Reimagining Gender beyond the Body a Posthumanist Reading of Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King
Author : Disha Tripathi
Abstract :
Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King (HarperCollins 2008) retells the story of King Yuvanashva who unknowingly impregnated himself, as narrated in the Mahabharata, to challenge traditional gender binaries via a Posthumanist viewpoint. “The image of the male body as a fluid location for motherhood, fatherhood and cosmic androgyny antithetical to humanist ideals of stable identity, sex and dharma— (Ardhanarisvara like) is what has been disrupted by the novel. It also demonstrates, drawing on posthumanism’s focus on interconnected, composite subjectivities and the deconstruction of norms in queer theory as well as mythological elements from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata, that gender is a spectrum that goes beyond biology. Yuvanashva’s movement from a patriarchal king to a “whole being” like no other denounces the demands of society and re-asserts the nature of an identity in relationship, malleable and transcendent of the body.
Keywords :
Posthumanism, gender fluidity, The Pregnant King, Devdutt Pattanaik, Ardhanarisvara, queer theory, Mahabharata, non-binary identity, dharma, mythic retelling.
