Individual Paper
6. Using the Arts, Media and Culture: Contestations and Collaborations
Several English-language retellings of the Indian epic Rāmāyaṇa have been published in 21st century India so far. Through them, retellers such as Devdutt Pattanaik, Amish Tripathi, Anand Neelakantan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Kavita Kané have become successful spokespersons for India and Hinduism. Through discourse analysis framed by the field of Orientalism, I analyse how the approaches adopted by these retellers are harmonised into the genre of “mythological fiction” by providing a unified structural representation of Indianness. Although the retellers claim to do something new based on Indian and Hindu approaches, to contradict Western discourses, and to create universal retellings, they mix Western Orientalist and Indian anticolonial/postcolonial discourses within a view of India coloured by middle class values. Simultaneously, they introduce innovations related to the neoliberal worldview of freedom of choice and equality of opportunity reimagined as traditional precolonial Indian or Hindu traits. In the process, the retellers represent themselves and their alter-ego characters as successful followers of these ideals and their readers as able to thread the same path.
João Oliveira
Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Portugal