Negotiating power and piety: savitri’s pativrata dharma as female agency

This article reexamines the figure of Savitri in the Mahabharata as a site of negotiated agency, challenging interpretations that reduce her narrative to a passive embodiment of pativrata dharma. Drawing on the critically edited text established by Sukthankar et al. (1933–1966) and the translation by van Buitenen (1973–1978), it argues that Savitri's authority in her encounter with Yama is produced not through devotion alone but through a structured sequence of discursive interventions that mobilize the internal logic of dharma to generate binding consequences. This mode of action, termed discursive agency, operates by inhabiting and extending the interpretive possibilities of the normative framework rather than by opposing it—compelling Yama to restore Satyavan's life through a chain of reasoning he cannot deny without undermining the coherence of dharma itself. The article situates this textual analysis within a broader comparative framework, drawing on ethnographic studies of women's ritual practice in Hindu contexts. Research on fasting observances, moral authority in devotional practice, and women's interpretive participation in religious life demonstrates that the structural dynamic visible in the Savitri episode—agency produced through the intensification of normative performance rather than its transgression—recurs across different domains and historical contexts. This parallel is understood as structural rather than historical, intended to illuminate the analytical content of the concept of negotiated agency proposed here. The article engages directly with the objection that identifying agency within constraint risks functioning as a theoretical alibi for structural subordination. It acknowledges that pativrata dharma operates as a historically embedded system of power rather than a neutral interpretive framework, and that Savitri's success ultimately reaffirms the normative order it inhabits. What the concept of negotiated agency is designed to capture, however, is precisely this entanglement of constraint and action—a dynamic irreducible to either domination or resistance. By foregrounding this dynamic, the article contributes to a more analytically precise account of how gendered subjects engage with normative systems, positioning piety not as the antithesis of power but as one of its conditions.