Patua Ramayana: Sita’s Telling

Abstract

Myths are ubiquitous in Indian cultures. Evolving through narratives transmitted in various forms (oral, written, visual, and combinations of these), myths have persisted in our cultural traditions and permeated our popular imagination. Various art-forms have drawn on myths and cast them in interesting new moulds relevant to contemporary social and political contexts. When transmitted through diverse forms and media, the mythological narratives undergo both intermedial and intramedial translations, thus  acquiring “parallel lives” (Ramanujan, “Tell It to the Walls” 465) in different Indian traditions. For instance, well-known episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have transmuted into different stories as they are incorporated and disseminated into diverse traditions in South Asia and South-East Asia. These plural living traditions foreground multiple interpretations as envisioned by the translator-creator and their audiences. The present paper attempts to explore how mythical tales have been adapted into the graphic novel form, how they constitute alternative tellings, and how these intermedial interactions pose new questions and propose new meanings.