The Queerness in Shikhandi: Concerning Devdutt Pattanaik’s Shikhandi and Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You

Abstract

Queer theory is a realm of critical theory that developed within/in the early 1990s, out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Shikhandi is an important character in the Mahabharata. Hindu tales have many references to queerness; one among them is the story of Shikhandi, a woman who became a man. The gender of Shikhandi is a controversial subject, in epics especially in Mahabharata, men are considered as great warriors, full of masculinity and resilience. But while approaching the text from a postmodernist perspective, we can analyze the gender of Shikhandi as the ‘other gender’, Mahabharata, which means great India have much popularity in India, as Homer’s poems over the Greeks. This paper seeks to examine, how the character of Shikhandi in Mahabharata,who is neglected in the society, the queerness in Shikhandi which is flexible and fluid made him/her a remarkable character in the great epic.