Negotiating Myth and Modernity: A Reading of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions

Abstract

With the rise of the third wave of Feminism, Écriture feminine is also becoming popular as people find it interesting to know the women from a woman's perspective. So, from the last decade of the twentieth century an Indian-born- American writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni came with the idea to give voices to female characters in her novels like The Mistress of Spices (1997), Sister of My Heart (1999), The Palace of Illusions (2008) and many more. She aims at writing fiction which almost every woman can relate to. The voices which the patriarchal society has suppressed throughout the different ages now are being told by a woman for the women who still silently performing the role of a ‘woman’ in age-old stereotypical terms.