The Sacred In-Between: Hybridity and Androgyny in the Pregnant King

Abstract

The Pregnant King (2008) by Devdutt Pattanaik presents the themes of gender, divinity, and social identity by centering around the story of King Yuvanashva whose unintended pregnancy threatens the social order that he is supposed to protect. This paper discusses the novel in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the third space, which views identity and culture as a hybrid, fluid and negotiated space. Beyond the Westernization of gender performativity, this paper places the transformation of Yuvanashva in a marginal zone of cultural and religious crossbreeding, in which dichotomous differences between male and female gives way to fruitful ambivalence. By reprocessing the incidents of Indian mythology in the context of a modern narrative, the novel itself is a hybrid discourse, the transfer of sacred tradition into the current issues of identity, morality, and embodiment. This paper discusses that The Pregnant King constitutes body and narrative as Third Spaces: places of negotiating meaning and conflicting truths. Yuvanashva experiences androgyny, which comes to represent Bhabha’s notion of in-betweenness and a revival of indigenous pluralities that patriarchal epistemologies have worked to suppress. By exploring intersections between myth and modernity, ritual and transgression, Pattanaik demonstrates the so-called sacred in-between as a metaphor of the negotiation with one’s own self which is never-ending according to the Indian cosmology. Ultimately, the novel alters the meaning of hybridity as the spirit of human and divine life; in which contradiction itself becomes sacred and identity is a constant becoming.