Modern Retelling of Indian Myths: A Study of Rehashing Mythology Through Popular Fictions

Indian fictional landscape has witnessed a significant swing in almost all spheres of life especially in the 21st century. In fact, it has been going through a generational change. We have left our borrowed colonial attire far behind and want to read and write more about our own roots, shadows and cultural twigs. By attributing scientific explanations to the conventional cultural ethics, the contemporary writers have recast the indigenous Indian culture with a refreshing perspective which has definitely revived the rich tradition of Indian ‘heroic age' and revolutionized the Indian Writing in English in order to acquaint the Indian readers with ancient Indian culture and history. The present paper will study the selected texts of contemporary popular fictional writers, which include, Anand Neelkatan's Asura and Ajaya, Krishna Udayashankar's Aryavarta Chronicles, Amish Tripathi's Shiva Trilogy, Rajiv G. Menonn's The Ascendance of Indra,, Sharath Komarraju's The Winds of Hastinapur, and Shamik Dasgupta's Ramayan 3392 A.D. Series. The paper focuses on examining how these texts display an array of divergent attitudes towards the characters and incidents in the Indian Epics and Mythology, how these versions of ancient texts reinterpret the mythical past, and how the respective authors utilize myth creatively for coming to terms with the predicament of the present.