Think India Journal

Reconstructing the Epic: Cultural Memory and Myth in Devdutt Pattanaik’s Jaya

Anant Shivam, Uday Shankar Ojha — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Mahabharata endures as a living tradition, continually reshaped through oral, regional, and modern retellings that preserve its role as a vessel of cultural memory. Devdutt Pattanaik’s Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata exemplifies this process by weaving canonical narratives with folklore, marginalized voices, and symbolic motifs. Through simple language and illustrations, Jaya makes the epic accessible while engaging with themes of dharma, karma, and fate in ways that resonate with contemporary readers. Though criticized for occasional oversimplification, the text contributes significantly to cultural memory by balancing tradition and modernity. This paper argues that Jaya transforms the Mahabharata into a pluralistic and secular narrative that continues to shape identity, ethics, and collective consciousness in evolving contexts.

Theoretical Examination of Conflict Handling Styles in Nigeria

Onyejegbu, Dominic Chukwuemeka — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People have attempted to manage and resolve conflicts from the beginning of time. Having said that, the academic field of Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) is relatively new. It was created by fusing ideas, research, and practice from multiple academic disciplines that are transdisciplinary. This piece examines the various means and approaches to conflict management and resolution in contemporary time. This becomes necessary as peaceful coexistence is a catalyst for societal development and harmonious a society. We set off by establishing that conflict handling is distinct from conflict resolution. In the first instance, we note that all the formal and informal techniques that enable us to positively control conflict and find a peaceful resolution are referred to as conflict handling styles while conflict resolution is more complex and denotes all the methods that two or more parties employ, whether formal or informal, to settle their disagreement amicably. In discussing these approaches to peace enthronement, the various steps in approach is further evaluated. In addition to these, phenomena such as nonviolent resistance and nonviolent mechanisms of change were explored as they constitute ways through which change is engendered in the society. Rather than having to live in constant fear of oppression and persecution, there is typically stability and a general sense of security when peace reigns. The conclusion therefore is that Social interactional conflict is a normal and widespread occurrence in human existence. Therefore, effective conflict management and resolution is important to make for harmonious and peaceful coexistence in the society.

Staging the Revolution: Badal Sircar and the Theatre of Political Protest

Varsha Wamanrao Suryawanshi — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The landscape of modern Indian theatre is a testament to the transformative power of radical ideas, and few figures loom as large within it as Badal Sircar. His name is synonymous with a seismic shift in theatrical practice, a conscious and vehement rejection of the commercial and bourgeois stage in favor of a visceral, immediate, and politically charged form of expression. Sircar’s work, which he christened the "Third Theatre," was not merely an alternative style of performance; it was a comprehensive philosophical and political project. It sought to dismantle the architecture of conventional theatre, both literally and metaphorically, to rebuild it as a space for urgent dialogue, social critique, and revolutionary potential. His was a theatre that moved out of insulated auditoriums and into the pulsating heart of public life—in parks, on street corners, within struggling communities—insisting that art must engage directly with the anguish and aspirations of its time. To study Sircar is to study the very mechanics of how art can be weaponized for social change, how the human body, stripped of all technological artifice, can become the most potent medium for staging a revolution of consciousness.