Myth, History, Nation, and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Abstract

This paper examines the intersecting registers of myth, history, nation, and cultural memory in the fiction of the Indian-American novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, with particular attention to The Palace of Illusions (2008), The Forest of Enchantments (2019), The Last Queen (2021), and Independence (2022). Reading these novels as a continuum that moves from epic retelling to historical reconstruction, the study argues that Divakaruni employs the female first-person voice as a narrative technology for revising the grand narratives of Indian civilisation. Drawing on feminist revisionist mythmaking, partition historiography, memory studies, and diaspora theory, the paper demonstrates that her heroines—Draupadi, Sita, Rani Jindan, and the Ganguly sisters—function simultaneously as characters and as custodians of collective memory. The analysis shows that myth in Divakaruni is not an escape from history but a means of interrogating it; that her historical fiction recovers voices silenced by colonial and nationalist archives; and that cultural memory, transmitted through women, becomes a mode of resistance and of imagining the nation anew. The study concludes that Divakaruni's fiction constitutes a sustained feminist counter-archive of Indian civilisational memory.