Between Memory and Myth: Resistance and Viole...

Between Memory and Myth: Resistance and Violence in Select South Asian Fiction

Author Name : Anusha Halim

ABSTRACT

Literature from around the world has used different myths to manipulate, guide, instruct, and shape societies from around the world. Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Don Quixote, all these eternal characters and figures have become “mythological” in the later writings. On a surface level, myth is nothing but a retelling of stories of earlier history. Still, when we dig deep, it is only then we realise that myth plays a significant and crucial role in not only shaping societies but in religion, gender, society and its marginalisation. South Asian literature, being one of the many, employed this technique in order to unravel the issues that are prevalent today. Classical philosophy was engaged in a rational evaluation of mythology and the connections between knowledge and myth. The Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the neo-Platonists took a serious interest in the study of myth. The second half of the nineteenth century gave birth to the “mythological” and “anthropological” schools in the study of myth. These two schools had contrasting views on the study of myth.

Keywords: Myth, Memory, Power, Religion, Gender and Culture.