indian mythology research paper topics

• Bibliography
• More Referencing guides Blog Automated transliteration Relevant bibliographies by topics
• Automated transliteration
• Relevant bibliographies by topics
• Referencing guides

Mythological Literature in India

Call for Papers

An Edited Book (ISBN)

                                                                             Mythological Literature in India

We are pleased to inform you that we are going to publish an edited volume with the proposed title “Revisiting Mythological Literature in India: Origin and Development.”  

Concept Note

Mythological literature has become a recent phenomenon in Indian Writing in English. The present book attempts to understand this emerging genre. There has been a steady flow of revisionist writings on the Indian classical myths. From Mahashaweta Devi’s reworking of the trope of Draupadi to Amish Tripathi’s  Sita , and Karnad’s theatrical adaptations, classical myth narratives have reawakened an interest in ancient accounts of the Indian subcontinent. The characters of the Ramayana and the  Mahabharata  exercise a particular fascination on the literary imagination because of the complexity of their representation, and the ambiguity of narration. The authors of the rewritten stories of the great epics bring the ancient history of the land wonderfully alive. The Indian sub-continent, from the Hindukush and the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, and from Mount Kailash to Sri Lanka is united through the narratives of geography, rivers, land, forest and sea.  Epics narrate the story of ancient India and get intertwined with the cultural and collective memory of the Indian subcontinent. Epic as a genre “uses narrative to represent situations from the past” and look back nostalgically “from the point in time when it is being composed and given form, which is its present” (Thapar 204). The narrative of the epic takes one through the passage of time in which forests give way to towns, clans to kingdoms and egalitarian fluidity of identity to a society that has formulated rigid systems of behaviour, broadly encapsulated as “dharma” which includes the codes of birth, death, caste and gender. If the ancient texts are read as a record of the social and political evolution of the Indian subcontinent, and not merely as a moral fable, it can be perceived that everything occurs over eons of time, and with each succeeding generation, a territorial, social, political, economic and cultural change becomes evident.

The history of western literature sees the epic as the “myth” of a land that lacks a specific geography and temporality and the novel as the genre which deals with specific places and events occurring at a specific time (Ian Watt,  The Rise of the Novel ). The rewriting of the epic stories as novels helps to make the characters, places and events “real.” The form of the novel itself makes for a realism that compels belief. The rewriting of the epic stories as novels helps to make the characters, places and events “real” the genre deals with specific places and events occurring at a specific time (Ian Watt). The form of the novel itself makes for a realism that compels belief. If epics have attempted to create a national myth through homogenization and unification of diverse elements in the existing politico-cultural reality, mythological-fictions tries to raise question on the issues of identity of clan, community, people and persons. In this way they intertwine the epic concern of projecting “the relationship between myth and formation of nation” and national imaginaries with the form of the novel which is about the “struggle of individual against the society” (Jeremy Hawthorn).  

This book attempts to uncover the diverse ways in which these classical myth narratives have been reworked and explore the ideological and aesthetic potential of such practice. It simultaneously exposes the tensions inherent in attempts to challenge narratives that have fundamentally shaped Indic thought. There are prominent writers like Devdutt Pattanaik, Amish Tripathi, Kavita Kane, Sharath Kommaraju, Ashok K. Banker, and Volga, and other minor writers who have given a new angle to epic narratives.

                                                   ***

Authors are invited to submit their full-length papers in the following, but not limited topic:

• Rise of Indian mythological literature in postcolonial and postmodern context.
• Role of Magic Realism in emergence of Indian mythological literature.
• Transition in the literary world with the rise of writers of Indian mythological literature.
• Theoretical Framework of Indian Mythological literature such as, Structuralist, Post-structuralist, Postcolonial, Historical Materialism, Deconstructionist, Feminist, Queer, Disability and Revisionist Approaches.
• Theatrical and Cinematic adaptations of Indian Mythological literature.
• Theme of Existentialism in Indian mythological literature.
• Theme of gender in Indian mythological literature.
• Works of writers of Indian mythological literature.
• The impact of popular fictional narratives on Indian Writing in English.

(Or any other specific area that you would like to explore within Indian Mythological Literature)

Send your 400 words abstract at [email protected] by 15th September, 2020.

Submission of Abstract s                      :   15th September, 2020.

Intimation about Abstracts                  :   30th September, 2020.

Last date of Full papers submission     :   15th December, 2020.

Manuscript Guidelines:

• Your document should be double-spaced, typed in Times New Roman 12-point font. Please double-space your entire document, including Works Cited page.
• Please submit all texts as a Microsoft Word doc. .docx file only.
• Please place your title 14-Point at the top of your document. Under it put your name-only byline.
• All specific book titles should be italicized . Please do not use underliningfor titles (or for any purpose).
• All citation should be done in MLA format 8th edition. In-text citations should resemble this (Vanita 34). Please consult the current MLA Handbook for citation questions. Please do a ‘Works Cited’ and not a Bibliography page. Cite all primary and secondary works referenced in the article including quotes from films, videos, youtube, online blogs, posts and articles.
• Please use endnotes for any textual notes. Use them sparingly, and only when necessary.
• When creating endnotes, do not use your endnotes function on your computer. This causes numerous problems when merging the chapters together into a single document. Instead, merely place your endnotes at the tail end of your article, prior to the Works Cited page. You need not alter the font of the endnotes in anyway. This will be done at a later stage. Use superset script to create the numbers in your text.
• Authors should ensure that the manuscript submitted is not simultaneously submitted to any other Publisher/Journal.
• Word limit 5000-8000.
• Papers should be free from any kind of plagiarism. Plagiarism report of the Research paper duly checked in plagiarism software like Urkund, viper, Turn it in, Plag scan etc.
• Authors should be careful regarding grammatical and typographical errors.

For any assistance, questions or guidance, feel free to contact the Editors:

Dr. Neena Gupta Vij

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Central University of Jammu

Email: [email protected]

Dr. Raj Gaurav Verma

Department of English and Modern European Languages

University of Lucknow

Email: [email protected]

Ms. Vishakha Sen

Amity University Lucknow

Email: [email protected]

List of Literary texts for reference:

Deep Trivedi                   I am Krishna

Saiswaroopa Iyer            Draupadi: The tale of Empress

Gunjan Porwal                Ashwathama’s Redemption: The Rise of Dandak

Anand Neelkantan          Vanara: The Legend of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara

Kevin Missal                   Kalki: Avtar of Vishnu

Ranjit Desai                   Karna: The Great Warrior

Amit Majumdar             Sitayana

Kamesh Ramakrishna   The Making of Bhishma: A Novel

Volga                             Yashodha: A Novel

Vishwas Mudgal           The Last Avatar: Age of Kalki I

Anurag Chandra            The Ramayan Secret

Pradeep Govind             Duryodhana

Radha Viswanath          Ashtmahishi: The Eight Wives of Krishna

Savita Singh                  Yug Purush        

H. A. Padmini               Mahabharata and the Marvellous Cycle of Boons, Curses and Vows

Adity Kay                     Emperor Vikramaditya

Ashok K. Banker

Prince of Ayodhya (Book one of Ramayana) ; Siege of Mithala (Book two of Ramayana) ; Demons of Chitrakut (Book three of Ramayana) ; Armies of Hanuman (Book four of Ramayana) ; Bridge of Rama (Book five of Ramayana) ; King of Ayodhya (Book six of Ramayana) ; Vengeance of Ravana (Book Seven of Ramayana) ; Sons of Sita

The Children of Midnight.

Amish Tripathi (The Shiva Trilogy & Ram Chandra Series)

The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas, The Oath of the Vayuputras

Ram: Scion of Ishkvaku, Sita: Warrior of Mithila, Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta

Sharath Komarraju (Hastinapur series)

The Rise of Hastinapur, Winds Of Hastinapur, The Queens of Hastinapur

Kavita Kane

The Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen, Sita's Sister, Menaka's Choice, Lanka's Princess, The FisherQueen’s Dynasty

Devdutt Pattanaik

Jaya, Gita, Sita, The Pregnant King, Shiva, Vishnu, Pashu, Devlok Series.

Utkarsh Patel

Kannagi’s Anklet, Satyavati, Shakuntala

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

MYTHS AND MYTHICAL NARRATIVES BASED ON INDIAN EPICS THE RAMAYANA AND THE MAHABHARATA: A STUDY THROUGH THE REVISIONIST TEXTS

Bharat (INDIA) is an elite country with its valuable epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. They are so scintillating that modern iconic writers are fascinated with the Indian myths and present their work with the usage of various hues of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These epics overflow with vibrant characters. They present the social, moral, political, cultural and spiritual society of ourcountry. Our Indian literature is too vast to understand every aspect of Indian mythology. This paper is an attempt to explore some of the mythical narratives of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as reflected in select revisionist texts. The epic Ramayana represents the period of Tretayug, when the atmosphere and the people were not as much toxic as they were in the Mahabharata era. The Mahabharatais the epic of belligerent characters and storiesfrom the concluding period of Dwaparyug. Mythical narratives are based on the traditional stories of our Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads and many ancient stories of Indian mythology. In this paper,the researchers will take the help of some revisionist texts to explore further on some myths and mythical narratives. The selected revisionist texts which will be taken for study are – Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita, Vayu Naidu's Sita's Ascent and Pratibha Ray's Yajnaseni. It is said that Valmiki's Ramayana is totally a mythical narrative of the life of Ram and Sita. Similarly, in the epic Mahabharata, Ved Vyas has created an ocean of myths and mythical characters with all the aspects of human life. Rework on these two epics by revisionist writers display their significant features and values in our lives.

Related Papers

VEDA'S JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE [JOELL]

Bharat (INDIA) is an elite country with its valuable epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. They are so scintillating that modern iconic writers are fascinated with the Indian myths and present their work with the usage of various hues of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These epics overflow with vibrant characters. They present the social, moral, political, cultural and spiritual society of ourcountry. Our Indian literature is too vast to understand every aspect of Indian mythology. This paper is an attempt to explore some of the mythical narratives of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as reflected in select revisionist texts. The epic Ramayana represents the period of Tretayug, when the atmosphere and the people were not as much toxic as they were in the Mahabharata era. The Mahabharatais the epic of belligerent characters and storiesfrom the concluding period of Dwaparyug. Mythical narratives are based on the traditional stories of our Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads and many ancient stories of Indian mythology. In this paper,the researchers will take the help of some revisionist texts to explore further on some myths and mythical narratives. The selected revisionist texts which will be taken for study are – Devdutt Pattanaik’s Sita, Vayu Naidu’s Sita’s Ascent and Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni. It is said that Valmiki’s Ramayana is totally a mythical narrative of the life of Ram and Sita. Similarly, in the epic Mahabharata, Ved Vyas has created an ocean of myths and mythical characters with all the aspects of human life. Rework on these two epics by revisionist writers display their significant features and values in our lives.

Vidya Shetty

The presence of issues related to patriarchal dominance and biased gender roles form a part and parcel of all feminist texts. Indian writers have been portraying women's inferior status in the family and larger community since ages. With the growth of revisionist literature, many authors have been retelling stories from The Ramayana, The Mahabharata and several Indian myths and religious texts to explore the under-represented women's voices. These unidimensional narratives, sugar-coated from the patriarchal perspective, are being revised in order to explore the possibility of alternate retellings. The stories of the two heroines in our great epics, Sita and Draupadi, form the most popular subject matter of such revisions. Whereas writers like Devdutt Pattanaik has represented these central protagonists without much revisions of their original tales, in the works of authors like Amish Tripathi, Divakaruni and Pratibha Ray, Sita and Draupadi are presented from quite different perspectives than the original ones. Thus, revisionist texts do not hesitate to present a Sita as a warrior and the minister of Mithila or a Draupadi who hates to cook, openly admires Karna and does not hesitate to oppose her mother-in-law. In addition to the shift in perspectives, revisionist texts also serve the purpose of exploring unexplored voices like that of Sita's sister, Urmila or Karna's wife, Uruvi. However, even though stories of different times and places, the narratives of these women portray the predominance of patriarchal hegemony in varied ways. This paper is an attempt to study the feminist strands in the stories of Goddess Lakshmi, Sita, Draupadi and Uruvi in select revisionist texts, while exploring the common strands of gender inequality and patriarchal subordination that they are subjected to. The study also seeks to probe into the different phases of their lives to establish a connect in the ways they act and react in similar situations.

Tanvi Mohile

Danielle Feller

The two sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa contain few descriptions of their heroes' childhood. Semantically, childhood implies stupidity, ignorance, and thoughtlessness, at times bordering on cruelty. Usually, the time of childhood is dealt with rather quickly, and seen essentially as a period of formation and learning. In the few instances when specific incidents of a character's childhood are mentioned, they are mostly cast in a negative light and meant to explain why certain untoward events happen subsequently. The young kṣatriyas' exuberant childhood deeds are often frowned upon by the brahmin authors or brahmin protagonists of the story, while the young brahmins are often shown as born with full language skills and knowledge of the Vedas, in order to skip over their time of childhood altogether.

Bikash Sarker

This paper talks about on the gender issues specifically in the background of The Mahabharata. In this paper the readers can realize easily the normative ideologies which against some incidents violate the normative and traditional gender notions or ideas through some major characters. It will be very understandable to the readers how male and female both are victims of those traditional gender notions and also the orthodox society rules.

Alisha Oli Mohammed

Indian Literature comprises several literatures-Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, and Malayalam. These literatures flourish today on the literary scene and most of these are distributed on a broadly which are called as "Regional Writings" in the mother tongue. Indian Mythology had a long history with millenniums and many gods and deities. Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik (1970-till date) is an Indian physician turned mythologist, author, theorist whose works focus largely on the area of myth, religion and mythology. The researcher's work Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don't Tell You is a collection of short stories from various Indian myths across India. Devdutt exposures that the Queer narratives in Indian folklores which describe about the gays and lesbians and hijras of Indian society It accepts Queer behaviour, be it cross dressing or homosexual intercourse, as perfectly natural, it leaves its social acceptance or rejection to culture, which is an artificial dynamic and artificial construct. The short story collection lights the suppressed voices of suppressed personalities in the Grand Narratives of Indian mythology, the analyses of these stories in which individuals of this age are resisted the hegemonic notion of gender and class.

DIOTIMA'S A JOURNAL OF NEW READINGS

Sanil M Neelakandan

This paper attempts to analyse the dominant cultures of reading Warli paintings.

Sushree Smita Raj

The Mahabharata in the Tribal and Folk Traditions of …

Dr.Mahendra K U M A R Mishra

haranadh gowrabathuni

There are lots of female characters in Mahabharata and Ramayana but few characters enchant people of all ages and all classes. Mass people admit that Sita should be the icon of all women. Draupadi though a graceful character yet not to be imitated. Comparatively, Gandhari's entrance into the epic is for a short while; though her appearance is very negligible, yet our research work is to show logically that Gandhari among these three characters is greater than the greatest. We think and have wanted to prove that Gandhari with her short appearance in the epic, excels all other female characters-depicted in Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Pradip Bhattacharya

AABS Publishing House, Kolkata, India

Alf Hiltebeitel , Alfred Hiltebeitel

Roshni Sengupta

Christopher T . Fleming

Aarttee Kaul Dhar

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Alankrita Anand

Pallavi Rajankar

Vishwa Adluri , Joydeep Bagchee , Fernando Wulff Alonso

Parvin Sultana

Romanian Journal of Indian Studies

R.K.K. Rajarajan

Foreword to Krishna Rajya

Koenraad Elst

Manav Kambli

Argument and Design

Vishwa Adluri

Representation of Myth in Traditional Tharu Songs

Indian Genre Fiction

Chinmay Sharma

Regiane Corrêa

Aniket Majumdar

Praggnaparamita Biswas

Bobby Kaushal

Adam Bowles

Gauri Mahulikar

Sarah Weiss

Lakshmi Bandlamudi

Peter Bisschop

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator

First published August 18, 2005

Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols and Rituals from the Heart of the Subcontinent

An exploration of 99 classic myths of India from an entirely non-Western paradigm that provides a fresh understanding of the Hindu spiritual landscape. Compares and contrasts Indian mythology with the stories of the Bible, ancient Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, and Mesopotamia. Looks at the evolution of Indian narratives and their interpretations over the millennia. Demonstrates how the mythology, rituals, and art of ancient India are still vibrant today and inform the contemporary generation. From the blood-letting Kali to the mysterious Ganesha, the Hindu spiritual landscape is populated by characters that find no parallel in the Western spiritual world.

Indian Mythology explores the rich tapestry of these characters within 99 classic myths, showing that the mythological world of India can be best understood when we move away from a Western, monotheistic mindset and into the polytheistic world of Hindu traditions. Featuring 48 artistic renderings of important mythological figures from across India, the author unlocks the mysteries of the narratives, rituals, and artwork of ancient India to reveal the tension between world-affirming and world-rejecting ideas, between conformism and contradiction, between Shiva and Vishnu, Krishna and Rama, Gauri and Kali. This groundbreaking book opens the door to the unknown and exotic, providing a glimpse into the rich mythic tradition that has empowered millions of human beings for centuries.

Recent Books

Abc of hinduism for kids.

With its simple writing style and fun, colourful illustrations, ABC of Hinduism for Kids is the perfect introduction to a Hindu way of life for your little ones…

Sati Savitri

You have heard tales of patriarchy. This book tells you the other tales―the ones they don’t tell you…

Garud Puran (Hindi translation of ‘Garuda Purana’)

Garud Puran – Hindi Translation…

Tirthankar: Jain Dharm Par 63 Vichar

by Devdutt Pattanaik (Author), Mihir Nilum Jajodia (Translator) …