English-language retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa and the ideas of India

: culture and society (2010-2020)

Abstract

The Rāmāyaṇa is one of the most important narrative traditions for the Indian civilisation. This story has been recreated through different media and across the broad social spectrum of India for centuries. In the 21st century, especially from the second decade onwards, several adaptations of the epic in English have appeared in the Indian literary market. The most successful authors have adopted unique approaches to the epic: Anand Neelakantan often adapts colonial, anticolonial, regional, and postcolonial discourses to invert the traditional roles of the main protagonists and antagonists; Devdutt Pattanaik recreates Indian mythology as a system with psychological value opposed to the Western and Hindu nationalist approaches, which the author regards as materialistic; Amish Tripathi recreates the epic as a nationalist narrative for a globalised audience used to the popular transnational epic fantasy genre; Kavita Kané tells the story of the epic from the perspective of less important female characters; and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni does the same, but from the perspective of the main female characters. Despite these differences, the most successful adaptations of the Rāmāyaṇa have followed two important discursive lines: male authors have tended to use the epic to create positive representations of the Indian civilisation and Hindu religion, often by explicitly or implicitly opposing them with foreign civilisations and religions, while female authors have tended to use the epic to create positive representations and models of Indian women. Structurally, both male and female authors have used the epic as a collective memory that encapsulates past virtues, which are regarded as containing the answer to current social problems. By adopting values that have become relevant in India since the anticolonial period and especially after the implementation of neoliberal reforms in 1991, which include greater global openness coupled with a fear of losing one’s native roots and the desire to decolonise contemporary Indian culture, these authors have become important spokespersons for contemporary India among middleclass, English-speaking Indian readers. In this dissertation, I use Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis based on qualitative data combined with the fields of Orientalism, re-Orientalism, postcolonialism and decoloniality to understand: 1. how the male authors have created a socio-historical worldview centred on Indian civilisation and Hindu religion, with both being simultaneously regarded as traditional and modern; 2. how the female authors have adopted a similar approach to create a new representation of Indian femininity, which is also regarded as traditional and modern. Although the authors promote a discourse according to which they have based their approaches on Indian perspectives, often explicitly contradicting Western discourses and creating socially holistic adaptations, they are actually authors who come from a privileged and Westernised social class. The protagonists of the epic have been recreated as ideal characters that embody positive global characteristics such as equality of choice, equality of opportunity, and social justice, here often reinterpreted as pre-colonial characteristics. With the exception of female characters, subaltern groups are often described with negative characteristics associated with non-Indian and non-Hindu ways of being and living in the world.

Date of Award	21 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Luísa Leal de Faria (Supervisor)