Some books are not just retellings of earlier stories; they tweak the edges, like pulling threads to see what falls out. K. Srilata’s book Footnotes to the Mahabharata is precisely that kind of book — one that does not rewrite the epic but listens to the silences within it.
If you believe that the epic is about duty, destiny, kings, and war, Srilata’s poetry dwells in the periphery: the desires, the fears, and the voices of the women who were written into the margins — and then forgotten there.
The first among these is absence. A daughter who has not yet been born hangs over the opening lines:
“She reaches for the moon incandescent —
the daughter we will never have,
and your eyes as they follow her are liquid love—
last night’s dream tremulous as a bird wing.”
It conveys its point in a delicate manner. These lines are a metaphor for a daughter who never will exist as an independent entity. The sadness is not announced — it is felt, as in this second excerpt:
“month after month
she drowns
our daughter
the one we will never have.”
Though bright, the girl was lost, drowned, and never born. I remember Spivak asking, ‘Can anyone hear the little Spivak?’; Spivak meant that no one gives subalterns a voice. Srilata does precisely that — she amplifies what has been systematically silenced.
Nonetheless, certain voices struggle to be heard. One of the resilient ones among them is that of Alli, the Tamil mythological warrior queen. When challenged by a man who cannot conceive of a woman who simply does not want him:
“You raised this daughter of ours
to be a warrior
and now she won’t look at a man.”
That’s a deliberate refusal. In this regard, it will be instructive to recollect Judith Butler’s pioneering work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which frames gender as performance. Alli performs a gender that the epic cannot accommodate. The man’s response is predictably oblivious:
“I am yet to meet a woman immune
to my charms.
Your Alli, I am sure, is no different.”
The quiet irony here is devastating. Alli is embarrassed by the carelessness of menfolk. In the story, she is compared to all the women who must navigate a world that insists on misunderstanding them.
In many cases, silence is more powerful than words. A parrot acting as a witness is one of the most striking images:
“Even this chatterbox of a parrot
has fallen silent
and looks at me as if to ask:
‘Are you alright?'”
When things grow too serious, the women stop talking, which is a reflection of the bird’s stillness. Women are mute because their thoughts are too complex for the language available to them. The parrot’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.
These poems are brimming with longing, but not in a clichéd sense. The women discuss what they desire, without shame:
“Such words roll easily off the tongues
of men like him.
But for me who knows
the delicious rogueness of bodies,
his words are empty
as a pauper’s purse”
When speaking, the speaker prioritises the body’s knowledge over meaningless words. And then this:
“Sakhi, like an ant
that has fallen
into honey,
I drown,
even as I sip
on the sweetness
of love”
This is a kind of sob of another woman, who is soft and defenceless. And what could be more sincere than to want anything, including dangerous sweetness, without apology?
Srilata gives us the reason why these women can seek, desire, and appreciate great things. This reminds us of the laughter of Draupadi, and her refusal to be managed even by a god:
“I am no fool, Krishna.
Don’t think you can fob me off
with your tall tales!”
The god who began the battle and gave rise to the knowledge of the Gita is brought down by a woman who refuses to be appeased. She wants explanations, not mythology. This is Srilata’s great feminist project — and it sits alongside works like The Penelopiad as a deliberate counter-narrative.
These speakers exercise their right to reject dominant narratives. From the title alone, the location of these women is clear: in Mahabharata, they are footnotes. And Srilata weaponises that word:
“Are we but footnotes in the war?
footnote:
an addition
a piece of information printed
at the bottom of a page,
also, a thing that is additional,
less important or relatively subordinate.”
Women in the Mahabharata are ancillary, hypothetical, and inconsequential. However, Srilata skilfully uses the footnotes to change everything — the margin becomes the centre. The definition of “footnote” becomes an indictment.
Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay Lives of the Obscure that women’s lives are absent from history, but that in the “lives of the obscure we find flashes of the truth.” That is exactly what Srilata’s poems are: flashes.
“On the morning they left,
much was said
but I had ears
only for that one word
of Bhima’s:
‘Beloved.'”
In the above lines, struggle, obligation, and fate are the key themes. Here, love is a single, modest, and genuine word. This is what is lost in the grand narrative — the tenderness, the specific word that mattered.
There is also a lot of irony in it. One woman says:
“By all means, old man,
buy Pandu another wife.
A new field yields nothing
when ploughed with the same old
broken plough.”
Men are being taught that women are fields. The joke is bitter. Feminist irony exposes patriarchy’s sexist nature by employing its own concepts and turning them back on itself.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the true story lies in the relationships between women, hidden beneath. As Woolf suggested in A Room of One’s Own, the unwritten story is often the most important one. Srilata accomplishes this precise goal by incorporating ‘the friend’ into the Mahabharata. These poems don’t downplay the subsequent events:
“After the war is done and dusted,
they come to me, Kunti’s five,
and I bless them as an elder should.”
In retrospect, how terrible is that? After all the devastation, women are supposed to be the ones who bless, heal, and care. They can only survive by doing what they always did — holding things together.
While Footnotes… is unique, it also echoes other feminist myth-reworkings. Srilata makes use of a range of voices. She does not choose a single protagonist but gives space to many — mothers, daughters, warriors, lovers, friends. In this context, Footnotes… is placed among other feminist mythopoetic works, like Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, and Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni. It belongs in that company.
To put it together, Srilata’s book acts as a reminder to listen to the continuously present sighs, whispers, cries, and silences. Since they are always there — in the Mahabharata, in the world, in the margins of every story ever told. Footnotes to the Mahabharata insists that we stop and listen.
