LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 26:2 February 2026
ISSN 1930-2940

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Recovering the Unspoken: Urmila and Narrative Silence in Kavita Kane's Sita's Sister

Mrs. K. Jayabharathi and
Dr. R. Kumarabalaji

Abstract

This study revisits the marginalised figure of Urmila—who endures fourteen years of separation during her husband’s exile—through the lens of narrative silence and gendered exclusion in Indian epic traditions. In Kavita Kane's Sita's Sister, Urmila, largely eclipsed within canonical Ramayana narratives, is brought to the centre of narrative and critical attention. While epic traditions privilege masculine action, exile, and heroism, women's emotional endurance and ethical labour remain largely unrecorded. Kane’s retelling intervenes in this narrative hierarchy by foregrounding Urmila's interior life, ethical reflection, and sustained endurance as meaningful forms of agency. Drawing on feminist criticism and postcolonial perspectives, particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's interrogation of silencing, this paper examines how dominant narrative structures marginalise women while claiming to represent them. Through close textual analysis, the study argues that Urmila's articulation in Sita's Sister constitutes a mediated recovery of suppressed subjectivity rather than a purely modern or anachronistic reimagining. By re-signifying silence as a historically produced narrative condition, the paper demonstrates how feminist retellings reclaim ethical and narrative space for marginalised women within Indian epic traditions.

Keywords:Kavita Kane, Urmila, Ramayana retellings, feminist criticism, narrative silence, Indian mythology

Introduction

Kavita Kane's Sita's Sister intervenes in the Ramayana tradition by foregrounding Urmila, a figure whose prolonged absence from the epic's narrative centre reveals the gendered logic of canonical storytelling. Across authoritative tellings of the Ramayana, women's experiences are selectively narrated, with priority accorded to masculine action, exile, and heroism, while female endurance remains largely unrecorded. This pattern is evident in canonical versions such as Valmiki's Ramayana and Kamban's Iramavataram, where Urmila appears only fleetingly and without narrative access to her emotional or ethical labour. Her silence in these texts is not incidental but structurally produced through epic conventions that privilege public action over private endurance.

By re-centring Urmila, Kane's retelling exposes how patriarchal narrative authority renders certain forms of suffering and ethical labour invisible. Sita's Sister does not merely supplement the epic with an omitted character; rather, it reconfigures narrative focus by treating Urmila's waiting, restraint, and interior conflict as ethically significant forms of experience. In doing so, the novel makes legible what canonical tellings systematically exclude. Urmila's articulation emerges not as a rupture from tradition but as a mediated recovery of suppressed subjectivity, revealing how epic silence functions as a mechanism of gendered marginalisation rather than as an inherent feminine virtue.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mrs. K. Jayabharathi
Research Scholar (F.T)
Department of Languages
Periyar Maniammai Institute of Science and Technology (Deemed to be University)
Vallam, Thanjavur-613403.
Jayabharathi959@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3091-0523
&
Dr. R.Kumarabalaji
Assistant Professor
Department of Languages
Periyar Maniammai Institute of Science and Technology (Deemed to be University)
Vallam, Thanjavur-613403.
kumarabalaji@pmu.edu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3744-0988

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