From Canon to Counter-Canon: Reimagining Indian Mythology through Marginal Voices in Contemporary Fiction

Indian mythology has traditionally circulated through powerful canonical narratives in which kings, gods, warriors and idealized figures occupy the centre of cultural memory. Yet the apparent stability of these narratives conceals multiple silenced perspectives: women whose lives are narrated through patriarchal frameworks, communities positioned outside dominant social structures, and characters whose identities have been defined by victorious or socially privileged narrators. Contemporary Indian fiction increasingly challenges this hierarchy by transforming mythological retelling into an act of narrative reclamation. This article examines how selected contemporary fictional works Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) and The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Anand Neelakantan’s Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2012) and the broader literary afterlife of Ekalavya’s construct a movement from canonical narration towards a counter-canon. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist literary criticism, Bakhtinian dialogism and subaltern perspectives, the study employs qualitative close reading and comparative textual analysis. It argues that contemporary mythological fiction does not simply modernize ancient stories; it contests the authority to determine whose experiences constitute cultural knowledge. Draupadi, Sita, Ravana and Ekalavya’s consequently become sites through which gender, caste, power, memory and identity are renegotiated. The article proposes that counter canonical mythology should be understood not as the rejection of tradition but as a dialogic expansion of it, enabling Indian fiction to transform inherited narratives into contested and plural cultural spaces.