Introduction

Ashok Banker, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik are Indian authors who have mined the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and, overall, Hindu mythology to produce a series of novels, adaptations and commentaries. They rank among the highest selling authors in India today, with translations into multiple languages. This chapter takes as its case studies the websites of the three authors (Banker n.d.b; Pattanaik n.d.a; Tripathi 2018b). It seeks to unpack the ideologies encoded through a close reading of their strategies of impressionmanagement and self-representations vis-à- vis their repackaged Hindu cultural productions. To this end, it unravels the discursive strands within their representations.

That religion is integral to any definition we might make of the public sphere today is now a given (e.g., Campbell and Golan 2011). This public sphere is at once offline and online with a constant interplay between the two, and social media in particular contributing in significant ways to its very making. The making and dissemination of online religious content, memberships and exchanges are central to the discussions of religion in the digital age, and frame the arguments stated later in the chapter. As commentators often note, the circulation of texts and images online does not imply a religious public as much as a public that discusses the legitimacy and competing forms of religious belief and practices (Fader and Gottlieb 2015, 776). Further, online Hinduism and its representations or cultural texts cannot be separated from the spectacular, hypervisible Hinduism in contemporary India. For purposes of this chapter, I use the term public sphere to signify the demos of democratic India, constituted occasionally by rational debate but also through the consumption of texts and discourses, as Novetzke argues (2016). The public sphere, with the numerous discourses contesting for space, is made of competing legitimacies – for instance, of secularism and right-wing (both Hindu and Muslim) belief systems – and their chosen forms of representations.

I propose that online self-representations and presentations of these authors intersect with an increasingly Hindu-hegemonic visual and cultural field in today's India, and contribute to it as well. Further, because these authors also function as cultural commentators through their blogs, public appearances and journalism, their online work must be located in a trans-medial context of speeches, fiction-writing, public engagements, fan cultures and exchanges by these authors.