The capitalist-writer’s imagination levels all concrete inconveniences in favor of abstract archetypes.
If, following Jacques Derrida, we are to say that we inhabit the times of the “end of the book,” we would need to qualify this insight by adding that the epoch of the “end of the book” has, paradoxically enough, produced and sold a significant number of books, sometimes with the help of imaginative banners like “national bestseller.” The phenomenon of the ‘National Bestseller’ creates and operates within a strange matrix of forces: on the one hand, it creates a “national” reading community. On the other hand, the terms dictating the creation of this reading community have little to do with the average literary tastes or aesthetic choices of said community and are instead predicated on and produced by a set of opaque and heterogeneous market forces.
Nevertheless, this coveted title within the publishing industry is quite intriguing, if not symptomatic, of the networks of exchange and circulation that have come to define the “book” in the contemporary bookselling markets, including those of 21st-century India. In being “produced” as best-selling novels, these literary works not only allow us to trace the co-mingling of literary aesthetics with popular politics, but in the process, also lay bare the very vectors of influence which operate between the text and the nation. One such ‘best-selling’ and highly profitable genre has been that of mythological fiction, which was reincarnated in the 21st century, just as the Indian nation-state was, to use Thomas Blom Hansen’s terminology, being subsumed under “the saffron wave.” These novels became bestsellers during a period when Indian politics was making a Hindu nationalist, right-wing pivot, and, in becoming bestsellers, they partially contributed towards forming the aesthetics of contemporary Hindu nationalism.
The ‘best-selling’ Indian mythological fiction has been, in some cases, a massive re-writing of canonical Hindu stories, and, in others, a complete re-imagination of narratives wherein the names of the characters (deities and demons) remain the same while everything else is changed in service of the actions and adventure expected of the genre. Starting from the famous Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi (2010, ‘11, ‘13), which arguably kick-started this genre of mythic fiction, to Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant (2010), Sharath Komarraju’s Hastinapur Series (2013, ‘15, ‘17), Anand Neelakhantan’s Asura: The Tale of the Vanquished (2012), Krishna Udayashankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles (2012, ‘13, ‘14), Anuja Chandramouli’s Arjuna (2013), Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen (2013), Sita’s Sister (2014), Lanka’s Princess (2017), Menaka’s Choice (2016), Ahalya’s Awakening (2019), Kevin Missal’s Dharmayoddha Kalki: Avatar of Vishnu (2018), Bhanumathi Narasimhan’s Sita: A Tale of Ancient Love (2021), Saiswaroopa Iyer’s Draupadi (2019), Ranjith Radhakrishnan’s Rama of the Axe (2023), Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu trilogy (2021, ‘22, ‘23), the list of novels that have been written and continue to be written runs too long to give an exhaustive account.
Nevertheless, a similar glimpse at the (overwhelming-) market share of these books would prove quite helpful in further strengthening this point. The first installment of Tripathi’s Shiva trilogy, The Immortals of Meluha, not only hit the bestseller list of several newspapers, including The Statesman, The Economic Times, The Times of India, but was also launched with much praise by the politician and author Shashi Tharoor (who himself has written a mythological fiction, the 1989 The Great Indian Novel), and was translated into more than ten languages. The book sold more than 2.5 million copies and collected over $7.5 million in revenue in the five years after its release. The success in fiction has also opened other doors for Tripathi, including serving as a host on a 2022 Discovery+ documentary titled ‘Legends of Ramayana with Amish,’ and later, on January 25, 2024, the day after the Hindu-right prompted inauguration of Ayodhya Ram Mandir, for yet another documentary titled ‘Ram Janmabhoomi: Return of a Splendid Sun.’ Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant won the ‘Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award’ for the highest sales in 2010. Anand Neelakantan’s Asura (2012) became a bestseller, and he went on to write an official prequel to the pan-Indian blockbuster movie Bahubali (2015, dir. S.S. Rajamouli). Anuja Chandramouli’s Abhimanyu: Son of Arjuna (2022), a sequel to her Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince (2013), was nominated in the popular choice category award at the Bengaluru Literature Festival. Kavita Kane, a former journalist who was an assistant editor of The Times of India, switched to being a full-time writer following the success of her book Karna’s Wife: The Outcast Queen. Finally, Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu (2022) has sold over 100,000 copies, and there are whispers that the rights for a screen adaptation of Saiswaroopa Iyer’s Avishi: Warrior Queen from the Rig Veda (2021) have been acquired.
Of course, the use of myth in Indian literature is neither inaugurated by nor exclusive to this sub-genre of the contemporary novel. Indian poets and playwrights engage with myth all the time. A.K. Ramanujan, one of the preeminent Indian poets of the last century, treated mythological narratives like the Mahabharata “not [as] as text but a tradition” and as “a part of a total world view” within the Indian subcontinent. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) frequently drew on Indian myth to construct, evoke, and represent the native world within the language of the colonizers. His second novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), “cash[ed] on…appeals and attributes of the myth that are emotive, figurative, historical and also symbolic in nature.” In R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days (1942), “reality” was “given a mythical dimension,” while The Man Eater of Malgudi (1961) featured the mythological figure of Bhasmasura. Arun Kolatkar and Nissim Ezekiel wrote poems with what S.C. Harrex has characterized as a “sense of an awakening or discovery of mythic impulse within the socio-psychological perimeters of small-scale… self-oriented world.” Girish Karnad creatively used elements of myths in his Yayati (1961), Nagmandala (1990), and The Fire and Rain (1998). Finally, this list would remain incomplete if we pass over the metamorphosis of myth as it appears within Salman Rushdie’s magical realist novels and the “feminist mythopoeia” in the fiction of Anita Desai. Considered within this long and productive lineage, it might seem that the post-2010 boom of mythic narratives was nothing but a 21st-century manifestation, or better, reincarnation, of the myth within the lands of Indian fiction.
However, the resurgence of right-wing politics, combined with a market-driven profile of contemporary authors, has made the current wave of bestselling mythological fiction quite a distinct literary phenomenon of our time. The authors who write “mythological narratives” have profiles that are radically different from those of the previous generation. Amish Tripathi, for example, is an IIM-Calcutta graduate who worked in Finance for fourteen years before moving into the literary world. Similarly, Ashwin Sanghi has an MBA from Yale and belongs to the family that operates “The M.K. Sanghi group” (one of the largest distributors of Indian car manufacturing). Sharath Komarajju began his life as a software engineer; Anand Neelakanthan, too, was an Engineer and worked for the Indian Oil Corporation before turning to writing fiction. Krishna Udayshankar has a Ph.D. in Strategic Management and has even published books on international management. Saiswaroopa Iyer has an MBA from IIT-Kanpur, and Ramjit Radhakrishnan still works as an entrepreneur and calls himself a “proud pagan and an ardent ‘idol’ worshipper.” From the long list of mythological fiction authors that I mentioned above, only Anuja Chandramouli and Kevin Missal are trained in the humanities. This shift in training, or academic backgrounds, of the writers of fiction has meant that the majority of mythological fiction produced in India today has been, for the most part, an anchorless enterprise lacking any foundations in literary and, thus, cultural history of the subcontinent.
Beyond these personal, biographical, and thus somewhat contingent factors, the other significant difference between the post-2010 boom and its precursors lies in the broader political formations within which these texts were written and circulated. In a 2010 interview, Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi noted that when “a country and its people become confident of themselves and their place in the world, they express this confidence by exploring their own inherent myths and legends.” While Sanghi and Tripathi, like good businessmen, might simply be justifying their own ‘products’ by linking them to glorious pasts described in alluring terms like cultural self-confidence, their remarks are intriguing on at least two counts: First, their use of the term ‘confidence’ echoed, uncannily or otherwise, the discourse of “decolonial” circles which, not so long ago, were invested in the very same theme of native self-respect. Second, and more crucially, Tripathi and Sanghi’s remark came merely four years before the coming to power of the incumbent Hindu Nationalist party, the BJP which has similarly flourished in their native qua communal ‘confidence’ by deploying ‘myths’ for its political purposes: remind yourself here of the mythological encoding of Advani’s 1990 “Rath Yatra,” which charted its way from Somnath to Ayodhya and which would culminate, initially, in the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid, and now with the 2024 inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. As Pankaj Mishra notes, the “modern fascination with myth has never been free from an illiberal and anti-democratic agenda.”
In her essay, “Epic and History,” Romila Thapar notes how Indian epics have “changed their form each time they are used to mobilize support for a different ideological position.” If we take Thapar’s historically sound insights and read the phenomenon of mythological fiction through her lens, we are immediately faced with a question: in whose name do these contemporary authors appropriate the myths in the first place? Consider Devdutt Pattnaik’s observation on his art, where he notes how he “help[s] people leverage the power of myths in business, management, and life.” This is to say, if Brahmins of the ancient world appropriated literary epics into sacred treatises, the managerial class of contemporary authors is, in turn, appropriating the same myths into “mantras” for the market. I am not invested here in making any morally bounded aesthetic judgment, and thus not interested in condemning the authors for their appropriation―after all, who is to say whether appropriating the narratives for gaining political and caste privilege is any better than appropriating the very same narrative to make your novels a “national bestseller”? Instead, what interests me here is the way in which the textual narratives function within these texts, and what we can potentially learn from the form of these narratives as they get (de-)formed under the pressure of literary market-place.
Indeed, many of these novels feature a near-total evacuation of history, whether in the form of “literary tradition” or as a marker of socio-political formation. Consider Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha. The text is supposed to take place in 1900 BC, and yet, despite the historical marker, the narrative it creates is a strange hybrid of ancient monarchical empires, medieval feudal lords, and modern scientific sensibilities. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu, which tells the story of a twenty-one-year-old Prithvi in the contemporary timeline. Here, too, the narrative struggles to situate itself within a sense of history as the protagonist moves between the secular present and the Hindu yugas. I am not saying that mythological fiction has to pass some history test to earn its name. However, while capitalizing upon the narratological tropes of Hindu myths, these novels simultaneously subdue, if not empty, those myths of their ideological workings. From gender relations to social hierarchy, all the mythical inconveniences vanish into thin air in favor of archetypal tropes of “Good vs. Evil” (A good litmus test on whether these novels retain the question of caste within their narrative). The capitalist-writer’s imagination levels all concrete inconveniences in favor of abstract archetypes.
Another characteristic of the form of these narratives is their seriality. From Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, which became a three-part series just like his recent “Ram Chandra” series, to Komarraju’s “Hastinapur” series, Krishna Udayashankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles trilogy, Kevin Missal’s Kalki trilogy, and Akshat Gupta’s The Hidden Hindu trilogy, these narratives are designed in a way that accommodates both future continuation and possible adaptation into visual media. It is precisely here that we not only see the extent to which the mythological fiction parts its way from the “myths” that it promises to re-write (after all, myths are self-contained narratives, and there is no Vyasa multi-verse), but, we can simultaneously sense the forces of 21st-century literary marketplace around every narrative turn and behind the back of every narrative character. Indeed, it is only when we take these two observations together—“the evacuation of history” as one of the dictates for thriving in the literary marketplace and the emergence of seriality as a historical form that opened the gates, or pages, of the novels to the invisible hand of the market—that we can begin to fathom the impacts of the 21st century literary markets upon the representational forms of contemporary mythological fictions.
Derrida’s diagnosis about the “end of the book” as an end of the bounded totality seems to have manifested at two simultaneous levels: firstly, at the level of their form, particularly in their seriality which makes them ‘open’ towards future of working and re-workings, and secondly, at the level of their content, particularly in the way that these novels themselves have opened-up and re-worked ancient myths/religious stories, and have adapted them for ‘our’ market-driven capitalist time. But that is not all.
The forces that have inserted a wedge between the bindings of the ‘book,’ the forces that have exerted pressure over the system of representation, are forces powered by the (literary-) marketplace in its allure of making a novel “best-seller” with the further promise of converting it to a media object (as I write this, the most expensive Bollywood movie, based on an ancient epic Ramayana is in post-production). The paradox then is not that the ‘end of the book’ has come with the emergence of ‘national bestsellers,’ but rather, that the ‘end of book’ has manifested not as a surmounting but rather as negating of the history of literature―abandoning us, to use Derrida’s phrase, “adrift in the threat of limitlessness.”
Nisarg Patel [નિસર્ગ પટેલ] is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, where he is working on a dissertation project titled “Enframed: Visual Culture(s) and the Changing Perceptions of History in India (1860-1960).” His writings and translations have appeared in Asymptote, The Hooghly Review, Muse India, Raiot, and the OLR Supplement.
Article photo: Kalamkari textile (ca. 1660) depicting a procession in a Nayaka court of the Vijaynagara Empire via Public Domain Review