Almost different, but not quite: neoliberal discourses on the Mahābhārata

This paper analyses a corpus of contemporary English-language adaptations of the Mahābhārata sold via Amazon India and takes a qualitative discourse analysis approach to describe and sort out the linguistic, narrative and discursive techniques that most writers use in their biographical notes and novels’ summaries to make their works commercially appealing. I conclude that most authors claim to come from a technological background and adhere to a neoliberal and exclusivist nationalistic ideology. They claim to be doing something entirely innovative and, by falsifying past interpretations of the epic influenced by (post-)Orientalist scholarly and Westernised left-wing Indian discourses, to unveil the “lost secrets” which were already present in the canonical Sanskrit version of the epic. By working as a historical account of the past and as a mythic blueprint for contemporary individual, social and national lives, the Mahābhārata is represented as a connecting point between the precolonial Indian Golden Age and postcolonial neoliberal India, which is depicted as reviving that Golden Age.