Sister of My Heart

Divakaruni’s novel emphasizes the capacity of storytelling, especially among women, to reveal truths and evoke transformation. Through storytelling, the storyteller and listeners can find pathways to take command of their own narrative, including their own history and culture. In the novel, the stories that influence Anju and Sudha are both ancient and modern, bringing together Eastern and Western literary traditions, much as the girls themselves do.

The transition between the two stories for which the two parts of Divakaruni’s novel are named—“The Princess in the Palace of Snakes” and “The Queen of Swords”—marks Sudha’s passage from a passive acceptance of the status quo to active rebellion in defense of her unborn daughter. Both stories are told by Sudha to Anju. Sudha originally heard the first from Pishi, while the second is of her own invention, albeit drawing inspiration from the narrative of the widowed warrior queen, Rani of Jhansi. In “The Princess in the Palace of Snakes,” the princess lives in a kind of limbo, lulled into security by the snakes’ soothing, wordless song; the princess only perceives herself as she is reflected in the prince’s eyes. Anju observes with frustration that Sudha has become “caught in the enchanted web of the stories she loved so much” and that she is waiting, like a fairytale princess, for Ashok to save her (115). In “The Queen of Swords” the gender dynamics are radically different. In this story, the husband is weak and impotent. It is the queen who finds strength, drawing it from the unborn baby girl she is carrying. In telling this story, Sudha takes inspiration from an alternative, feminized national cultural history, comparing herself to a Hindu goddess, Durga, and the warrior queen, Rani of Jhansi. Sudha thereby obtains salvation not through male intervention, but in sisterhood and feminine community.

These two alternative visions of feminine agency are paralleled in a gradual reassessment of the novel’s opening narrative, the story of Bidhata Purush, who writes the fate of babies on their foreheads on the night of their birth. At the end of the first chapter, Sudha speculates that Bidhata Purush condemned her to sadness. Before her pregnancy, she is passive and fatalistic, believing that all her suffering was ordained from birth. However, Sudha’s rejection of the orthodoxies of patriarchy goes hand in hand with her growing resistance to fate; in this context, it is interesting to note that Bidhata Purush is a male deity. As Sudha seeks to become financially independent as a seamstress, she imagines the wind blowing her designs away as an act of spiteful sabotage by the deity, but she persists regardless: “Stubbornly, I put out another sheet and begin to draw again. I will prove myself. I will be in charge of my fate. I will design a new life for myself” (295). Showering after returning to the mothers’ house, Sudha imagines herself as “washing away everything the Bidhata Purush wrote, for I have had enough of living a life decreed by someone else” (272). Sudha, then, tells and retells stories as a way of dramatizing her evolving circumstances and attitudes. Stories at once anchor the present to the past and carry the past forward to the present moment. As well as functioning trans-historically, stories also transcend geographical boundaries. In seeking analogies to help her understand her feelings and experiences, Sudha shifts backward and forward easily between Indian traditions and the myths of ancient Greece. In Book 1, Chapter 7, she compares herself to Hercules, trapped in the poisonous cloak that was presented as a gift of love. As she tries to find the right words to comfort her cousin in Book 2, Chapter 19, she compares herself to Theseus, finding his way through the labyrinth.

In conclusion, storytelling—whether historical or fictional, Eastern or Western, religious or secular—is a central thematic concern in Sister of My Heart. Stories connect the past and the present and build bridges across cultures. They help Sudha and, to a lesser extent, Anju, to understand and give form to their experiences and evolving perspectives and to formulate their own narratives in their own voices.