The New Avatar of the Hindu Gods

Hundreds and hundreds of years ago there were great men ruling the Indian sub-continent. Their tales were written by the scholars of the time and bards began to sing their glories in every nook and corner of the world. With the passage of time, more glories were added to the actual tales and by the time the tales reached the farthest corners of the globe, they were more of mystery and fantasy than real life stories. After years of unending controversies about the reality of the tales and their fantastic mysticism, a new trend of bards have taken birth with the start of the second millennium after the birth of Christ.

Ramayana and Mahabharata, the two great epics born and brought up in the Indian soils are the invaluable treasure rediscovered by the contemporary writers of the land. They started brushing down the long accumulated dust of superstitions and illogical mysticism and once again took to the alchemy of writing down the tales of the original superheroes of the past. The result is the new surge in mythological fiction hitting the bookstores all over the nation. The stories that were told and retold for hundreds of years have taken a new form and are gripping the readers with thrill and ecstasy.

Amish Tripati’s Shiva Trilogy, a one of its kind mythological fiction with no aspects of myth trespassing through its pages is noticed to have triggered the interest in mythological characters in the youth. A number of illustrations and digital portrayals of Shiva as a legendary hero with scarred muscles and unkempt hair have taken to the social media platforms replacing the melancholic Lord Shiva seated in a brick wall amidst the snowflakes of the Himalayas. Anand Neelkantan’s Ajaya and Asura are the next most popular bestsellers with their stories of the vanquished churning the thoughts of ‘History is written by the victorious’.

To imagine the other side of the coin some thousands of years ago and to take up the cause of the supposedly labeled evil forces manifests the new extremes that the contemporary writers are ready to take to and the society is ready to accept. The next in queue is Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna’s Key which propagates a new theory of historical ingenuity. Whether the claims are true or not, the thread that Indian mythology is still providing the authors is what needs to be noticed. With thousands of stories and many more tales of glory, passion, empathy, thrill, horror and love the religious texts of India are a treasure of stories of all genres for all age groups. For a considerable number of years the treasure trove was ignored by the writers of the hour. However, with the advent of challenging and lateral thinkers, the treasure hunt began once again and at least one story on mythological fiction is hitting the stores every month.

Taking cue from the mythological experiments, new authors have come up with historical fiction as their agenda. The Empire of the Moghul by Alex Rutherford is the glory of the Moghuls retold with less dates and more valour and zeal. The Indian film industry has also taken cue from the novelists and a series of movies on the historical warriors are released in the past few years. To name a few, Bajirao Mastani of Bollywood, Rudramadevi of Tollywood and Urumi of Mollywood are some of the films of 2015 which received acclaim for their depiction of the historical characters with in-depth understanding.

Devdutt Pattnaik’s Sita is yet another appraisable experiment in the field of women empowerment and gender values. Ramayana, the story of Ram is rewritten to sing the glory of Sita not just as Ram’s wife but as the sole leading force behind the transformation of the tale of a just king into that of a God. Breaking the barriers of centuries of patriarchy, Devdutt has succeeded in writing the story of SitaRam in place of the noble and magnificent Lord Ram. Another noticeable similarity in almost all the mythological novels of the present times is the compelling insight into the societal structures and proceedings of the past. Also the way mysticism is being depicted as reality without forcing it onto the readers but rather convincing the public of the legend through a different keyhole of least expected logic can be considered to be the driving force behind the success of these stories. Whatever the reason be, it is rejuvenation to the wrinkled eyes of the old and the tender eyelids of the infants to find their pastime stories in a new avatar.