Transforming Meaning Into Form
Arts Illustrated|Aprill - May 2018

In the volatile times we live in today, Devdutt Pattanaik’s My Gita and Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu help us better understand what is commonly called ‘Hinduism’, the myths that shape it and the narratives that contextualise it

Shakti Maira
Transforming Meaning Into Form

For me, all the arts – literature, music, dance, theatre, sculpture, painting, photography, installations – at their best, are transformers of meaning into form. I point this out because this is a shared endeavour of myths and the arts and they have had a long symbiotic relationship.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes claimed that the key characteristic of a myth is ‘to transform a meaning into form’. (Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill & Wang). More precisely, I think, myths are attempts to convey meaning through a negotiation between the known and the unknown. Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, for instance, described myth as a genre between a fairytale and a detective story. Historically, most myths seem to be stories created by human imagination to bring together natural forces, animals and birds (quite often anthropomorphised), spirits and gods, to offer an explanation for one or the other of life’s mysteries, or to give direction to human social behaviour. This is exemplified by the epic myths of India: Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in which the Gita is embedded.

Myth has inevitably become interwoven with religion; all religions have used myths to create themselves. Gods appear and speak to prophets on mountains; avatars materialise to drive chariots in epic wars, and so on. Religions have often used and relied on myth rather than reason to validate themselves and foster faith. This has worked quite well for them. In all cultures around the world, social and philosophical ideas have been created and transmitted effectively in society via mythic stories and a great variety of imaginative and wonder-inducing mythic visual forms.

This story is from the Aprill - May 2018 edition of Arts Illustrated.

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This story is from the Aprill - May 2018 edition of Arts Illustrated.

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