Et si les vaincus avaient leur mot à dire… Écritures alternatives des mythes indiens

Abstract

As in other cultures, contemporary writers in India are retelling ancient myths from a new perspective. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) and Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni: The Story of Draupadi (1995) thus relay one of the major works of Hindu culture, the Mahābhārata, through the eyes of Draupadi, wife to the five Pandava brothers, while in Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2015), Anand Neelakantan reworks another major myth, the Rāmāyana, to give voice to an even more marginalized cast-out, the demon Rāvana, as does Arun Kukreja in his play Dashaanan (2004). The idealized male heroes of Indian mythology thus come under the scathing gaze of their wife or opponent, and the core values of ancient myth are radically questioned.