The mythologist's many heads: an encounter with Devdutt Pattanaik

[Here is a longer version of a profile-interview I did of mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik for Open magazine. I admire a lot of Pattanaik’s work, but I also feel there are a few blind spots - including the disproportionate amount of scorn he directs at atheists and “secularists” - and have tried to mention them in this piece. Along with a brief account of a phone conversation where he lost his temper at me.

There wasn’t enough space here to get into details about that conversation (and it would have been too self-indulgent for this magazine piece anyway), but I’ll soon put up a rough account of what happened]

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Early in his new book My Hanuman Chalisa – a verse-by-verse discussion of one of Hinduism’s most popular devotional hymns – mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik offers an insight about “north” and “south” in the Ramayana. These are not literal references to north and south India, he says, but metaphors that reflect attitudes or states of mind: the north is an empathetic, caring world while the south stands for fear, insecurity and covetousness. And in between them “is the land of the monkeys, our animal core, that can move either way, towards Rama or towards Ravana”. Hanuman, he writes a little later, “stands on the frontier between wilderness and settlement, between the animal and the human world”.

Speaking to Pattanaik on the phone, I tell him that on reading this sort of analysis – and there is plenty else like it in his books – I think of him as a version of the literary or film critic who offers subtextual interpretations and new ways of looking.

He chuckles softly, doesn’t say what he thinks of the comparison (later I will have reason to reflect that he probably didn’t approve), but affirms the importance of subjectivity and open-mindedness. The “my” in the title of the new book is essential, as it was in his earlier My Gita. “When you deny the possessive pronoun, you are propagating the idea that your view is the single, objective one. But in the same way that we might read the same poetry and see different things in it – or get different things out of Shakespeare’s plays – we can respond differently to myths too. There are so many diverse ways of looking at the same things.” In his Introduction to My Hanuman Chalisa, he states that he isn’t interested in locating a definitive truth but in “expanding ‘my’ truth and the truth of my readers”.

He wanted to analyse and decode these hymns – composed by Tulsidas more than four centuries ago – because “we have all read and heard and played them, they are ubiquitous, but I wondered: do we actually listen to the words and pay attention to their meaning? I wanted to make it accessible to a younger generation.”

“The worldview it expresses is very Indian, and can be hard to explain to a Western reader or someone who has been trained to look at things through a Western lens. It’s difficult to explain, for instance, why Hanuman is even there – and treated as a God in his own right – when the god Rama is already the centre of the epic. Many people don’t understand this tradition of multiple Gods or demi-Gods, and Indians tend to go on the defensive too: if a friend comes and asks ‘why do you worship a monkey’, we don’t know what to say, we can’t explain.”

These are running themes of his prolific career as a writer and lecturer: that Indian myths are so fluid, wide-ranging and ambiguous that they can confuse or daunt even devout readers, who don’t always know how to make sense of them; that because Hinduism, compared to the other major faiths, doesn’t have a single canonical or prescriptive text, it is often decried by those who hanker after certainties. This is where Pattanaik sees himself coming in, to “join the dots”. To distill or synthesize myths, make sense of them for modern readers.

He has been doing this for over twenty years now, a period that has seen the publication of thirty books and hundreds of articles, all dealing broadly with myths and what they may teach us. The output includes lucid retellings of the epics (Jaya and Sita, about the Mahabharata and Ramayana respectively), examinations of the many legends surrounding a specific deity (99 Thoughts on Ganesha), books for children (Pashu: Animal Tales from Indian Mythology) and guides for management students and entrepreneurs (Business Sutra).

He has also written about non-Indian mythology, notably in Olympus: An Indian Retelling of the Greek Myths, published last year. “I wanted to reverse the gaze. When Roberto Calasso and Wendy Doniger write about Indian myths, they are eagerly published and their work is seen as more valid somehow. Which would probably not have been the case if Doniger had been African-American or Calasso had been from Beijing University! We have to study other cultures too, to understand what is special about ours. My intention was to bring my perspective to these non-Indian myths and say, let’s have a conversation.”

Through all these books, one constant is Pattanaik’s delightful illustrations, which are minimalist yet detailed, affectionate and drolly funny at the same time. “I have been drawing from a very early age,” he says, “and I often find that I can’t properly explain something unless I draw it – this helps me achieve clarity in my own mind.”

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One of my favourites among those hundreds of drawings is a seated Ravana as a “strategic” figure, a CEO of his era, with the ten heads depicted as blank square boxes, spread out in a pyramidal pattern that evokes flowchart boxes in computer-science classes of 20 years ago; this image is in the just-published Leader: 50 Insights from Mythology. I was looking at it in the company of a friend when the latter said “Pattanaik has ten heads himself.”

This was an admiring reference to the many sides of the mythologist’s personality: from the well-travelled motivational speaker to the disciplined author who maintains a solitary writing schedule each morning to the management guru who serves as consultant to high-profile businessmen. And someone who subtly tailors his work to the demands of many readerships and publishing houses. One of his finest books, Shikhandi and Other Tales They Didn’t Tell You – an exploration of gender roles and alternate sexuality in myths – was done for the feminist publishing house Zubaan. Another, The Girl Who Chose: A New Way of Narrating the Ramayana, is with the children’s publisher Puffin. In a charming video introduction to this book, he relates how a schoolteacher asked him to use the Ramayana to impart good values to children, and he raised an eyebrow and said “A book that begins ‘There was a king who had three wives’ – you think children will get good values from that?!” (Of course, this little joke didn’t prevent him from doing the book, and reframing the story to make it appeal to youngsters.)

“I enjoy writing for different sorts of readers,” he says. “There is a lot of adapting: for business people, outcomes tend to be important; when writing for children, you have to be more linear. I like all these modes – it forces me to think about what I’m saying, and how best to say it.”

Apart from the many Pattanaiks on view in his books, there are also the avatars that show up in television shows, interviews, video-blogs – and of course, on social media, where he often comes up against people who disagree with or attack him. Including the “trolls” to whom he has dedicated My Hanuman Chalisa.

It isn’t easy being a moderate – and a very high-profile one – in a field where emotions are easily inflamed, and at a time when the growth of a virulent, chauvinistic Hindutva can lead the softer, more reflective aspects of the religion to become tainted by association. In such a climate, someone like Pattanaik draws fire from both religious literalists – who take offence to the mildest observation that doesn’t chime with their rigid beliefs – and from those secular-liberals who find any close engagement with old texts problematic.

To the irreligious mind, some of the things he writes can sound like sophistry, faux-philosophy or even mumbo-jumbo; to a religious Hindu, the very same things can seem inappropriate or upsetting. And so, it isn’t uncommon to see him being assailed, at the same time, as a Hindutva apologist AND as a betrayer of sacrosanct texts. “The Ramayana is the Ramayana – it doesn’t change” someone scolds him on Twitter when he mentions that there are many versions of the epic apart from the mainstream one favoured by the Hindi-speaking belt. When he posts a tweet that goes “Did Ram live 7000 years ago and Krishna live 5000 years ago? No way to verify it”, there are angry comments about “scientific dating” through the Ram Setu bridge.

“Everyone who has an agenda will hate you when you write something that discomfits them, and love you when you affirm their point of view,” he tells me. “I have no agenda – I don’t want to save the world, only understand it.”

It does seem, though – and this could be my own bias at work now – that Pattanaik finds it easier to sympathize with and engage with the religious mind than the non-religious one; that he is more willing to hit out at the “secularists”, the “atheist fundamentalists” as he sees them, than at religious hardliners.

At one point, instead of answering a question I ask about his views on hardline Hindutva – including the triumphal narrative about building a Hindu rashtra by harking on the supposed glories of the past – he chooses to lash out, again, at atheists – as if villains like Richard Dawkins were running around killing people in the name of their “militant un-beliefs”. The ISIS and RSS, he says, very perplexingly, “are engendered by atheists and secularists who deny the role of the sacred and the transcendental in the world. They create the monsters we fear and claim innocence.”

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But if liberals can be described as fundamentalist, it is just as possible for a mythologist – even a moderate one – to become inflexible. Beneath the soft-spoken, genial man who values subjectivity and discussion – and prefaces much of what he writes with a humble-sounding epigraph about how the Gods may have a thousand or a hundred eyes, but “you and I, only two” – there may be another, more complex Pattanaik: someone who is very conscious of his reputation as a guru, and can get riled when his definitions are questioned.

I sense this during a second phone conversation, when I mention that as a Mahabharata-obsessive, I see the epic primarily as a great work of literature, and ask if Pattanaik can clarify the distinction – as he sees it – between myths and fiction. At this point, he becomes very annoyed, as if the difference is a clear-cut one that should be obvious to anyone, and says reductive things about fiction being just entertainment. “Would you compare Harry Potter to the Bible?”

“Myth = somebody's truth,” he writes in a tweet. “Fiction = nobody's truth.” But isn’t this a very limited view of what good fiction – or literature – can be? Any such writing – regardless of genre or the many other labels critics stick on literature – can contain deep poetic truths and can teach us a great deal about people and their lives.

When I suggest that the line between myth and fiction may not be so clear, the conversation takes a southward turn and Pattanaik loses his composure, accuses me of disrespecting the dearly held beliefs of others by calling them “just fiction”, and wonders if I would tell my grandmother that her Krishna murtis were like Barbie dolls. Notably, he frames the concept of disrespect in a way that is common among those who believe religious sentiments are automatically more important and respect-worthy than any other sort; in such a framing, non-believers are better off keeping their mouths shut all the time! But Pattanaik may be doing religious people (especially those within a traditionally open-ended faith like Hinduism) a disservice by treating them as a homogenous group of infants whose feelings must never be hurt, nor their views challenged – and as being incapable of having nuanced conversations about faith and lack of faith.

He apologizes subsequently for having lost his cool, soon returns to his usual gracious, soft-spoken self – but just for a few minutes it was as if a Ravana had lost one of his heads.

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As a writer, Pattanaik has a sense of humour, the ability to make interesting connections between ancient and modern life, and can be very frank and inclusive when it comes to topics like sexuality –or when providing information about the many regional interpolations of the epics, as he scrupulously does in Jaya’s chapter endnotes. But there are little blind-spots too, such as a deep suspicion of retellings or analyses that stress certain viewpoints or political positions. “Nowadays,” he says, “there are these bizarre writings that look at myths purely through the lens of Dalit oppression, or present them as misogynistic from the feminist point of view, or try to further the RSS agenda.”

Since you champion subjectivity, I ask him, why are those readings any less valid than the benevolent, comforting ones? Why would the perspective of a marginalized, underprivileged character not be just as important?

“But how many of these writers stay open-minded about alternate interpretations?” Pattanaik responds. “They market their version as the only possible one. Words like ‘privilege’ are political words, used with an agenda, and these writers don’t recognize their own agendas. Literature is politicized, academia is confused with activism. I have never heard a proponent of the feminist or Dalit view say ‘here is one possible point of view’ – it is always more rigid than that.”

There is a sliver of truth in this. The use of a purely political or ideological lens to look at creative works – at the cost of closely engaging with the human complexities in those works – is a familiar one, and it often tars literary and film criticism too. Personally, I have plenty of experience of people who, without having closely read the Ramayana, will reflexively make sweeping statements about Rama being a bad husband (in much the same way that rigidly religious people will refuse to see Rama as anything other than a God whose actions mustn’t be questioned).

However, it is problematic to say that privilege and under-privilege are just political terms – they are real things and take many forms, including more complex, intersecting, context-dependent ones than caste or gender inequality. To take one instance, the mighty Pandava prince Bhima would not be deemed unprivileged in any conventional sense of the word – yet, in MT Vasudevan Nair’s excellent Randaamoozham, Bhima – the narrator-protagonist – is decidedly the underdog, forever in the shadows of his siblings Arjuna and Yudhisthira. He sees himself as hard done by, and this is necessarily the lens through which the whole of that book unfolds; it would be silly to expect the author to provide a “balanced” viewpoint.

And yes, there is something either disingenuous or deluded about any position that goes: “Other people have agendas. I do not.” To some degree or other, everyone has biases, born of countless unquantifiable life experiences. The impulse to be seen as an authority figure, a conduit who provides wisdom, can be a sort of agenda too – a non-malicious one, but one that might grow over time as you become a bestselling author and protective of your own image.

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[I have written way too many posts on the Mahabharata and other mythological works to link to individually, but you'll find a few dozen of them here. Also, here is a piece about Randaamoozham. And a piece about so-called liberal "extremism" here - with a comments section that's more invigorating than the post]