53 – Recasting classics and traditional genres in South Asia: refractions, satirical deviations, adaptations

This panel explores retellings and refractions of Indian traditional narrative forms in modern literature and other media (movies, theatre, comics, music, social media) to see how these are repurposed for new audiences in modern and contemporary South Asia. The phenomenon of translation and adaptation of classical texts in India has been a longstanding one in the multilingual literary ecosystem of South Asia: throughout modernity, transmission-through-translation in the vernacular languages has been a distinct trait of India's literary culture, reflecting the multilingual economy of this region. Emblematic in this sense is the rewriting of the Hindu epics, starting from their vernacular recensions to modern transpositions in literature (Stasik 2009), comics and graphic novels (Chandra 2008, McLain 2009), movies and post-millennial mythology fiction (Varughese 2017), all witness to the pervasive and continuous practice of adaptation in modern India. In this panel, we wish to investigate how popular genres, narratives and folk themes are “refracted” (Lefevere 1982) in new languages, public spaces and media cultures in today's South Asia, with a focus on satirical and comic deviations from the classics. We welcome papers exploring Indian classical texts, genres, and popular themes – not limited to Hindu epics but also extending to Perso-Arabic and regional narratives – to discuss their transmission and reception by new audiences through literature, movies, TV, theatre, comics, music and social media. We particularly encourage proposals on different languages of South Asia to highlight the transregional and transcultural character of the panel.

Convenors

Daniela Cappello
- Fabio Mangraviti
- Anirudh Karnick -