Empowering Girlhood Journeys: Feminist Mythic Revision in Contemporary Indian Diaspora Children’s Fiction

Abstract

There had been relatively little interest in a narrative of female individuation within mythology. Revisionist myths and legends in contemporary literaturehave thus addressed issues of women’s identity and autonomy while redesigningthe gendered spaces in these cultural narratives. The need for alternative mobility arcs within the cultural imaginary was also recognized for adolescent girls in their quest for subjectivity.This paper thus explores two works of children’s fiction, viz. Sayantani Dasgupta’s Game of Stars(2019) from the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series and Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time (2018) as coming-of-age immigrant narratives where young girls undergo heroic adventures restructuringIndian mythology and Bengali folktales. Dasgupta’s Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series intertwines intergalactic science and Bengali folktales, mostly from the Thakumar Jhuli (1907), meshing different fairy tale characters aidingthe adolescent female protagonist Kiranmala, who isa neotericgutsy counterpart of the warrior princess in Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder's fairy tale collection.At the same time, Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah fantasy adventure series celebrates the Indian heritage of Hindu mythology (particularly the Mahabharata) in the diaspora, while empowering young immigrant girls to imagine and undertake non-normative feminist voyages.