Traditional Hegemony and Power in Nagarkar's Cuckold
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This note summarizes Kamalakar Baburao Gaikwad’s 2025 article on Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. The paper reads the novel as a study of feudal power, masculine honor, dynastic duty, and spiritual resistance. Its central argument is that Maharaj Kumar and Meerabai are shaped by overlapping hegemonies rather than by private feeling alone, so marriage, kingship, and devotion all become sites of power struggle.
Key Findings
Section titled “Key Findings”- The article treats Cuckold as a critique of traditional hegemonies rather than as a simple historical romance.
- Maharaj Kumar is positioned between political duty and personal humiliation, making him a figure through whom masculine honor and state responsibility can be analyzed together.
- Meerabai’s devotion to Krishna functions as a spiritual counter-power that destabilizes patriarchal and dynastic expectations.
- Marriage is framed less as intimacy than as a political arrangement regulated by honor, lineage, and possession.
- The paper argues that the novel exposes fractures inside feudal, masculine, and religious orders instead of presenting them as stable or morally secure.
Clinical Relevance
Section titled “Clinical Relevance”This source is not clinical research, but it is useful as interpretive context for how cuckoldry, humiliation, and symbolic rivalry are embedded in larger systems of status and gender. It helps connect private jealousy to public scripts about honor, legitimacy, masculine adequacy, and control over women’s bodies and loyalties.
Interpretation
Section titled “Interpretation”The paper is strongest when it shows that Maharaj Kumar’s distress cannot be reduced to sexual jealousy alone. His injury is political, symbolic, and social at the same time. Meerabai’s refusal of conventional wifely duty is therefore experienced not just as rejection, but as a collapse of the rules that were supposed to organize masculinity, marriage, and rule itself. For this site’s purposes, that makes the source useful for thinking about cuckoldry as a status wound as much as a relational wound.
Related Topics
Section titled “Related Topics”Sources
Section titled “Sources”- Gaikwad, K. B. (2025). The Discourses of Traditional Hegemony and Power Dynamics Through Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. Crossroads, 1(1).