Global Form, Orthodox Content: Banker's Ramayana and the Conservative Imagination

Abstract

This paper analyses Ashok Banker's Ramayana Series, one of the earliest English retellings of the epic to achieve significant popular reception both in India and beyond in the twenty-first century. Its success laid the foundation for a broader tradition of English-language Ramayana retellings, works that do not merely translate the epic but reinvent and reframe it across new forms and mediums for a readership more at home in English than in the languages in which the Ramayana has traditionally lived. The paper examines how Banker's series intervenes in and extends the Ramayana tradition while simultaneously positioning itself as a global cultural commodity. It further analyses how, beneath this cosmopolitan surface, the text reaffirms and reasserts conventional orthodox Indian social and cultural values, naturalizing caste hierarchy, consolidating a singular Brahmanical worldview, and reaffirming conservative gender roles, even as it borrows the grammar of contemporary western fantasy to package the epic for a new generation of readers.