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@article{206940,
        author = {Kiran Pandey and Dr. Jyoti Singh},
        title = {Deconstructing the “Ideal Woman”: Sita, Kaikeyi, and Tara through a Contemporary Feminist Lens},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {2},
        pages = {4030-4035},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=206940},
        abstract = {This paper undertakes a deconstructive feminist reading of three women from the Valmiki Ramayana — Sita, Kaikeyi, and Tara — whose portrayals have long anchored a normative, patriarchal template of Indian womanhood organised around chastity, obedience, and self-effacement. Reading the source epic against contemporary literary retellings, including Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Samhita Arni's Sita's Ramayana (2011), and Vaishnavi Patel's Kaikeyi (2022), the study argues that these retellings do not merely humanise mythic women but actively contest the ideological function of the “ideal woman” archetype itself. Drawing on Adrienne Rich's (1972) concept of revisionist mythmaking, Judith Butler's (1990) theory of gender performativity, and postcolonial feminist critique (Mohanty, 1988; Spivak, 1988), the paper pursues three objectives: first, to examine how Sita, Kaikeyi, and Tara are constructed within the patriarchal ideal-woman framework; second, to analyse how contemporary feminist retellings deconstruct and reclaim these figures through narrative voice and agency; and third, to evaluate the ideological implications of this deconstruction for contemporary feminist literary discourse. The paper concludes that these retellings collectively dismantle the singular, sacrificial ideal in favour of a plural, contested, and historically situated model of womanhood.},
        keywords = {Ramayana, feminist mythmaking, Sita, Kaikeyi, Tara, revisionist retelling, Indian feminist literary criticism},
        month = {July},
        }