Keeping Myth Memory Alive: The Usual and the Unusual in Sudha Murty’s Unusual Tales Series

Abstract

If myth is vital to a community, its memory must be kept alive. But how, is the question? Is it always prudent to remain faithful to the ‘original’ version of the received myth, or is it desirable to tamper with, or destabilize, the source myth? In India, mainstream versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have long been disrupted by folk, feminist, and queer adaptations. Reversions of these oral, transhistorical master narratives of Hinduism have made a resurgence in a post-independence India that is precariously perched between tradition and modernity, and hence more acutely desirous that its children veer closer to their roots, or so the flourishing market for myth retellings for children suggests. Amongst this incandescent body of literature is Sudha Murty’s series of five books that revisits popular stories about the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon — The Serpent’s Revenge: Unusual Tales from the Mahabharata (2016), The Man from the Egg: Unusual Tales about the Trinity (2017), The Upside Down King: Unusual Tales about Rama and Krishna (2018), The Daughter from a Wishing Tree: Unusual Tales about Women in Mythology (2019), and The Sage with Two Horns: Unusual Tales from Mythology (2021). This paper explores how these tales of antiquity, refracted and reconstructed through the author’s own personal memory, intersect with the more public and collective myth memory of the community. In reviewing Murty’s retrieval of myths by reimagining and re-situating the ‘evidentiary traces’ of myth in the here and now for the children of today, it interrogates how, if at all, the retold myths counter the metanarratives of gender, religion, culture and perhaps, history too. Finally, it argues that the genre of myth retelling must go beyond simply reviving myth memory to destabilizing myth by ‘fiddling ‘with the sacred, especially when adapted for children.