EXPLORING THE INFLUENCE OF MYTHOLOGICAL THEMES ON INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

ENGLISH

ABSTRACT This article critically inquires into the continuing salience of myth in Indian Writing in English; it shows how myth is not a vestigial ornament of an archaic past but a constitutive principle that invests narrative strategies, symbolic systems, and modes of consciousness in Indian Writing in English. In an exploration of texts from a range of historical moments of the trajectory of the myth within the subcontinent—from the late nineteenth-century texts of Toru Dutt and Sri Aurobindo to the nationalist fictions of Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, the postcolonial experiments of Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor, and further, the feminist and ecological retellings by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Meena Kandasamy, and Amitav Ghosh—the argument is that myth is a figure that functions at once as cultural memory, political allegory, feminist reimagination, and ecological ethic. Methodologically, the analysis is a literary-historical one. However, theoretical light is sought from Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist myths, Roland Barthes's theories on myth as ideology, and from postcolonial theories by Homi Bhabha and Aijaz Ahmad. The study also places Indian mythological rewrite in a comparative framework, in particular with Latin American magical realism and African mythopoetic fiction, to indicate the global dimension of mythopoeic narrative. Indeed, the essay contends that Indian Writing in English uses myth to work out the dissonances of modernity and tradition, colonialism and nationalism, globality and locality, down to feminist, Dalit and ecological story- telling. The persistent revaluing of the myth reveals that myths in Indian English literature are by no means obsolete, rather, they are still active and adaptable and inexhaustible in their relevance to today's issues. Keywords: Indian Writing in English, mythology, postcolonial literature, feminist retelling, ecological narratives, Mahabharata, Ramayana

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