'Heroic' women in the Indian literary tradition are depicted as long suffering and devoted to their husbands. Women like Sita, Draupadi, aakuntala, Savitri, and Damayanti stand as examples par excellence of femininity and have been used for thousands of years by both Indian men and women as role models of perfect womanhood. A relatively large corpus of scholarly material has been addressed to such figures and to their impact on the tradition, but little has been devoted to significant negative female characters or 'anti-heroines'.2 Perhaps the best known of these, and in a number of ways the most interesting, is the second queen of Dasaratha, Kaikeyi. She is considered by the tradition as a traitress to her husband and the 'wicked' step-mother of the god-hero Râma in the Sanskrit epic, the Vâlmiki Râmâyana. The treatment of Queen Kaikeyi is important to our understanding of Râma's actions throughout the epic, and more importantly, to our understanding of the attitudes expressed toward women in this epic, an epic that has served as a pattern for female sexuality and familial conduct to countless generations of Indians. In an attempt to shed additional light on the traditional Indian attitudes toward women, I would like to look more carefully at the maligned Queen Kaikeyi, antithesis of the devoted wife, and perhaps, to rehabilitate her as a hidden 'feminist heroine' of ancient India. The events that occur in the opening chapters of the Ayodhyâkanda of the Vâlmiki Râmâyana set the stage — structurally and psycho logically — for the remainder of the epic. Here we find Rama the hero of the epic exiled through the cruel machinations of his 'wicked' step mother Kaikeyi. The exile is tragic for Rama who, despite his stoicism, is bitter that his father, fallen victim to a mere woman, drove him from the kingdom on the eve of his coronation. Later in the closing portions of the epic, the fear that he, too, might be accused of such degrading behavior haunts Rama and when he realizes that rumors are