The entrance to the Waterstones Club in Mumbai is ritzy — you must turn off of a road lined with the city’s best hotels, pass through a gated entrance and enter through a very Western, almost colonial-seeming path to the clubhouse, where suited waiters and a swimming pool, among other amenities, await.
The only real sign you’re in India is the muted sound of honking horns behind you, and the gods peopling your way: a squat statue of the elephant deity Ganesha just outside the entrance, a few bobblehead figurines sitting on the dashboards of air-conditioned cars in the parking lot. For me, it’s also the man I’m here to meet: Devdutt Pattanaik, a former doctor whose profession today is even more Indian than medicine — he’s the country’s most famous mythologist.
When we say “myth” today in India, we mean anything but some Barthesian theory — ancient myths of the many Hindu gods here are alive, well and quotidian. Pattanaik is a case study; his nearly 30 published books top best-seller lists and he’s not some esoteric folklore commentator. He has hosted his own CNBC show and delivered a TED Talk and is frequently called upon to enlighten the masses about their spiritual history. And, somehow, his expertise in mythology has also had him once holding the title of “Chief Belief Officer” of Future Group, a retail company, and doing some management consulting for good measure — because, as he tells me, “mythology is a map to the human mind.”
You don’t pray, you petition, you have a personal conversation with God.
Pattanaik, 45, is not alone as a mythologist working in the extreme mainstream. Many Indian children have grown up on Amar Chitra Katha comic books, which tell stylized, colorful versions of epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. TV airwaves are full of serialized, sometimes melodramatic versions in every conceivable language and beamed (often through YouTube) to the Indian diaspora. There are even video games. And the airline-quality paperback novels of the year — the Immortals of Meluha series — are a trilogy all about the life and somewhat Game of Thrones–like adventures of the god Shiva. Pattanaik, says Philip Lutgendorf, a professor of Hindi and modern Indian studies at the University of Iowa, is “following a long tradition of people retelling ancient tales in the present.” The pop cultural omnipresence of myth has shown watchers like Lutgendorf a lot about the “creativity” of the retellers, who manage to keep making the myths relevant. But it’s also caused some critics, he says, to worry that the tales are watered down, stripped of nuance.
In person, Pattanaik, slightly squat with a wide smile, doesn’t come across as a storyteller. For one, he oscillates between being a bit clammed up and delivering long, occasionally polemical speeches. For another, he wears doctor-esque glasses and frequently cites his medical training — “You have to be specific in medicine,” he says, launching into a minor diatribe against those who study myth without the guiding hand of evidence or data. A mere breath afterward, though, he dives into another speech, on the limitations of Western rationality, its assumptions of objectivity, its obsession with order and its inability to comprehend India’s disordered order. Hm? “Everybody’s seeking the Truth,’ ” he tells me. What’s the other option, I ask? “Subjectivity.” Pause. Well, he hedges, “India hasn’t really created its own framework yet.”‘
Resource: http://www.ozy.com
No comments:
Post a Comment