Kaikeyi

by Vaishnavi Patel

The Ramayana itself is a sprawling epic with thousands and thousands of verses, and I didn’t want to retread its ground. By focusing on one person and one specific set of events within that person’s life, I’ve kept Kaikeyi more cabined.

While Kaikeyi feels different from the Ramayana, the critiques in it are meant to make us think about what messages these religious stories are sending so that we can more consciously consume these myths.

Kaikeyi has similarities to these novels in that they all take a mythic woman who has not always been looked upon kindly and retell the story from her perspective.

But I do also think that Kaikeyi is different from other popular retellings in some ways, because it is reinterpreting a story from a religion that’s still very widely practiced and has great modern weight. The Ramayana is an important part of Hinduism, so Kaikeyi is set in what many people believe to be our past.