This is a book review for ‘Myth = Mithya: Decoding Hindu Mythology’ by mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik , published by Penguin Random House India.
The book deals with various scriptures from Hindu mythology (here, calling it generally as myth-o-logy, because that is the focal point , or similar or subjective to someone's own opinions) and has stories and excerpts from the Ramayana , Mahabharata , Puranas, etc. For most people like me will already have heard some of these stories and deduced our very own conclusions in the general sense, but , as the title suggests , it is much more than just stories.
Coming back to the book, it deals with our perception of the truth. For we think we know truth, is opposite of false and vice versa . But is it the case all the time. The all things mentioned in the great epics are debatable, existence of Gods on the very Earth we walk on , or the structures they had created , or the utmost notion of there even being a god.
The book deals with the concept of how generally we perceive truth and how it can be subjective, just like a human may be a good person to some or a bad to the other. In a similar way , stories and epics from our ancient times , may or may not have the very literal meanings that we have generally accepted them to be all this time.
As I told , the stories are some well-known and some lesser-known, but each of them has been selected by the author based on what can be deduced from them , in the literal sense , and or in many other sense that we can understand . It's like exploring and deep diving into the story , like is it a code ,is it a lesson , is it a experience , or is it a reflection of what is happening in my life at one point ?
The quality of observation and analysis out in the book is what fascinated me the most , and somewhat inspired me to look for such stories with some hidden or lesser known meanings myself. It is not a single big story, so we are free to choose any index and just explore the story with the author, and I believe that somewhat makes it interesting , and intriguing.
The book binds us with the notion of what we may have deduced from stories read or told by our elders can be so much different and challenges our perception of western notion of myth (untrue or false), until we deduce that if it really was a mithya (here, the truth based on our own subjective opinion).
