Epic Win

Weighing contemporary English retellings of myths against other narrative traditions

01 May 2013
Kathakali exponent Kottakkal Shivaraman playing Sita. The classical arts have always brought fluidity and playfulness to the epics.
HERVE BRUHAT / GAMMA-RAPHO / GETTY IMAGES
Kathakali exponent Kottakkal Shivaraman playing Sita. The classical arts have always brought fluidity and playfulness to the epics.
HERVE BRUHAT / GAMMA-RAPHO / GETTY IMAGES

BEING THE BHAKT OF A HINDU GOD is a little like being the fan of a Bollywood actor. It does not matter if he or she ever sees you; the fervour of your love brings into existence the version of the god that you carry around in your heart. The convenient thing about celebrities and deities is that you, and not they, get to define the authentic narrative of their lives.

Coming across a tacky retelling of your cherished god’s story, then, is like seeing a particularly tawdry picture of a beloved actor decorating the interior of an autorickshaw.

That was my reaction to reading Breaking the Bow, an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana, in which author after author attempts to put Sita in fancy-dress costumes and parades her in a literary beauty pageant as a suitably decorous example of a feminist retelling. Sita as giant “intelligent nanite cloud” choosing voluntary exile; Sita as an alien testing humanity to deem it unworthy of her species’ largesse; Sita as time-travelling feminist seeking to fix the ur-Ramayan; Sita as drug-addicted NRI housewife. Well-crafted writing lifted some of these stories above mediocrity, but as characters, the Ramas and Sitas fell flat—vacuous hollow-hearted puppets jerking around only to fulfill the polemics of their authors. (Actual shadow puppetry Ramayanas, on the other hand, have a far more moving grandeur.)

Deepa Dharmadhikari ’s book reviews have appeared in Mint Lounge and Business Standard. She scripted Kaikeyi, a solo performance by Geeta Chandran that was selected for the National School of Drama’s international theatre festival in 2007.

Keywords: tradition Indian English writing AK Ramanujam Ramayana Mahabharata mythology Indian Literature classical arts
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