New Delhi: Europeans and Americans have retold Indic mythologies umpteen times but now mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik attempts to reverse the gaze by retelling Greek myths.
“Olympus: An Indian Retelling of the Greek Myths” tries to decode the Greek mythology. In the process he wants to show the difference between Greek and Hindu mythologies.
“Indic mythologies – Hindu, Buddhist and Jain – do not follow the linear structure that Greek storytellers (from chaos to cosmos) or Greek philosophers (from faith to reason) or Christian missionaries (from many gods to one God)
…or scientists and activists (from unjust feudal faith to fair egalitarian development) prefer. It has its own structure: a cyclical one,” the author says.
Western mythology, according to him, propagates the idea that the world is in need of changing, either by Greek heroes, or by Abrahamic prophets and kings, or by scientists, activists and capitalists.
“Indic mythology presents the idea that the world is constantly changing, human intervention notwithstanding. There are no heroes or villains, no oppressor or oppressed, no saviour or martyr, just different ways of looking at reality.
