Early on Sunday morning, popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik took an auditorium of enthusiasts at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival on a journey through the language of Indian poetry – tracing how the metres, rhythms, rasas and nouns of our ancient poetry took shape and were interpreted and reinterpreted through the ages. Between one crowd of fans extending their books for autographs and the next, the author took a moment to chat with CE about falling in love with mythology, his criticism of both left and right wing lenses of reading it, how TV moulds its shape, queerness in Karnataka’s mythology and more. Edited excerpts:
1. You’ve worked as a script advisor for popular mythology shows, which is a major way young, urban audiences encounter mythology. What in the stories is lost or gained in this medium?
TV mythology is not mythology. It is exactly what the audience wants and gets higher ratings. Ram becoming vegetarian, for example, is a television phenomenon. It is not there in the Valmiki Ramayana. What is coming on TV is mimicking Hollywood films and is focussed on ComputerGenerated Imagery (CGI), they’re not interested in what Valmiki or Tulsi Das said. I feel there is no point in doing script advice for them. For young people who want to learn more about mythology: read.
2. Speaking of Hollywood films, there’s a lot of interest around The Odyssey right now. Comparisons are often drawn to Indian epics like The Mahabharata and Ramayana. As someone who has written books on Greek mythology too, how do you explain the relationship between the two?
They both come from the bronze age with Homer recollecting and writing about events that happened 1,000 years before his time, the same is true for the Ramayana. What’s fascinating is – there were no horses in Greece or India. All horses come from the region that is Russia today. Can you have the stories without the horses? The Trojan horse, the Ashwamedha yagna… In the Mahabharata, the bow that Ram strings (the sharang) is a composite bow, which also comes from Russia. The stringing of the bow is a Scythian idea, not Indian or Greek. So both got it from a common source, likely around Ukraine/Russia.
3. In your latest book Ways of Seeing the Lotus, you trace the significance of the lotus in Indian mythology and literature which drew associations to beauty. To day, its immediate association is perhaps with politics. Has the lotus ever had political symbolism in the past?
The lotus is a sensual symbol. It can be many things. In tantra, lotus means a woman’s body. So is that what they are trying to communicate? Manipadmeham is a sexual metaphor and tantric metaphor. Take it whichever way you like. Metaphors are very fascinating.
4. You’ve criticised both the left and right, atheists and religious radicals for their approach to mythology and the influence of the ‘white saviour’ on both. Why?
Neither of them believe in diversity or plurality. Diversity also means diversity of thoughts and opinions – how do you accommodate people who disagree with you? Neither the left nor the right want to make room for those who disagree with them. So this is monotheism disguised as atheism and Sanatan Dharma. It is just missionary zeal of wiping out the ‘savages’. Both of them are the same.
5. Do you mean ignoring incompatible with reading mythology?
Not all mythologies are plural. The biblical traditions are not plural at all. God does not like false gods. But this idea of false gods does not exist in Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism.
6. You publicly came out in 2018 and have written extensively about queerness in Indian mythology even before that. In what ways have you noticed the way that people research, write about, and publish books about queer mythology change?
It’s just that there are more people talking about these cases. The language has changed over time with Gen Z familiar with all kinds of possibilities. There are more books published now that it is politically correct.
7. Is there a story of queer mythology from Karnataka that stands out to you?
The Yellamma tradition – Parashurama cuts his mother’s head and replaces it with a Dalit woman’s head, in some versions, a man’s head. If you go to Belagavi, you will find these stories
Bengaluru Poetry Festival At a Glance:
Bengaluru’s own Prakash Raj and Jeet Thayil took the stage at separate sessions, the former sharing his poetic inspirations while the latter read poems from his ouevre.
Bhumika Anand, Mani Rao, Namratha Varadharajan and Rajani Radhakrishnan took attendees on a journey of love through a dramatised reading of Kalidasa’s famous lyric poem Meghadūta. As the clouds gathered over Bengaluru, rasikas got lost in tales of a cloud messenger.
Akhil Katyal’s session-cum-mehfil ‘Urdu: Poems between Languages’ had visitors mesmerised by Urdu verses and using adjectives like ‘transcendent’.
A corner of Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha’s auditorium entrance saw visitors lined up to try their hand at typing in Braille, engraving their names onto bookmarks as an awareness initiative.