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.

Keywords

India, Maharashtra, Ramayana, language, cosmopolitanism, genre and intertextuality

How to Cite

Hakim, R., 2014. Countless Ramayanas: Language and Cosmopolitan Belonging in a South Asian Epic. ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, 21(2), pp.4–14. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ane.117

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Authors

Rafadi Hakim (Carleton College)

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

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