Ahalya: The Enigma of Purity and Pollution - Intertextuality Between Valmiki’s Ahalya and Other Ahalyas

The parallels and variations between discourses in the form of a novel, a short story, and a short film with the shared theme and characters from the legendary story Ahalya, an excerpt from The Ramayana, sparked this study. The originality of these works that observed the hipogram (prior literary works) was deemed greater in this study. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is essentially a study of an author's level of originality in creating a new literary work after reading earlier literary works. The purpose of this study was to describe intertextuality in terms of similarities and differences as seen through the lens of expansion and alteration. This study was a qualitative investigation with a descriptive method. The findings of this study revealed that the hipograms (the tale of Ahalya) have an intertextuality relationship with the epic Ramayana by Valmiki and are viewed from the perspective of feminism.