The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas may all have been composed millennia ago, but they are certainly in no danger of being forgotten. While the proliferation of the characters and tropes of Hindu mythology is obvious in the visual media—right from the days of B R Chopra’s teleserial of the Mahabharata and Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug, to recent Bollywood movies like Raajneeti and Raavan, and the more inane renderings in children’s entertainment like Chota Bheem and My Friend Ganesha—there is a significant presence of elements of mythology in contemporary Indian fiction in English.
Subtle allusions to the epics and Puranas abound in contemporary Indian English writing, but there are a number of novels that make more obvious attempts to retell these stories or recast the characters of mythology in a new mould.
Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989, Viking) is perhaps the best-known novel in this category, in which Tharoor draws a number of parallels between the Mahabharata and his fictionalised account of the Indian independence movement. A number of examples can be found in more recent writing as well:
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions (2008, Picador) is a retelling of the Mahabharata through the eyes of Draupadi, in an attempt to break away from the traditional, male-centric tellings of the epic. Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series (Penguin), starting with Prince of Ayodhya (2003), to the most recent Vengeance of Ravana (2011), reinvents the epic in a fantastical vein, employing a narrative that is modern and psychological. Amish Tripathi’s bestselling The Immortals of Meluha (2010, Tara) and its recent sequel The Secret of the Nagas (2011) are thriller/adventure novels based on the life of the god Shiva.
These are only a few of the several contemporary Indian novels that offer new interpretations and imaginings of ancient mythologies. Which makes one wonder: what is it about these stories that continue to provide such rich fodder for writers? Why is there such a strong vein of mythology in contemporary fiction?
Author Anil Menon, who is co-editor of an upcoming anthology Speculative Ramayana (Zubaan), that recasts the Ramayana in genres like science fiction, fantasy and magic realism, says that “these stories are not mythologies for most Hindus. We use the word “mythology”, but these stories are not like The Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey. They continue to exert a strong moral hold on our lives. They shape Indian culture (not just the Hindu culture) in a great many ways.”
The cultural influence of these stories might explain their popularity among writers, but could the same writers be accused of relying too much on them, leading to a dearth of originality on their part? Devdutt Pattanaik, author of several books on mythology, including The Pregnant King (2008, Penguin), a novel based on some of the gender-bending characters from Hindu mythology, responds to the question thus: “No stories are original. Every story is based on a mythic template. Our notions of right and wrong, justice, fairness—all come from mythology. You realise this only when you deconstruct stories.” Besides, he says, “Mythology is universal, not just Indian. A book like Atonement by Ian McEwan is rooted in Biblical notions of transgressions, guilt and confession, but we do not call it mythological. We ‘see’ mythology only when it is explicit—not implicit.
Palace of Illusions is explicitly about Mahabharata, but implicitly about the author’s views on feminism. So which is more mythological—Atonement, which is mythic in spirit or Palace of Illusions which is mythic in form?”
These insights bring one back to those enigmatic words of narrator Sauti, when he says about the Mahabharata, and perhaps, by extension, all mythology: “What is found here may be found elsewhere. That which is not found here can be found nowhere else.”