Re-reading the Mahabharata through Contemporary Retellings: Cultural
Memory and the Continuity of Indian Knowledge Systems

Abstract
The Mahabharata has never really belonged to the past. It persists as a remarkably elastic archive of
Indian Knowledge Systems, carrying philosophical inquiry, ethical reflection and cultural memory into
ever-changing historical moments. Contemporary retellings are often described as adaptations, yet that
description feels a little too limited. They do something more demanding: they reopen the epic, invite
fresh acts of interpretation and, in the process, keep its intellectual traditions alive rather than merely
preserving them. This paper asks what happens when the Mahabharata is read not as a fixed canonical
text but as a continuing conversation across generations. The discussion centres on Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions and Devdutt Pattanaik's Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the
Mahabharata. Through qualitative textual analysis informed by theories of cultural memory alongside
concepts drawn from Indian aesthetic traditions, the paper examines the ways these works reconfigure
narrative voice, ethical dilemmas and characterisation while remaining deeply engaged with the epic's
philosophical core. Divakaruni's revisioning of Draupadi unsettles inherited narrative authority,
Pattanaik's interpretive framework invites readers into a layered understanding of myth, history and
dharma, and together these texts reveal that the transmission of knowledge is rarely linear. It moves
across voices, audiences and historical contexts in ways that are often uneven but deeply productive. At
stake here is not simply the survival of an ancient epic. These retellings negotiate the often uneasy
relation between tradition and modernity, showing Indian Knowledge Systems as living intellectual
formations rather than static inheritances. They preserve, question and reshape cultural meanings all
at once, a process which resists easy categorisation and perhaps should. The argument, then, is that
contemporary literary engagements with the Mahabharata function as sites where cultural memory is
continually reactivated, revised and carried forward, ensuring that the epic remains an active repository
of indigenous knowledge for present readers and, one suspects, future one's as well.