ABSTRACT
Most of the female characters that play an active role in the Ramayana are wicked, either by nature, such as Manthara and Surpanakha, or by persuasion, such as Kaikeyi. In her greatly abbreviated version of the epic, Candravati keeps the main events of Valmiki's plot but omits crucial episodes even as she describes at length events extraneous to Valmiki. In this very short version of the epic all women suffer, as much from male oppression as from other women's malice. Candravati brings this understanding to her reader as a first step to cutting the deadwood of conditioned sensibility to reach towards a kind of knowledge very different from the formulas advanced by the Ramayanas that celebrate battles and those that celebrate bhakti. Perhaps her greatest act of imagination consists of making even Kukuya, wicked as she is, an instrument in that purifying task of understanding women's suffering and the universe that plunges them into crisis.
