Should Mythology Be Left Alone, or Do Retellings Serve a Purpose?
Mythology, the ancient treasure trove of narratives, often finds itself at a crossroads—should it remain a relic of the past—cryopreserved in time, or does its immortality depend on the resurrecting touch of retellings? Are authors like Vaishnavi Patel, Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and if I may be so bold, myself, wrong for playing mythological DJs, spinning ancient yarns into modern beats? Or are we helping widen mythology?
Symbiotic Relationship Between Mythology and Retellings
What is Mythology? Mythology is a formless, beautiful body of imaginations which is an alloy of the:
Dreams of our ancestors;Debris of ancient history; andPopular philosophy of the times in which it was composed.
As children in India, most of us are handed mythology by our grandmothers like precious heirlooms, only to discover that these stories are like chameleons, adapting to the storyteller’s voice and that era’s ethos. This adaptability is the heartbeat of mythology—a living, breathing organism that thrives on reinterpretation. Let me use a legend from Indian Mythology itself to illustrate this.
Ramayana, the religious epic of ancient India, shares an interesting story of the God Ram and his trusted aide, Hanuman (often called the Monkey God). When Ram’s time on earth came at an end, he calls Yama (Lord of Death) to fetch him, but Yama is unable to do that as Hanuman guards the gate of Ram’s Palace and would not let Yama enter. Ram only smiles and drops his ring in a crack on the face of earth and asks Hanuman to bring it back. With his powers Hanuman shrinks in size and follows the crack till the Underworld where he meets the King of Snakes “Vasuki.” Vasuki takes Hanuman to a mountain of rings where Hanuman, to his shock, realizes that all of those rings were of Ram himself. Vasuki explains how Time is cyclical. Ram will be reborn, and Ram will perish anew. Each time, he’ll let his ring slip through the crevice, which Hanuman will trace back to this room. The tales will cycle endlessly, each iteration bearing subtle alterations, each retelling offering slight modification.
This is exactly what the relationship of Mythology and Retellings is. Imagine it as a water cycle. Where water in the ever constant sea (lore) vaporizes, goes to the heavens, crystallizes as rain (retellings), to shower the next generation of civilization, still the same, but a little different. The sea (mythology) doesn’t change as the new rain (retellings) all just merge into it.
Importance of Retellings
Retellings help in mainstreaming the marginalized. They aren’t sacrilegious but an homage to the eternal relevance of those tales while questioning inherent biases of those times. Think of Circe (Miller) or Penelopiad (Atwood)—these retellings explore the challenges faced by women in ancient Greece and recontextualizes the mythological events of Troy through a feminist lens of a condemned witch and a loyal wife (or those 12 maids unfairly executed by Odysseus) respectively. This reinterpretation not only shines a light on previously footnote-characters but also prompts readers to reconsider traditional mythological narratives and their implications.
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Illustrations of Medieval Retellings of Old Legends
Mythology is not simply a collection of ancient tales but a treasure of timeless themes. It isn’t also as if retellings are a 21st Century phenom. Shakuntala’s story in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata (4th Century BCE) is not quite the same as Kalidasa’s play (5th Century CE). Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is exceptionally aware of her social disgrace while Mahabharata’s Shakuntala is apathetic regarding it.
To give another example of the profound impact of retellings, one of the most popular motifs to come out of the Ramayana is the “Lakshman Rekha.” The Lakshman Rekha was a magical uncross-able line in the soil drawn by Lakshmana, Ram’s brother, around their forest-hut to protect Sita, his sister-in-law while he was away searching for Ram. Sita ends up crossing it and gets abduced by demon-king Ravana. The concept of Lakshman Rekha has such resonance in the Indian ethos that it has entered modern vernacular to mean a strict convention or a rule, never to be broken.
But here is the plot twist—
Neither does the Lakshman Rekha find any mention in Valmiki’s Ramayana (300 BCE) nor is it mentioned in its most popular retelling Ramcharitamanas (16th Century CE). It was first featured in the Bengali retelling of Ramayana called Krittivasi Ramayana. But I dare you to find an Indian who would say Lakshman Rekha is not an integral part of the Ramayana. Can you now see the importance of retellings?
Black-and-White in Mythology Versus Morally Grey in Retellings
Even with Sons of Darkness, my idea was to widen the canvas of mythology by exploring it from the perspective of traditionally perceived evil characters in the Mahabharata, the world’s longest epic poem. It is well known that history is penned down by victors of a war who paint the losers as murderbots. But does anyone actually believe they are the villains of their own story? I wanted to blur this line between good and evil by examining the motivations of the ‘so-called’ villains—be it the crippled Machiavellian torturer, the reluctant soldier, the lowborn archer, the pirate princess, and so on.
Check out Gourav Mohanty’s Sons of Darkness here:
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Writing Women of War
And my passion was not just limited to lending villains a spotlight in this Game of Thronesque dark reimagination of the Mahabharata. I have always found it ironical that despite the presence of numerous female warriors in Indian history (Rani Laximibai, Begum Samru, Indira Gandhi et) along with a revered Goddess of War (Mother Durga who rides a lion to war), mortal female weapon-wielding warriors (according to my research) were conspicuously missing in Indian mythology.
Of the most famous mythological mortal women who had anything to do with the battlefield, Sita (Ram’s Wife in Ramayana) was trained in the weapon arts by her father, a training she never put to practice in any battle or duel. Similarly, Kaikeyi (Ram’s evil stepmother in Ramayana) saved Ram’s father from demise but as a charioteer. Shikhandi (from Mahabharata) fought in the great war but she belonged to the Tritiya Prakriti, i.e. Third Gender. It was then that I stumbled upon a mention of the lone Indian swordswoman in our myths: Satyabhama—Lord Krishna’s third wife—who battled monsters with her sword. How epic is that! Yet, it’s disheartening that Satyabhama barely features in any of the epics. The mainstream focus always remains on Krishna’s first love, Radha, or his first wife, Rukmini.
But now Satyabhama is on the cover of Sons of Darkness.
Retellings Keep Mythology Alive Amongst the Masses
Writing Son of Darkness allowed me not only to bring to the forefront an overlooked badass swordswoman and other misunderstood flawed characters shadowed in Indian myths but also challenge traditional narratives and prompt a re-evaluation of their implications. I believe retellings and reimaginings of myths serve as bridges between past and present.
By deconstructing and reconstructing mythological elements, writers are not only keeping mythology alive amongst the masses but also offering fresh perspectives and questioning the inherent biases and limitations of ancient tales. In Gen-Z parlance, mythology and retellings are colleagues and collaborators, not competitors when it comes to the true purpose of literature, i.e. educate, entertain, and enchant.