Trading the Slippery Ground: Blurring lines of Gender Identities in Devdutt Pattanaik's ‘The Pregnant King’

Abstract

Post-millennial Indian English fiction witnessed a marked rise in thenovels inspired by Indian mythology. A sudden spurt of mythologicalfiction underlines the changing trends in the themes, structures andgenres of fiction in Indian literature. Writers like Amish Tripathi, Devdutt Pattanaik, Anand Neelkantan, Ashwin Sanghi, Rajiv Menon, KrishnaUdayshankar, Sharath Komarraju, Kavita Kane and few more haveattracted the attention of readers especially, the younger generation. Themajority of writers mentioned above have tried to liberate marginalisedvoices suppressed by a dominant discourse which tried to subjugateLGBTQ communities.The present paper scrutinises Devduatt Pattanaik's novel, ‘The Pregnant King’ (2008) in light of the 'power dynamics'. It also studies the genderbaseddiscrimination and possible reasons behind it.