Analysis Of With The Missing Queen By Samhita Arni

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The rakshasis, interestingly, are short-haired and warrior-like, though not huge and grotesque of the ACK variety. Text and image here however, blend very well and become a coherent narrative within a clear narrative frame .. Like other graphic novels, the result here is that of a well-concerted joint effort, unlike the other book, in which the Patua artist first painted her scrolls and then handed it over to the writer to flesh it out.

A cheerful attitude of sacrifice and submission characterises Sita. Here, Sita’s story is less tragic and more inspiring, and thus the question of blame or critique hardly arises. She herself holds in check her radical qualities, as she repeatedly puts her duties as a queen before her rights as a wife. Interestingly, …show more content…

The format of the book is that of a speculative mythology thriller based in contemporary Ayodhya, Mithila and Lanka. It has been almost a decade since Sita has mysteriously disappeared from Ayodhya, leaving it an intolerably repressive kingdom, where dark secrets lie beneath the veneer of the glorious ‘Ayodhya Shining’. Peppered with many parallels to contemporary socio-political conditions in India, the book makes intelligent comments about vital issues like land dispossession, a biased media, the government-corporate nexus, terrorism, state surveillance, intolerance, manipulation of ‘history’ and of course, misogyny. Amidst all this, our unnamed narrator journalist develops an obsession for searching for Sita which becomes a metaphorical journey for hunting out the truth. Along the way, she comes across rebels and the misrepresented, like Kaikeyi, Shoorpanakha and Sam Boo Kha, who shed very different light on the official version of Ayodhya’s story, though we are also indirectly cautioned against taking all their words at face value. An elderly, decrepit Kaikeyi in the prologue to the novel remarks, “…me, Kausalya, Sita—all we’ll ever be are villains or footnotes in history textbooks” (19). To redeem such women, the novel carries the testimonies of several of them, forging an unlikely bond between them through a story that otherwise thrusts them apart. Thus, a feel-good story slowly unravels to reveal its cracks and fissures until a new one emerges, bitter but more

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