The ‘Other’ side of the Narrative: A Postcolonial Reading of Anand Neelakantan’s “Valmiki’s Women”

Duddupudi Vidya Srivani; TATA K.V. SRINIVASA RAO

The ‘Other’ side of the Narrative: A Postcolonial Reading of Anand Neelakantan’s “Valmiki’s Women”

Author(s)	Ms. Duddupudi Vidya Srivani, Dr. TATA K.V. SRINIVASA RAO
Country	India
Abstract	Abstract: It is said that Valmiki’s poetic skills are induced from the pathetic death of a male krouncha bird which is killed by a hunter. The agony of its female mate evokes a strong sense of Karuna Rasa in him and he utters a poem out of it. Then he meets Maharshi Narada and hears the story of Ram eventually, he writes ‘the Ramayana’. The desire to write about an exemplary man, Ram, who defeats the epitome of all the evil, Ravan is also a kind of hidden pathos which hits the cruel nature of the hunter. But, if he had given a chance to see the tragedy from an-‘other’ perspective, from the hunters perspective, he would have written the story differently. Especially, the disliked and defamed women characters of the narrative might have been portrayed definitely in a different way. Anand Neelakantan, one of the leading modern mythological fictionist, tries to recreate the untold tales of such women using the narrative gap left by Valmiki in the Ramayana through his “Valmiki’s Women”. This paper aims to study the concept of ‘other’ in the narrative from the perspectives of post-colonial theory and how the key concepts of the post-colonial theory like counter-discourse and orientalism can be observed in this work of Anand Neelakantan.
Keywords	Key Words: Other, counter discourse, postcolonial, savage, civilized, orient-occident, colonizer-colonized, grand narrative, deconstruct, perspective.
Published In	Volume 16, Issue 4, October-December 2025
Published On	2025-10-04

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The ‘Other’ side of the Narrative: A Postcolonial Reading of Anand Neelakantan’s “Valmiki’s Women”

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