that particularly draw insights from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of Western feminist universalism to analyze how Devi’s narratives disrupt dominant historiography and reconfigure mythic authority. The paper demonstrates how subaltern voices articulate alternative ethical paradigms that contest patriarchal power, caste hierarchies, and necropolitical structures embedded in the epic tradition.
Ashley Mejolsha. “From Epic Glory to Subaltern Ethics: Rewriting Myth, Memory, and Marginality in Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 483–500. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.30.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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