Pregnant King, The

Read Pregnant King, The Storyline:

‘I am not sure that I am a man,’ said Yuvanashva. ‘I have created life
outside me as men do. But I have also created life inside me, as women
do. What does that make me? Will a body such as mine fetter or free
me?’Among the many hundreds of characters who inhabit the Mahabharata,
perhaps the world’s greatest epic and certainly one of the oldest, is
Yuvanashva, a childless king, who accidentally drinks a magic potion
meant to make his queens pregnant and gives birth to a son. This
extraordinary novel is his story.It is also the story of his mother
Shilavati, who cannot be king because she is a woman; of young Somvat,
who surrenders his genitals to become a wife; of Shikhandi, a daughter
brought up as a son, who fathers a child with a borrowed penis; of
Arjuna, the great warrior with many wives, who is forced to masquerade
as a woman after being castrated by a nymph; of Ileshwara, a god on
full-moon days and a goddess on new-moon nights; and of Adi-natha, the
teacher of teachers, worshipped as a hermit by some and as an
enchantress by others.Building on Hinduism’s rich and complex
mythology—but driven by a very contemporary sensibility—Devdutt
Pattanaik creates a lush and fecund work of fiction in which the lines
are continually blurred between men and women, sons and daughters,
husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Confronted with such fluidity
the reader is drawn into Yuvanashva’s struggle to be fair to all—those
here, those there and all those in between.