Puja S., Grief, Anger, and In-between

Śurpaṇakhā from the Rāmāyaṇa, though she plays a pivotal role in the epic, is often neglected in the main discourse. The character’s exclusion from the central narrative typically positions her as the “other” and reduces her to a flat, villainous archetype. To bring her from the margins to the center, it is crucial to reimagine and reinterpret her narrative in order to reclaim her subjectivity. Thus, this paper proposes revising Śurpaṇakhā in Poile Sengupta’s play, Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni, through the lens of the rasa-bhāva theory. It moves beyond the aesthetics to view rasa as a transformative medium, shaping the character’s experiences. It investigates the factors that marginalize Śurpaṇakhā in the traditional narrative and how they instigate dominant sthāyibhāvas like śoka (grief) and krodha (anger), which, respectively, evoke karuṇa rasa and raudra rasa, shaping the character’s internal conflicts and agency. By redefining her emotional complexity, this study challenges traditional Rāmāyaṇa narratives and offers new perspectives on the emotional experience of marginalized voices.