Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel
To Ajji, Aai, and Ananya, three generations of strong women
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
The seeds of Kaikeyi were planted seventeen years ago in a discussion between my mother and my grandmother. Each summer, my grandmother would tell my sister and me stories, passing down myths and legends centered around Hindu gods and heroes that she herself had grown up hearing. One particular summer, she told us the story of how the noble prince Rama was exiled by his jealous stepmother Kaikeyi, who was convinced to banish him by her wicked servant Manthara. At this, my mother stepped in to add that Kaikeyi had actually helped Rama. Without Kaikeyi, my mother pointed out, Rama would have never achieved his destiny by slaying the demon king Ravana, his main adversary in the Ramayana. My grandmother disagreed, arguing that it was cruel to exile your child, no matter the circumstance.
And then we moved on. But their minor dispute stuck with me for years, and I would periodically search for stories told from or studying Kaikeyi’s perspective to make sense of the contradiction. I never found them. Eventually, I decided to write my own. I wanted to give Kaikeyi a chance to explain her actions and explore what might have caused a celebrated warrior and beloved queen to tear her family apart. I hope that Kaikeyi gives voice not just to its titular character but to the many women who populate the world of the Ramayana and have rich and worthy lives of their own.
As a primary text, I used the Ralph T. H. Griffith English translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana, available online through Project Gutenberg. Although there are many Sanskrit versions of the Ramayana, Valmiki’s Ramayana is considered the original text—but even Valmiki’s epic was born of several antecedent stories. Beyond the Sanskrit epics, there exist many other versions in a multitude of languages across South, Southeast, and East Asia.
Each of the surviving iterations of the Ramayana has a slightly different focus or purported author. Readers familiar with Valmiki’s Ramayana may notice in Kaikeyi unfamiliar variations of the story, some of which have been inspired by these alternate tellings. For example, in some versions, including the Adbhuta Ramayana and the Jain Ramayana, Ravana is in fact Sita’s birth father. The idea of Ravana as a tragic or misunderstood figure who may not be purely evil is present in many Southeast Asian tellings. And some elements that may feel new, such as Dasharath’s promise that Kaikeyi’s son will become king, are in fact present in Valmiki’s Ramayana—but they are not often included in popular adaptations or dinner table recitations.
Of course, there are deviations from the Ramayana that are my own invention for Kaikeyi. There are too many to concisely name, but among the more important ones stand the presence of Ahalya’s husband as Rama’s tutor and Bharata agreeing to take the throne during Rama’s exile. And Kaikeyi’s magic and aspects of her story, including her journey to Janasthana and confrontation with Bhandasura, are my own imaginings, as much of her life is simply a blank space in the original epic. This book does not strive to be an exact retelling of any version of the Ramayana—it is Kaikeyi’s story, and thus it is its own story.
Kaikeyi also does not seek to replicate the world, technology, or customs of any exact time period or civilization in South Asia. Instead, it draws on aspects of culture and science from across thousands of years of ancient Indian history, primarily before 1 BCE. As but one example, it borrows elements of political structure and governance from Patrick Olivelle’s translation of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, an ancient political science text purportedly written by the teacher of Chandragupta Maurya. While it would be impossible to name here every source consulted to determine, for example, the build of chariots or the type of windows or the varieties of court entertainment in ancient India, I owe a great debt to scholars of ancient civilization. Of course, creative choices have also been made in fashioning Kaikeyi’s world—for example, paper was not in common use in ancient India, but is present in the narrative.
For those interested in learning more about the Ramayana’s evolution and breadth across its many tellings, I found A. K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” an essay in The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan edited by Vinay Dharwadker, absolutely invaluable. Ramanujan’s essay can also be found in Many Rāmāyaas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, a collection of essays edited by Paula Richman. I highly recommend this collection as a whole—in particular, I drew inspiration from stories recounted in Velcheru Narayana Rao’s essay, A Ramayana of Their Own: Women’s Oral Tradition in Telugu. The Rāmāyaa Revisited, a collection of essays edited by Mandakranta Bose, was also of particular use to me in thinking about the portrayal of gender and ethics in the Ramayana.