Rewriting the Epic from the Margins: Feminist Counter-Narratives, Ethical Power, and Female Subjectivity in Kavita Kane's Tara's Truce with Reference to Sita's Sister and Lanka's Princess

Feminist revisionist mythology has emerged as a powerful literary mode in contemporary Indian English fiction, challenging androcentric epic traditions and reclaiming silenced female voices. Kavita Kane’s Tara’s Truce (2023) exemplifies this trend by re-imagining the Ramayana through the perspective of Tara, the politically astute queen of Kishkindha. This paper undertakes Tara’s Truce as a feminist counter-narrative that interrogates patriarchal constructions of power, dharma, and heroism. Through comparative analysis with Kane’s earlier novels Sita’s Sister (2014) and Lanka’s Princess (2016), the study demonstrates how Kane systematically reconstructs marginal female figures as ethical agents and political thinkers. Drawing on feminist narratology, myth criticism, and gender theory, the paper argues that Kane’s mythological retellings constitute a sustained epistemological challenge to canonical epic discourse by decentralising male heroism and privileging women’s experiential knowledge.