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

October 1, 2025
1:45 pm
UGX61
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

Presentations

Scary Tales: Nepalese Ghost Stories from Classic Texts to Social Media and Horror Movies
Torri Davide - SARAS, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy
Of Transposed Heads and Transformed Ontologies: The Case of Chandamama issues from the mid-1950s.
Tiwari Neha - University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
The uses of ‘folk’ in the making, remaking, and reception of Vijaydan Detha’s ‘Duvidhyau’/’Duvidha’
Karnick Anirudh - University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Upside-Down Purāṇ”: A Bengali Mock-Purāṇa from 1927
Cappello Daniela - University L'Orientale of Naples, University L'Orientale of Naples, Napoli, Italy
Laughing at the Undead: When Indo-Himalayan Folklore Meets Western Zombies in Go Goa Gone
Armand Fabio - Sciences and Humanities Confluences Research Center (EA1598), Catholic University of Lyon (UCLy), Lyon, France
Yamarāja and satire in Indian postcolonial Hindi literature, movies and performing arts
Mangraviti Fabio - Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali - ISO, Sapienza, University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Smugglers and Sycophants: Postcolonial Satirical Subversions of the Ramayana in Aubrey Menen and Hariśaṅkar Parsāī
Syed M. Khalid - University of Oxford, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom