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Finding your religion
Updated On: 20 December, 2009 09:00 AM IST | | Janaki Viswanathan
Mythology is the latest 'it' word for books. Religion may have become a bad word with war, politics and terrorism, but more and more people are turning to our culture to find answers
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Mythology is the latest 'it' word for books. Religion may have become a bad word with war, politics and terrorism, but more and more people are turning to our culture to find answers
Fifteen years ago in Hum Aapke Hai Koun..!, when the newlywed Renuka Shahane entered her in-laws' home, she was handed the Ramayana with a four-word explanation: "Iss mein Sita hai." It was obvious that she was to understand and emulate the heroine of one of our most idealistic epics. If they were to make a new-age sequel to the movie, the daughter-in-law might just be handed a copy of In Search of Sita, to trigger off a debate. Religion may have become a bad word especially when you think war, politics, saffronisation, terrorism and Taliban, but on the flipside, more and more people are turning to our culture, to find answers. Result: an upsurge in the sales of books in the genre.u00a0
Today, the mythological section (which falls under religion) of every bookstore is teeming with books that are retelling or revisiting an epic, analysing characters, gods and goddesses, drawing parallels with our lives and so on. They tell the reader to think about and question tradition. They're written by not just godmen but entrepreneurs (Gurcharan Das' The Difficulty of Being Good) and economists (Meghnad Desai's essays in In Search of Sita), amongst others. 
Starting the trend
Niyati Dhuldhoya, merchandiser, Landmark, says that the genre had opened up early in 2008 with mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King. The book, published by Penguin, is the story of Yuvanashva of the Mahabharata, who accidentally drinks a potion meant to make his wives pregnant. He bears a child and thereon the lines between father-mother, king-queen and husband-wife seem to blur. Another book responsible for the spike in sales is The Women of the Mahabharata by Chaturvedi Badrinath, which examines the roles of the epic's female characters from Shakuntala and Uttara to Draupadi among others.
While she refuses to divulge sales figures, Niyati says the patrons of this genre are aged between 25 to 30 years. "They're not teenybopper novels, but they have their own audience. In Search of Sita, for instance, which is a compilation of essays on Sita, finds its readership mostly among young urban women." Her explanation for this sudden increase in interest: "People want to know more."
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