Contemporizing Mythology: A Critical Study of Amish Tripathi’sWorks

Abstract

Myths are a community’s legacies that are passed on over generations. They are open to interpretation, re-interpretation, re-creation, and review. This gives myths a transient quality and the narrators and writers of myths a license to revitalize them and change who the reader sees as hero, villain, reliable, un-reliable, good, bad, deity and human. Literary retellings of myths often focus on specific characters and tell their story from a perspective that may or may not have been told in a dominant narrative. The retelling of myth also contemporizes it in so far as it includes the contemporary socio-cultural sensibilities in it. The paper shall focus on how certain modern retellings of ancient Indian myths contemporize the context so that the reader is no longer reading the epic or a moral fable but rather an interesting novel that serves as a constant companion during lunch breaks or during metro rides.