Hindu mythologies and epic characters have become cultural metaphors in India. Many speak with ease of a lakshman rekha that constrains the behaviour of a woman, call scheming older men shakunis, identify sati savitris in women we see around us. No wonder then, that mythological themes, characters and events are found widely recurring in the country's popular cultures and literatures. To speak of Hindu mythologies permeating contemporary literature in India, therefore, is to state a truism – but a compelling truism, nonetheless. In one sense, there is nothing more traditional than repeating the stories from the past: throughout the region we have been doing so for centuries, each retelling becoming another layer in the vibrant, living palimpsest of the myths and epics. So it is unsurprising when we find contemporary writers doing what writers from the Subcontinent have been doing for what seems like forever – using themes, characters, events and emotions from a literary past to add nuance to their work.
For these reasons (and perhaps others as well), there is almost never a single version of any Hindu myth. We commonly know Hanuman to be the son of Vayu, but the Siva Purana tells us that this extraordinary monkey was the son of Siva (via a complex impregnation process that involved shed semen and hawks and leaves and open-mouthed women). By telling ancient stories in our own way, we are asserting a claim to these stories, making them our own, just as the story of Hanuman's birth passed through many hands and minds and mouths and became a Saivite myth. Similarly, we, any and all of us, are invited by the Hindu tradition itself to tell stories again and again. By doing so, our contemporary tellings and variations and interpretations enthusiastically add to the inherent diversity and dynamism of our reservoir of tales.
Other traditional and modern art forms in the Subcontinent have also eagerly mined the riches of mythology for their narratives and their characters. Even a medium as recent as cinema (a hundred years is a mere moment in the centuries that it has taken to form the traditions that Southasia inherits) chose, in India, to mitigate its newness by telling the stories that Indians knew best, beginning with the story of Raja Harishchandra, which was the subject of the first full-length feature film made in India, in 1913. Since then, this magical medium has continued to be used to tell stories of miracles and wonder, of gods and demons and flying monkeys and apotheosed goddesses. For all that film has allowed us to 'show' the wonders of myth (and turning celluloid stars into gods), we have also transposed the older, grander narratives into contemporary cinema's stories of power, hatred, love and lust. In the last two years alone, audiences have been offered a contemporary Mahabharata in Prakash Jha's Rajneeti and reconfigured Ramayanas in Mani Ratnam's Raavan as well as in Thiagarajan Kumararaja's Aaranya Kaandam.
Indeed, the Subcontinent's literatures have returned time and again to the epics for inspiration and grounding. Classical Sanskrit drama prescribes that the plot of nataka be drawn from the epics. Kalidasa, writing as early as the fifth century, transforms the feisty Shakuntala of the Mahabharata into a gentle forest creature who becomes a victim of circumstance in his romantic play, Abhijnanasakuntalam. Even Bhasa, who appeared to break the rules of classicism, went back to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana for at least half of his known works. Writers working in languages other than English have drawn from myth and epic for secular literature for as long as we can remember, certainly as long as we have records of oral and written traditions. Most everyone takes this in their stride, assuming (with some prejudice) that regional-language writers, even modern ones, have a linguistic and emotional affinity with the past that so-called deracinated Indian English writers do not have.