Mythological tales are in vogue - some new, some retold
Anyone who closely follows indian publishing would have noted a few years ago that retellings of mythological tales were becoming a sub-genre of contemporary fiction. Well, matters have progressed apace and it is now observed, particularly in more cynical quarters, that such books are a cottage industry unto themselves. The last time I went to a bookstore—you know, the physical kind that some of us still trudge to like museum-goers—I saw an entire shelf packed with titles that read “The Mahabharata Quest”, “The Ramayana Code”, “Draupadi in High Heels” and such. And that was only the “new popular fiction” section—it didn’t include older titles such as the multi-volume, fantasy-style renderings by Ashok Banker, beginning with Prince of Ayodhya, or the English translations of acclaimed regional language books such as SL Bhyrappa’s Parva, Pratibha Ray’s Yagnaseni or MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham.
No doubt many of the new books are lazy attempts to cash in on the popularity of pre-existing stories by making a few superficial changes and repackaging them—or even creating hybrids that hope to replicate the success of Western thrillers like The Da Vinci Code. Yet amidst the dross there are also a few genuine efforts to re-examine conventional perspectives and deal with less well-known subplots. Sharath Komarraju’s The Winds of Hastinapur, for instance, doesn’t try to capitalise on the Mahabharata’s most popular episodes; instead, the author directs his imagination and empathy at the epic’s early passages, which many casual readers aren’t familiar with—the childhood of Ganga and Shantanu’s son Prince Devavrata (later to be known as Bheeshma), the tangle of succession issues that results from his oath of celibacy, and his stepmother Satyavati’s desperate efforts to keep the throne of Hastinapura secure.
Equally notable is the anthology Breaking the Bow, which collects speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. Editors Vandana Singh and Anil Menon were clear about their brief for the collection: They didn’t want wholesale retellings but tales that elaborated on the known elements of the mythological universe. For this reason, they even politely rejected a story by Manjula Padmanabhan, set in the future with all the characters gender-reversed: Rama as Rashmi, Lakshman as Lakshmi, Sita as Sidhangshu. (Padmanabhan subsequently did another story for the collection, centred on Ravana’s wife Mandodari.) As often with anthologies, the result is a little uneven, but includes many fine pieces such as Aishwarya Subramanian’s “Making”.
Here, the main story is told in short vignettes and always from a slightly unsettling, off-kilter viewpoint, with creation and destruction (or making and unmaking) being the running themes. The characters are addressed by their more obscure names—Mythili for Sita, Meenakshi for Surpanakha—and Rama’s divinity, though accepted, is not celebrated as something life-affirming; this is a moody, megalomaniacal God. (“He must act out these petty human performances, as if he could not merely think different circumstances into existence. So he performs rage, and standing on the edge of a sea he could part with a mere flick of his hand sends mortal creatures to do his work instead.”
(This story appears in the Mar-Apr 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)