There was a time when bookstores were filled with campus love stories set in IIT and IIM campuses. Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone – What not to do at IIT (2004) spawned many campus capers until readers were fatigued by the genre and the stories had little recall value.
Around the same time, there was a quiet wave as Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series caught readers’ attention. The text de-mystified the epic. From Prince of Ayodhya (2003) to Ramayana series:The Complete Omnibus (2013) and Mahabharata series from 2011 to 2014, Ashok Banker was the go-to author for mythology retellings. Much later, Amish Tripathi presented a cocktail of fantasy and mythology in his Shiva Trilogy series. Ashwin Sanghi took references from mythological and historical texts and set them in contemporary thrillers ( The Chanakya’s Chant and The Krishna Key ).
Krishna Udayashankar’s Aryavarta Chronicles series is a reconstruction of the Mahabharata . V. Ravi’s The Exiled Prince blends Ramayana with science fiction while Anand Neelakantan’s Asura and Ajaya narrate the epics from the point of view of the vanquished. Most of these works are by professionals turned authors, bound by a common interest in Indian mythology.
“Ravana is considered a scholar and a Shiva bhakth (devotee) in our puranas, apart from being a powerful emperor. A question that haunted me since childhood is why such a man is hated so much? What if Ravana had a different Ramayana to tell? Asura is an attempt to tell Ravana’s Ramayana ,” says Anand Neelakantan.
Before he became a bestselling author, he wrote columns and contributed cartoons besides his work at Indian Oil Corporation.
Asura also presents Bhadra as another hero and as Neelakantan says, “is the tale of the forgotten as much as it is the tale of the vanquished”. Simultaneously, Neelakantan began work on his second book Ajaya, presenting Mahabharata from Duryodhana’s perspective.
Futuristic view
Data consultant and entrepreneur-turned-author V. Ravi found it easier to explain mythical happenings with relative science. “It is critical to have our stories blend futuristic science that gives us a huge leeway into innovations ahead,” he says.
Krishna Udayashankar, an academic and a Ph.D holder in strategic management, began with a satirical retelling of Mahabharata only to give up midway. “I abandoned the satirical retelling and began reconstructing the epic because, trying to reconcile a character’s actions with the way events progress was next to impossible without looking for explanations. It’s easy to slot people into good and bad and justify all that they do. But real people are complicated,” she says.
Response from readers has been encouraging, so far. “Many readers have got back to me saying I have brought to life the imaginary version of the Mahabharata in their minds, or tell me that I have provided possible answers to questions they’ve always had,” says Krishna.
The audience is ready for new settings; it is for the author to connect with them, feels Neelakantan. “These stories have been around for thousands of years. Great writers of the yore, from Bhasa to Kalidasa of the classical age, from Michael Madhusudhan Dutta, Shivaji Sawant, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, S.L. Bhyrappa and others in recent times, have reinterpreted the epics in their own style,” he says and draws an analogy to popular cinema. “Who can forget the portrayal of NTR or Shivaji Ganesan in their mythological films? The present trend we are witnessing in Indian English is a continuation of the same tradition,” he points out.
The mythological characters in these books are not black and white and this reinterpretation is akin to walking on a razor’s edge. “The idea of ‘super heroes’ was to push people to raise the bar. The story doesn’t change; you can make Ravana a CEO of a multi-billion dollar international corporation and Rama a rural farmer. The tale sells for an improbable victory of a primitive man over a powerful one,” reasons Ravi.
New perspectives
Krishna feels it is insightful to see new perspectives and shades to mythical characters we think we know. “Such novelty is essential to keep the reader engaged. But the truth is also that characters are where the scope for fictionalisation comes in, particularly if one wants to tell the same old story all over again, without questioning the logic or motive for events. An author can tell the story of a time, or of a person. The latter is much easier, and certainly less offensive,” she explains.
Mythological fiction might be occupying prime space on book shelves and a few bestselling authors maybe given lucrative sums for their next books, but is an inescapable déjà vu creeping in? “Unless a book has an original philosophy and something unique to offer, these tales cannot evolve in a fast-paced world,” feels Ravi. Neelakantan feels these trends cannot be wished away. “The books were not written to satisfy a trend but because the authors were passionate about what they wanted to say. When I started writing Asura eight years back, the trend was romantic comedy. It took me six years to finish my book and by that time, three trends had come and gone. A good story, well told, will always buck the trend irrespective of the genre,” he says.
Quality of writing
Krishna sounds a note of caution: “My concern is with the lack of quality in the genre, rather than the number of works. Mythology, Indian epics in particular, is far too rich to have been exhausted so quickly. If readers become less enthusiastic about the genre, it has to do more with the quality of writing and not the concepts,” she points out.
Reading list
Anand Neelakantan’s Asura and Ajaya
Krishna Udayashankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles
V. Ravi’s The Exiled Prince
Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy
Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant and The Krishna Key
