Pregnant King
At the heart of this novel sits a question that refuses to stay quiet: what does it mean to be a man, a woman, or something the language of your time has no word for? Yuvanashva, a king from the vast, ancient world of the Mahabharata, accidentally drinks a fertility potion intended for his queens. He carries a child. He gives birth. And from that single, startling act, Devdutt Pattanaik spins a story that is rich, strange, and genuinely hard to put down. Yuvanashva is far from the only figure here whose identity defies tidy categories. His mother Shilavati holds the mind of a ruler but is barred from the throne by her sex. Young Somvat relinquishes his body to become a wife. Shikhandi, raised as a son despite being born a daughter, fathers a child with a borrowed penis. The warrior Arjuna, castrated by a celestial nymph, lives for a time as a woman. A god named Ileshwara is male on full-moon nights and female on new-moon ones. It's a cast of characters that feels both mythologically rooted and startlingly, almost provocatively, modern. Pattanaik draws on Hinduism's intricate, layered traditions, but he brings to them a sensibility that speaks directly to contemporary questions about gender, identity, and belonging. The prose has a fable-like quality, measured and purposeful, yet the ideas it carries are anything but simple. Boundaries between mother and father, son and daughter, husband and wife keep shifting, and the reader is quietly pulled into Yuvanashva's efforts to act justly towards everyone, wherever they fall. This is a novel that thinks seriously, wears its learning lightly, and leaves you seeing ancient stories with fresh, slightly unsettled eyes.
- Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality
- ISBN: 978-0143423331
- Pages: 360 pages