Every myth has two kinds of characters: the ones we’re meant to love, and the ones who exist only to make the hero look good. I spent the last few months writing an academic paper about the second kind — and it just got published, so I wanted to talk about it here in plain language, without the footnotes.

The paper looks at two women from two very different traditions: Circe, the witch from Greek mythology who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, and Surpanakha, the demoness from the Ramayana whose nose Lakshman cuts off for daring to desire Rama. For thousands of years, both of them existed only as obstacles — the monster the hero has to get past on his way to somewhere more important.

Then two novelists decided to hand them the pen. Madeline Miller gave Circe a whole novel of her own. Kavita Kane did the same for Surpanakha in Lanka’s Princess. Both books ask the same question: what if we heard this story from the “other” side?

Here’s the part that surprised me while I was researching: Miller and Kane don’t do the same thing at all. Miller makes Circe sympathetic — relatable, wronged, someone you’d want to be friends with. But Kane refuses to do that for Surpanakha. She gives her a backstory, a reason for her rage, but she doesn’t soften her. Surpanakha stays difficult, uncomfortable, someone you don’t fully warm to even once you understand her.

That difference is the whole argument of my paper. It’s easy to give a marginalized character a voice if you also make her likeable enough for us to accept. That’s a fairly low bar, dressed up as feminist retelling. What’s harder and, I argue, more honest is what Kane does: letting a woman be angry, monstrous, and unresolved, and still insisting she deserves to be heard. Real feminist retelling isn’t about redemption. It’s about the right to be complicated without earning it back.

A bit about how this paper actually came together, because the process taught me almost as much as the writing did. I started with just Circe. It was a novel and character that I deeply loved and was almost obsessed with. I’d read the novel years ago and never stopped thinking about it. In fact I made it a point to read the novel at least once a year and would you believe I’d find something unique every single time. It was like reading a magical book that got a few paragraphs added before every new reading I did. Coming back to my research topic – a paper on Circe alone felt done already; so many people have written about her. So I went looking for what hadn’t been paired with her yet. I ran a fairly exhaustive search through existing scholarship and found that no one had put Circe next to Surpanakha specifically despite both being reimagined “monster” women, despite the obvious conversation the two books could have with each other. That gap is what made the paper feel worth writing. And of course both characters lying in the most famous epics of two cultures – one being Homer’s Odyssey/ Iliad and the other from the Indian Ramayana.

The other thing that struck me, reading as a mother and not just as a student, was how much of Surpanakha’s story is about a woman’s desire being treated as the real transgression, not her anger, not her monstrousness, but the fact that she wanted something and said so. Circe gets to want things across the whole novel. Surpanakha wants one thing, once, and it costs her her face. That asymmetry isn’t in my footnotes, but it’s the reason the paper exists.

I presented this at the Tabula Rasa conference at the University of Mumbai’s Department of English, and it’s now been published in Romanch, the department’s peer-reviewed journal — this year’s volume is themed “Koham: Narratives of the Self and the Other,” which felt fitting for a paper about exactly that.

Here’s a pic from the event … I still get the same butterflies when I think of that magnificent day.

If you want to read the full academic version — Fanon, Kristeva, Spivak, and all — the paper is out now. But if you take away just one thing from this post, I hope it’s this: the next time a story hands you a villain, ask who decided she was one, and whether being forgiven was ever the point. Here’s the abstract of the research paper that eventually got published.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon