Narrating the Untold and Resurrecting the Unheard Voices in Karthika Nair's Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata

Reconfiguring and reimagining mythological narratives have become a new literary discipline amongst contemporary Indian writers and poets. They endeavour to underscore those incidents and characters who have been either placed at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder or been completely swept under the carpet. Writers like Amish Tripathi, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mahasweta Devi, Kavita Kané, Meena Kandasamy, Ranu Uniyal, Devdutt Patnaik, Ami Ganatra, to name a few, have subverted the conventional representation of the mythological figures bringing them in a new light and rendering voices of their own either reading them through feminist lens or through dismantling the grand narratives of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. Karthika Nair, a French-Indian poet, strives to dissect the dominant narratives of the Mahabharata to pave the way for individual narratives of the nameless, voiceless, and marginalized figures in her highly distinguished volume, titled "Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata.” (2015) She also reconceptualizes the perspectives on war, violence, and memory through multiple unheard figures of the Mahabharata. This research paper intends to examine Karthika Nair's aforementioned assemblage of verses and prose to unleash an entirely fresh perception of the minor, unidentified characters and the unheard voices of the Mahabharata through their narratives.