By — Chandril Ray Chaudhuri
Abstract
What allows mythological narratives to persist across centuries, and continue to define notions of the Indian nation? This article proposes that Indian mythology survives, not as a cultural heirloom, but as a pliable political tool, frequently re-configured according to the needs of ever-evolving technological and political environments. From Amar Chitra Katha, through Doordarshan television epics, to current animations and AI generated digital content, this book asks how each medium of circulation has consistently rendered mythical images, homogenized and circulated them, creating and sustaining a unified national imagination. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, Arjun Appadurai’s mediascape, and Arvind Rajagopal’s studies of media and Hindu nationalism, the article reveals how this ongoing project has never been apolitical. At each stage, the pan-Hindu, sanskritized interpretation of myth has been promoted, to the detriment of minority, caste-based, and local forms, showing the partial and debated way in which myth helps to imagine India.
Introduction
During the 2024 Indian general election cycle, AI-generated images, devotional artwork, and temple iconography circulated widely across WhatsApp, Instagram, and the X tweeting platform. Rather than dismissing this phenomenon as a ‘trend’, it is necessary to address a persistent question: why do ancient stories continue to dominate every new media environment that India produces? Where does the enduring political power of mythology come from?
While media technologies continually change, mythological narratives persist because they do more than entertain or preserve tradition; they help one to imagine the nation itself, or to at least create an ‘idea’ of the nation in one’s mind. Each successive medium, from comics and television to digital platforms and AI-generated imagery, has actively reshaped inherited narratives for new audiences and new political contexts, producing a national imagination that is simultaneously unifying, selective, and contested. Benedict Anderson‘s concept of the nation as an imagined community, together with Arjun Appadurai‘s notion of modern “mediascapes”, helps illuminate how India’s changing media landscape repeatedly reconstructs mythological narratives to serve contemporary cultural and political purposes.
Comics and Standardisation: Amar Chitra Katha
Before Doordarshan brought mythology into the living room as a televised event, Amar Chitra Katha had already begun assembling a national mythological canon, one panel at a time. Founded in 1967 by Anant Pai, a Bombay-based journalist with India Book House, the series originated in a moment of postcolonial anxiety: Pai had grown fascinated by a children’s quiz show, until a boy was unable to answer a basic question about an Indian epic figure despite confidently fielding several questions on Greek mythology. For Pai, this gap was a symptom of cultural alienation, children fluent in foreign myth, illiterate in their own.
Pai’s response was to convert Indian mythology into the same visual idiom of colour panels, captions and speech bubbles, that Western comics had used in the first place. The result was not a single story but an accumulating archive: several hundred titles drawing on the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, and nationalist history, eventually selling over 100 million copies across more than twenty languages. Frances Pritchett has argued the cumulative effect was closer to a unifying cosmology than a miscellany, a single editorial vision repeatedly centering certain figures (Krishna, the subject of issue one) as “Indian” by default, rather than regional or sectarian. Karline McLain’s India’s Immortal Comic Books and Nandini Chandra’s The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Kathas, 1967–2007, remain the two most sustained scholarly treatments of this archive, both reading ACK as a deliberate exercise in producing a shared “Indian” childhood.
This is where Anderson’s account of print capitalism becomes especially useful. Amar Chitra Katha performed on myth what the newspaper performed on the nation: it allowed readers in Kerala and Punjab to encounter the same illustrated Krishna under a single editorial hand, smoothing over the plurality A.K. Ramanujan would later document into a standardized, repeatable, pan-Indian narrative.
That standardisation provoked resistance. When ACK’s 1976 Valmiki issue repeated the traditional account of his low-caste origins, the Valmiki Sabha objected so strongly that Pai was burned in effigy in Jalandhar and Patiala, and the group attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue him for libel. Choosing which version of a myth to canonize was inherently political, capable of provoking the communities whose self-understanding it overwrote; the first clear instance, in this article, of a pattern recurring at every later stage of mediation.
Television and the National Spectacle
If the standardized pages of Amar Chitra Katha gave the postcolonial nation a shared cultural archive, the arrival of state-sponsored television transformed that archive into a visceral national ritual. The late 1980s witnessed an unprecedented media phenomenon with the broadcasting of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan (1987–88) and B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat (1988–90) on Doordarshan. AsPurnima Mankekar‘s ethnographic studies demonstrate, these serials extended far beyond ordinary media consumption. Across towns and cities, streets reportedly emptied during telecast hours, communities gathered around shared television sets, and many viewers incorporated devotional practices into viewing itself, bathing before broadcasts, lighting incense, and treating the television set as a site of darshan.
This was the moment Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” acquired an embodied and synchronized form. Unlike the fragmented practices of print culture, television introduced a powerful sense of simultaneity. Millions of viewers across linguistic, regional, and socioeconomic divides encountered the same sacred imagery at precisely the same moment. Myth was no longer merely a story one knew; it became a national event in which one participated. The nation was not simply imagined through shared texts, but enacted through a recurring collective ritual.
Crucially, this national spectacle possessed a significant political afterlife. As Arvind Rajagopal argues, the state’s broadcast of these epics did not mechanically produce Hindu nationalism. Rather, it created a shared visual vocabulary that political actors could subsequently mobilize. This convergence of religious imagery, mass media, and electoral politics became particularly visible during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra, through which Ram increasingly moved from the domain of epic narrative into that of mass political symbolism. Television thus amplified and nationalized mythological imagery on a scale previously unimaginable, laying the foundations for its continuous recirculation and politicization in the digital age.
Digital Platforms and the Algorithmic Nation
In the digital era, the construction of national myth no longer relies on rare, synchronized national spectacles; instead, it has become an ambient and permanent media environment. This transformation was signalled by the emergence of mythological animation, marked by the commercial success of Hanuman (2005). The film demonstrated the viability of animated mythology and was followed by a rapidly expanding ecosystem of television animation, YouTube shorts, and child-oriented devotional content. Rather than remaining a solemn text or a weekly ritual, epic narratives became woven into the everyday screen habits of a new generation.
As Aswin Punathambekar’s work on India’s contemporary media economy suggests, this ecosystem marks a profound shift from the “appointment viewing” of the Doordarshan era to a state of permanent availability. Mythological content now circulates fluidly across decentralized digital platforms, from OTT streaming and mobile clips to memes, gaming applications, and WhatsApp forwards. Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “mediascapes” is particularly useful here: fragmented yet interconnected digital channels allow sacred and national symbols to move effortlessly between entertainment, commerce, personal devotion, and political expression. An image of a deity is no longer tied to a singular context; it has become a highly mobile digital symbol.
The permanence of this media environment is further intensified by platform architecture. Drawing on Zeynep Tufekci‘s analysis of algorithmic systems, recommendation engines tend to privilege emotionally resonant, familiar, and easily shareable content in order to maximize engagement. In the Indian context, as Sahana Udupa has shown, this logic often intersects with forms of digital Hindu nationalism. The rise of user generated content, oversaturation of visuals, rise of AI-generated content to simultaneously atomize, and quicken, the processes of production of the national mythology, means that instead of one homogenous audience, that during Doordarshan the national psyche aimed for, one is instead immersed in one’s own personalized, fluid mythical world in which all that constitutes ‘the nation’ is reiterated, monetized, and re-contested for, continually. This commodification of belonging results in a phenomenon called algorithmic nationalism.
Whose Nation? The Politics of Representation
However, every national mythology is also a form of selection. In what has been called a classic by scholars of Indian literatures and cultures, A.K. Ramanujan’s ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, India’s epic literature has never appeared in one definitive, iconic version. Instead, it’s a dispersed and contentious (sometimes, even controversial!) plethora that includes regional, linguistic, caste, and religious subtexts. A one-version-fits-all notion of Ramayana or Mahabharata is thus not historically accurate.
Through the power of the popular media, a national myth is canonized and standardized in a given form. The most privileged traditions-generally those drawing upon Sanskrit, upper-caste and pan-Hindu ethos, are privileged in almost every attempt, from comic books to TV serials to digital forums, to tell a quintessential tale about India. Consequently, narratives associated with Tamil, Dalit, Adivasi, Sufi and Northeastern traditions are often rendered peripheral in mainstream media engagement with epic culture.
When one dominant tradition, one official rendition of the past, is established as civilizational reality, then mythology gains significance, warns Romila Thapar. For Thapar, premodern Indian traditions were characterized by plurality, multiple tellings, regional variations, and competing memories rather than a single, authoritative narrative. This suggests a dilemma: in order to achieve cultural homogenization, and create a sense of belonging within the nation, it’s necessary to simplify the past and create a hegemonic narrative. Paradoxically, however, in producing the national consciousness through a national mythology, a plurality has been selectively muted.
Conclusion
From the comic frames of Amar Chitra Katha, to the collective trance on Doordarshan, to the personalized algorithmic feeds of the internet era, each new medium has reinvented India’s mythological heritage in place of simply repeating it. Comic books standardised mythology, television nationalised it, digital media personalised and endlessly reproduced it. But through all these transfigurations, one language has persisted through which India continues to invent itself: mythology (or is it history?).
However, nothing in the process has been non-political, since every re-inventing instance inevitably prioritizes some narrative over others and elevates some traditions over others while ostracizing some communities.
The medium will evolve, from the comic frame to the screen or the personalized content filter, but the political contestation over the rights to imagine India through this mythological discourse would never change.
About the author
Chandril Ray Chaudhuri is an undergraduate student of law at O.P. Jindal Global University with a strong interest in critical theory, equitable wealth distribution models and economic politics, global and domestic. His work often deals with understanding class and resistance. He researches the morality and politics of law and its intersection with economics, law and ‘Justice’.
Image source: https://iskconeducation.org/media_library_old/The20Lord20of20Lanka.pdf