Queering/Querying the Nation: Interrogating Alternative Mythography in Devdutt Pattanaik’s Shikhandi

Abstract

The grand narrative of nationalism, which “has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope”, as observed by Cynthia Enloe, in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases, is essentially a gendered discourse and excludes any gender location that does not conform to the standards of heteronormative masculinity. Therefore, any attempt to locate and identify instances that debunk this gender binary in the history of the nation creates space for multiple localized narratives and destabilises the hetero-patriarchal power-centre of the nation-state. Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You by Devdutt Pattanaik, published in 2014, during the legal tug-of-war regarding section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, tries to create an alternate mytho-historical framework by selecting queer occurrences from Hindu mythologies to challenge the broader discourse of monolithic understanding of “Indian-ness”. This paper seeks to interrogate the subversive potentials of these narratives, deliberately chosen from “Hindu” myths, in critiquing and questioning the homogenised, hegemonic and masculinist constructs of the mytho-historiography of the nation. It also aims to explore the use of mytho-history as an agent in shaping nationhood and validating the queer space in the narrative of the nation.