THE NEW GODS OF FICTION

Indian publishing is awash in a tide of inventive mythological literature. Does the trend reflect a revival of faith or the loss of traditional narratives?

Ashok Banker’s groundbreaking seven-volume Ramayana and his more recent writings from the Krishna cycle of stories, Amish Tripathi’s chart-busting Shiva trilogy and the success of the first book in his Ramayana series, Devdutt Pattanaik’s innumerable bestselling books on Indian myth and his newspaper columns, Anand Neelakantan’s passionate partisanship of the so-called villains from the epics, Kavita Kane’s and Anuja Chandramouli’s excavation of the minor women characters from myth and epic, Amruta Patil’s exquisite and subversive graphic texts that reach deep into the Mahabharata and the Puranas, Samhita Arni’s delightfully dystopian The Missing Queen, which takes the end of the Ramayana as we know it further .... These are but a handful of writers and books who are busily rewriting, rethinking and re-visioning, through words and pictures, the stories our grandmothers told us or that we encountered in our beloved

Amar Chitra Katha. Throw in a random first-timer like Trisha Das and her confabulation of Draupadi and her mothers-in-law dropping in on contemporary Delhi, and you begin to wonder if you are, in fact, living in Brahma’s dream with the gods at hand and illusion as the only truth.

This rewriting of myth in India is a phenomenon so noteworthy that even the Economist deigned to notice it, crediting Banker with being the first to go where we imagined angels had

feared to tread—into the minds and hearts of the gods. It is entirely true that the popularity of these new tellings in our country nestles within a larger worldwide explosion of reimagined pasts. From Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the

Rings trilogy on screen and Neil Gaiman’s recently published The Norse Mythology, humans everywhere seem to be reaching for stories from the ancient times. Maybe we’re trying to understand who we are and how we got into this mess. Perhaps the stories we tell and the ways in which we tell them justify our current behaviours of greed, violence and the relentless quest for power. Or perhaps we read these stories to give us the faith we need to overcome whatever counts as evil in our times.

And if myths can be retold, why not their close cousin, history? Television’s prime time (certainly in Hindi) is bursting at the seams with animated and performed serials about the gods, their sons, their childhoods, even their wives. These more traditional ‘mythologicals’ are bracketed by lavish and righteous productions of legendary heroes and heroines from the past, making the hours between 8 pm and 10 pm on weekdays a veritable diorama of ‘our’ mythic and historical glories.

Apart from the sheer falsification of facts in both our sylvan groves of academe and the hurly burly of political rhetoric, there is also a tsunami of books that place themselves in the genre of historical fiction and fantasy. Sumedha Ojha’s Urnabhih series is set in the Mauryan empire, Shatrujeet Nath’s Vikramaditya trilogy takes its location from the imagined world of King Vikrama, Krishna Udayasankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles revolve around what might have been the imperial formations during the purported historical moment of the Mahabharata. These are all tales of swashbuckling adventure, filled with gory battles, searing horse chases and furtive love. They are peopled with brave warriors, cunning conspirators and lovely ladies set against dark forces that gather on the borders of kingdoms and empires. These complex narratives recall Robert Graves’s masterfully and memorably reconstructed palace intrigues and the expansion of the Roman empire through books such as I,

Claudius. Graves had studied the classics and read both Greek and Latin, but his writing contemporary, Mary Renault (most famously the author of The Persian Boy about Alexander’s relationship with a young Persian slave), created her historical worlds through meticulous research.

Similarly, almost all the Indian writers creating these new historical fantasies count on the expertise of others to fill out the stories they want to tell. They read translations and, avidly and conscientiously, use as their sources any number of other documentary material. Since their access to the worlds they are reimagining is mediated through what are essentially interpretations, perspectives and opinions, it should come as no surprise that they are liberated from the evidence that constitutes historical ‘fact’. Translators and historians are tied to what they find in the materials they study, writers are not. Their heroes of legend and history can be more heroic, their warriors fearless, their weapons magical, their women courageous and outspoken, their cities richer, their fields poorer, their enemies more diabolical.

The new mythologists, on the other hand, are already on surer ground in terms of how they choose to tell stories we already know. As a culture, we’ve been telling our myths in the ways we want to tell them for centuries. There is no single version of a myth; each telling is inflected by time and place, by caste and region, by politics and ideology and sectarian bias. Note, for example, the multiple birth stories of Hanuman. Most commonly, we know him to be the son of Vayu, the wind god, who impregnates Anjana (a cursed apsara) who is in monkey form. In the Vaishnava universe, Hanuman and the other mighty monkeys were born of the gods to help Vishnu-as-Rama defeat Ravana. By the time we reach the 16th century and the Hanuman Chalisa, Hanuman is called, among other things, Sankarasuvan, the son of Shankara. This is probably because by then, the Shiva Purana (whose earliest layers date back to the 11th century BCE) had claimed Hanuman as its own. He

is born from the seed of Shiva, which falls onto a leaf which is carried by a bird, and propelled by Vayu, it slips into Anjana’s open mouth. One can imagine a hundred reasons why this myth was retold, especially at a time when religious identities needed to be strengthened. For example, with the growth of sectarian Hinduism, it could have been that Shaivites wanted a share in the story of Rama. How better to enter it than through its most charismatic character? Further, the story demonstrates that if not for Hanuman (now the son of Shiva), Vishnu would not have been able to kill Ravana and win Sita back.

SWhy are our old stories being retold now? Because we have lost touch with our traditional storytellers, our roots and our sense of self

o, too, the new mythologies are located in the times and spaces that created them. Das’s Ms

Draupadi Kuru (2016) shows us how venal and corrupt contemporary Delhi is and suggests that women in the 21st century have far fewer freedoms than their female ancestors. Arni’s The Missing Queen (2013) and Anand Neelakantan’s Asura (2012) both envision a dystopic Ayodhya, albeit for very different reasons. Arni’s Ayodhya is authoritarian and without the freedom of thought and speech whereas Neelakantan’s Ayodhya is imperialistic, expanding its boundaries and imposing its harsh rigidities of caste and gender upon the lands and peoples it conquers. Neelakantan’s Ravana fights Ayodhya and all that it stands for in order to preserve his (Dravidian) people’s egalitarian way of life. Arni’s woman journalist, who goes in search of Sita, is hounded by a government that wants to keep its secrets. The deadly conflicts of Amish’s Scion of

Ikshvaku (2015) are set against the backdrop of a brutal trade war between Kosala and Lanka.

It’s probably worth looking at another ‘native’ phenomenon that preceded this efflorescence of remaking myths in English. Modern and contemporary writers in regional languages have been creating questioning and subversive narratives for characters from myth and epic for decades. Long before, there was Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) about Draupadi, Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (1984) in Oriya. Kavita Kane’s Sita’s Sister (2014) was preceded by Sreekantan Nair’s Malayalam play Kanchana Seetha (1961), one among many of his Ramayanabased works and which has Urmila challenging Rama’s view of dharma and the bases for ethical behaviour. Volga’s Telugu stories about Sita are radical in how she envisions such characters as Shurpanakha and Ahalya. Sara Joseph’s Malayalam stories from Ramayana Kathakal use minor characters to examine the dominant ideology of the epic.

Apart from literary merit and a perceived multiplicity of possible narratives about the past that these new retellings promise, the times we live in require that we consider other purposes they might serve. Are they merely multiple or are they truly diverse? Do they speak in other voices, do they represent new spaces of empowerment? Do they intentionally or inadvertently support hegemonic cultures and politics? Turning a villain into a hero does not subvert a dominant ideology if the narrative remains fundamentally patriarchal. Writing from the point of view of a woman or a minor character does not necessarily redraw the margins or push towards the centre. Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King (2008) uses the Mahabharata story of King Yuvanshva (who accidentally gets pregnant by drinking the potion meant for his wives) to begin an examination of gender as socially constructed identity rather than as biological destiny. It may be hard to think of an ancient text addressing these ideas, but Pattanaik, by telling Yuvanshva’s story (or retelling it at all), opens up the that possibility. And if that idea is too farfetched, we, as 21st century readers, can still enjoy new wine in old bottles—refracting the concerns of our times through the lens of a story where unlikely things are possible because of magic.

Keeping in mind how we choose to retell stories and how we pick the ones we do, the larger question is not why we are retelling our old stories but why we are retelling them now, in English and for a largely urban readership. The simple answer is, more and more of us have lost touch with our languages, our traditional storytellers, our socalled roots and, therefore, our sense of self. If we believe this to be a crisis rather than a somewhat natural if accelerated societal transition, we’ll need to hear and tell the old stories again, but in ways that resonate with the realities of our times and in the idiom, both linguistic and political, of our world. Our gods and heroes must be muscled and battleready, our women (there are almost no goddesses central to these stories) must be feisty but not threatening, we must speak of country but we must imply nation (‘India’). Most of all, we must speak of danger to a way of life, one that culminates in war.

Popular mythological and historical books that carry these subtexts of danger and war (and there are many) participate in the idea of a culture under siege, threatened from within and from without. Such fictions play easily into the singular national and, therefore, nationalist narrative being developed around us. The rhetoric of the fictions is strengthened by the fact that they are stories about gods. With that alone, they must be both right and righteous, even if they are not true. When the gods themselves are made to act in favour of exceptions and exclusions from the narrative that is created to define us, then truly there is nowhere in the universe to hide.