Ramayana & beyond: Epic retellings

Editor’s note: Indian mythology boasts of complex, richly layered stories and characters with a timelessness to them. These great tales of heroism and valour have, over eras and generations, spawned retellings, interpretations, and new reimaginings of the classic tales of Ramayana, Mahabharata, and more. Across time, they have also been used as instruments to fan divisive politics, rendering the act of reading and revisiting various interpretations all the more important. In this enriching reading list, Amritesh Mukherjee looks at retellings of Indian mythology, and the conversations they’ve sparked. 

Written by: Amritesh Mukherjee

(Don't forget to check out our Buy section this week, with recommendations for Ramayana retellings for adults and kids alike!)

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Ramayana

As another big-screen adaptation of the Ramayana arrives, we must remember that the "mainstream" version we accept today isn't the only version of the story, or, for that matter, the primary one. Over the centuries, the story has existed in many shapes and forms, as AK Ramanujan describes brilliantly in his essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’.

Many recent reimaginings have tried to present a distinct version of this epic, even though many still fall back on Valmiki's version. Volga's The Liberation of Sita puts the women of the story at centrestage through Sita's interactions with Surpanakha, Ahalya, Renuka, and Urmila. Each shows her the world differently and makes her reconsider her worldview. They complicate her morality and question the authority of the story imposed upon us. On the Banks of the Pampa, by the same author, retells Sabri's story as an ecofeminist, anti-colonial tale, changing her popular conception of her as a feeble, lower-caste woman waiting to be rescued by Ram into an indigenous woman working to save her surroundings and forests from oppressive kingdoms.

In SL Bhyrappa's Uttara Kaanda, an epic story is seen through the uncertain gaze and experience of one woman, following Sita after her exile from Ayodhya. The book highlights aspects that typical epic stories gloss over—how do you find food and shelter? How do you tackle pregnancy? How do you communicate? What vulnerabilities arise from your surroundings? In the face of duty, where does humanity stand?

Manini J Anandani's Mandodari: Queen of Lanka chooses a different character. Drawing on multiple Ramayana versions, the novel moves beyond the usual caricatures; here, Ravan is a loving, capable husband. The proceedings, thus, ask interesting questions: Can you love someone without agreeing with their decisions? Does fidelity equal complicity? What does a defeated civilisation actually look like beyond the victors' lens? 

Adapting West Bengal's Patua scroll tradition into a linear narrative is Sita's Ramayana by Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar. The anti-war book goes beyond typical valorising heroic traditions and asks how wars between men and kingdoms leave women as nothing but objects: where there is triumph, there is simultaneous devastation too. In Anand Neelakantan's Vanara, Ramayana's monkeys are reimagined as marginalised forest people, derided by the more powerful communities as “monkey men”. In this telling, Kishkindha is a radical political experiment that rejects caste, creed, language, and race, with Baali and Sugreeva growing up as impoverished orphan brothers in a world defined by a Deva-Asura power binary. In doing so, the novel creates a distinct history that eventually collides with the Ramayana.

In Warlord of Ayodhya: Rebellion by Shatrujeet Nath, the novel imagines Ayodhya's story during Ram's 14 years of exile. When Ram was sent to exile, Bharat ruled Ayodhya with his sandals on the throne. But sandals can't govern a kingdom; kings do. Dangers loom on the horizon, and citizens are disappearing. While tackling these dangers, Bharat must also learn statecraft.

In The Missing Queen, Samhita Arni writes a speculative political thriller set after Ram's return to Ayodhya. In her telling, Ayodhya is a modern state with state surveillance, authorised history, regulated public opinion, and a strict security apparatus. An investigative journalist begins asking: what happened to Queen Sita? The novel's ultimate ambition is to highlight the one-sidedness of any story, how characters can be portrayed in certain shades and how stories can be manipulated to create desirable outcomes.

Lest you think revisionist mythology exists only in contemporary Indian publishing, consider an 1861 Bengali classic: Meghnad Badh Kavya by Michael Madhusudan Dutt. The poem radically departs from earlier Ramayana retelling traditions; the nine-canto epic retells the story of Meghnad (or Indrajit), Ravan's warrior son. The book carries strong undercurrents of Western epic scholarship, like Milton's Paradise Lost and the Homeric epics, shaped by Dutt's own engagement with these stories. 

Bhima: Lone Warrior by MT Vasudevan Nair

Randamoozham, a Malayalam classic by MT Vasudevan Nair translated into English by Gita Krishnankutty as Bhima: Lone Warrior, humanises the Mahabharata character known primarily for his brute force. Through his novel, Nair asks what it's like to live as someone indispensable at all times, yet always second in the hierarchy.

Retelling the Pandava story from Bhima's perspective, the book presents an emotionally intelligent man who notices the hypocrisies around him, even as he remains silent out of loyalty. He is a man troubled by political and existential questions, and the Mahabharata's different narrative sequences take on a different emotional shade through this altered perspective.

Yajnaseni by Pratibha Ray

Long before the current flurry of first-person mythological retellings, Pratibha Ray's Yajnaseni—translated by Pradip Bhattacharya—retold the Mahabharata from Draupadi's perspective, addressed to Krishna. Draupadi here is a passionate, proud, jealous, angry woman, and her moral authority doesn’t need a neutral serenity. 

It reinvestigates, in particular, the many conflicts inherent to Draupadi's existence: being an individual while being married to five men, being a daughter and queen without having any independent political authority, being a symbol of honour while constantly viewed as a vehicle for male honour, having to show dignity amongst all these contradictions.

The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

One of the most widely read Anglophone Mahabharata retellings in recent times, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions is another novel from Draupadi's (or Panchali's) perspective. From her miraculous birth from fire to her dramatic marriage and the tumultuous life that followed, the novel showcases the many patriarchal restrictions and restraints that bind her choices. 

Like Ray, she shows the many contradictions of womanhood: an enchantress and a strategist, a participant in and victim of a war-torn world. Rather than reimagining the epic, she fills the gaps left by the original, shifting its moral and emotional texture by changing its point of view.

Yayati by VS Khandekar

A 1959 Marathi classic, Yayati by VS Khandekar, translated by YP Kulkarni, uses a compact episode from the Mahabharata to create a cautionary tale about appetite. It tells the story of Yayati, married to Shukracharya's daughter Devyani while also having a relationship with Sharmistha, Devyani's former companion and the daughter of an Asura king, creating a triangle of love, sex, status, and resentment.

Desire here extends beyond the erotic. Desire can be of recognition, control, revenge, safety, and power. Through multiple perspectives, the novel casts the same moments in different moral light, showing how self-justifications can explain any craving. Ultimately, the novel is our story: our never-ending desire to find just one more thing that will satisfy our appetite.

The Pregnant King by Devdutt Pattanaik

Humanity loves classification: father or mother, husband or wife, man or woman. But our bodies are more fluid; our identities more complex. Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King collects such complexities. Its titular story tells of a childless king, Yuvanashva, who accidentally drinks a ritual potion meant to make his queens conceive. But does giving birth alter your masculinity? Can a king also be a mother?

Other stories raise similar questions: Somvat, who changes sex to become a wife; Shikhandi, who undergoes gender transformation to exact revenge; the period when Arjun lived as a woman; and other divine figures who go beyond the male-female binary. These stories show that Indian mythology contains ample material that complicates our modern, rigid ideas around gender. Retelling, therefore, becomes more a process of excavation than one of modernisation.

Parva by SL Bhyrappa

Amid stories of valour and conspiracy, the Mahabharata's many orthodox, regressive aspects often go unmentioned. Through his retelling, SL Bhyrappa's Parva, translated by K. Raghavendra Rao, tries to understand the political, economic, sexual, and social arrangements behind these mythic events. 

Through shifting perspectives and recollected memories, he interrogates the institutions of polyandry, caste, monarchical succession, marriage politics, and the claims of Arya Dharma. He strips the story's supernatural elements to present a more grounded version, and its thousand pages of narrative bring forth the epic's complexity in all its forms and shades.

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean by Amruta Patil

Using charcoal, watercolour, collage, patterned textiles, typography, astronomical motifs, double helices, Tibetan lotuses, and cross-cultural mythic images, Amruta Patil's Adi Parva is a magnificent feat of visual storytelling that retells the beginnings of the Mahabharata. It covers the narrative prehistory before the Pandavas' adult conflicts: from cosmic creation to the churning of the ocean, and from the story of Ganga and Shantanu to Hastinapur's succession crisis.

Through her narrator Ganga, she captures the many streams of these myths, with her visual elements capturing their plurality. Every brushstroke makes visible the hundreds of other lines that helped create this epic.

Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata by Karthika Naïr

Karthika Naïr's Until the Lions, instead of focusing on one sidelined character, distributes voice to many: women and minor men, non-human beings, and other creatures whose experiences are seldom chronicled, seldom remembered. Through these fragments, the book explores the Mahabharata.

The book's polymorphic format, including the sestina, pantoum, glosa, landay, Tamil andadi, and prose poems, helps portray these characters' polyphonic perspectives. Though they may replace the original, retellings often settle on a unitary perspective. Naïr changes this by asking why there should be only one.

The Prince by Samhita Arni

Indian storytelling lives in the shadow of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and this list of recommendations reflects that, too. To end on a different note, we have Samhita Arni's The Prince, which reimagines the life of the Jain monk-poet Ilango Adigal, author of the great Tamil epic ‘Silappadikaram’. The novel is both a mythological retelling and a novel about the making of mythology.

The young Chera prince Uthiyan begins a dangerous journey beyond his court's security when an astrologer predicts he may be destined for greater things, despite his elder brother, Senguttuvan, being positioned as heir. As he travels through the kingdoms and hears stories of ancient Tamilakam, he encounters conflicts anyone familiar with Silappadikaram will recognise. The novel, ultimately, asks these universal questions—how do you convert anger into a form of ethical action? How do you use poetry for political work? How do you bring personal convictions into political change?

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Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and journalist—mostly in that order. Covering literature, cinema, and art through his writings, he’s fascinated by the stories that shape our world.