Countless Ramayanas: Language and Cosmopolitan Belonging in a South Asian Epic

Abstract

The Kiski Kahani project in Pune, India, is a not-for-profit program that compiles stories of the Ramayana, a South Asian epic, and publishes them in English. Kiski Kahani’s ideology rejects the Hindu nationalist master narrative of the Ramayana, and privileges the fragmentary, improvised stories of the epics. As a socially grounded language practice, Kiski Kahani’s retellings are grounded in pan-Indian, cosmopolitan modalities that index a sense of belonging to a pluri-cultural nation: the use of English rather than Hindi or Marathi, and a curation of stories from diverse Indian regions and languages that develops an emerging genre.