Between Reverence and Resistance: Mythological Women, Cultural Memory and Feminist Reinterpretation

Abstract

Mythological women are a paradoxical and a lasting presence in the cultural imagination of India. They are held in respect as expressions of moral rectitude, religion, sacrifice and manliness - and also as examples of deeply gendered conflicts and ideologies that created and maintained the stories that shaped them. The characters like Sita, Draupadi, Kunti, Gandhari and Mandodari have left the epic world and become strong part of the Indian cultural memory as a result of many centuries of its transmission through epics, rituals and collective memories. But their meanings are not carved in stone and not agreed to by all. This paper reflects on how mythological women and cultural memory are in relationship to one another, how they can be re-interpreted in a feminist way and how they are not a passive repository of inherited traditions, but an active space of negotiation, contestation and renewal. Cultural memory is the ability of a society to preserve and transmit together, in texts, traditions and symbolisms, its collective accounts, values and identities thus keeping the past alive in the present. The research draws on feminist criticism, cultural memory studies and mythological hermeneutics to examine the manner in which contemporary reinterpretations is revisiting the canonized representations of epic women so as to bring the voices of the marginalized to the fore, to resist the patriarchal assumptions, and foreground an alternative form of agency for women. This study investigates the question, “How does the reinterpretation of mythological women, from a feminist perspective, recalibrate cultural memory and question cultural mythological assumptions based on the gender? The paper employs both textual and interpretive analysis of primary female characters from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to explore how women have been deconstructed in literature, culture, and scholarship as idealized archetypes and reconstructed as layered, intricate experiences that raise issues of identity, autonomy, justice, and power. The paper also holds that the significance of mythological women is their extraordinary potential to provide new meanings in different historical and cultural context. The feminist re-readings of the text do not to reject tradition or simply celebrate it, but rather open extent to historic and critical conversation touching the inherited myths, turning them into the space of reflection, criticism, resistance. Through the shifting roles of these feminine in the evolution of sacred tales, the researcher has attempted to show how mythology helps to mold and themselves be molded by the changing conceptions of gender. Overall, the paper suggests that mythological women occupy a space of fertility between reverence and resistance, memory and reinterpretation, in which to reimagine the woman subject imaginary in a traditional and modern context. The results add to the broader discussion of gender, cultural identity and narrative authority, and also underscore the ongoing relevance in the contemporary day of day discourse about the myth..