Abstract
This essay looks at the popular self-described mythologist, Devdutt Pattanaik, and his Mahabharata retelling, Jaya (2010), to analyse the production and dissemination of Hindu mythology in contemporary India as a guidebook. Drawing on cultural histories of book production in post-Independence India, the rise of the Hindu Right, and studies of neoliberalism and the post-millennial workspace, this essay argues that Pattanaik recontextualises the Mahabharata narrative using both rationalistic and pseudo-rationalistic knowledge systems to foreground the multiplicity of the Mahabharata narrative tradition while simultaneously reinscribing centre-margin hierarchies upon that multiplicity and legitimising the logic of Hindu history in his vision of a national Indian culture. Pattanaik thus retells the Mahabharata to provide lessons in self-control and self-regulation by reframing the narrative and rearticulating its moral lessons within the discourse of responsibilised productivity to (re)produce neoliberal workers.
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