Bookmarked Musings: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions by Ramlal Agarwal
1 min read
Ramlal Agarwal shares a literary essay on the Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) is a conversion of the Indian epic, The Mahabharata, into a 21st-century novel. The Mahabharata expounds the Hindu philosophy of man and his fate. It expounds Hindu beliefs in rebirth and karma. It is a sprawling epic with powerful characters with puffed-up egos, intractable conceit, and magical powers, little knowing that their previous births and deeds hem them in and they are not free to do what they like. The Mahabharata deals with the age when women were treated as property and dealt with as such. It deals with a society wrought with feuds and prejudices carried from generation to generation and obsessed with avenging what they believe to be an insult. The Mahabharata is directly in opposition to the Western idea of free will. In it, everything is preordained, and one is driven to one’s destiny willy-nilly.
