Department of English, Jadavpur University

Presents

Professor Debabrata Mukherjee Memorial Annual

Students’ Seminar, 2024

28th February, 2024

CALL FOR PAPERS

Calliope Ex Machina: Afterlives of the Epic

Marking the bicentenary of the birth of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, pioneer and master of the

Bengali epic, this year’s Professor Debabrata Mukherjee Memorial Annual Students’ Seminar

aims to trace the afterlives of epics in their myriad reincarnations, adaptations and interpretations

across genres and media, languages and cultures. The traditional epic which begins in medias res,

invokes the aid of the Muse, and follows the heroic undertaking contra deus ex machina, has a

foundational impact on our nature and urge of storytelling. Though Bakhtin compares the epic to

marble due to its rigid, idealised and antique form, epics have continued moulding the stories we

tell, the images we see and the lines we chant to this day. Their effect can be seen also in last year’s

biggest pop phenomenon, Barbenheimer. Nolan’s Oppenheimer recites from the Mahabharata as

he finds the awe of Krishna’s viswarupa in the atomic blaze: “Now I am become Death, the

destroyer of worlds.” And Greta Gerwig mentions Milton’s Paradise Lost as one of her influences

in showing Barbie and Ken’s “fall” from the Edenic Barbieland.

Literary canons receive a steady flow of inspiration from the epics. (Joyce wrote Ulysses

paralleling the Odyssey to channel the imploded Modernist psyche, Derek Walcott was spurred by

the Iliad to portray his native St. Lucia, the “Helen of the West Indies,” as a site of colonial conflict

in Omeros, and J. R. R. Tolkien has expressed his indebtedness to Beowulf in writing The Lord of

the Rings.) But what made them accessible to readers outside academic and hardcore literary

circles were popular retellings like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) which intimately

captures the companionship between Achilles and Patroclus, and Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand

Ships (2019), a feminist tour de force giving voice to the women of the Trojan War. On the screen,

something similar has been done by Nina Paley’s animated extravaganza Sita Sings the Blues

(2008) which interweaves the animator’s own life with Sita’s. And Rituparno Ghosh’s 2012 film

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish creates the tale of a queer dancer grappling with his identity and

his love for a man, taking cue from the Mahabharata and Tagore’s dance-drama Chitrangada

(1892).

To suit the concerns of our times, epics have been adapted, translated and used as a referential

framework for highlighting issues of agency, oppression, identity and intersectionality. A viable

means of transporting the epic into the zone of ordinary individuals has been the theatre. One is

reminded of Jean-Claude Carriere’s nine-hour play The Mahabharata (1985) which formed the

skeleton of Peter Brook’s iconic 1989 film. Dharamvir Bharati’s play Andha Yug (1953), set on

the final day of the Kurukshetra War, struck the right chord in riveting a nation reeling from the

pandemonium of the Partition of India, and found further resonance in Ebrahim Alkazi’s

productions at famous historical monuments across Delhi. Folk theatres such as the Bengali Jatra,

Ramlila of Northern India and Yakshagana from Karnataka, among others, have readily absorbed

the seismic sway of the epics.

Anime has also become an innovative mode of adapting and recontextualising the epic. Starting

from Kazuyuki Kobayashi’s Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama (1992) which got an entire

generation of kids engrossed in the saga, the format has seen the emergence of stories of epic

proportions. Hayao Miyazaki, for instance, lifts the name of the protagonist of his 1984 post-

apocalyptic fantasy Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from the Odyssey. The film shows

Nausicaä’s reverence for the natural world, much like Homer’s character, but incorporates themes

of ecocide, warfare and the clash between the human and the non-human. Miyazaki’s Princess

Mononoke (1997), dealing with the porousness of binaries like nature/culture and good/evil, is also

loosely based on the Cedar Forest episode of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving epic.

Comics and graphic novels (for example, the multiple portrayals of DC’s Wonder Woman who is

an Amazon, and the many renderings of the Old English epic Beowulf) and most recently, online

communities, blogs and social media have seen an unprecedented proliferation of fanfiction,

memes, erotica etc. based on characters and episodes from various epics. The craze with such

reworkings is only a testament to their universal and timeless appeal.

For this year’s seminar, undergraduate and postgraduate students are asked to submit abstracts of

250-300 words critically interrogating adaptations, retellings and transcreations of epics with focus

on themes including, but not restricted to, the following:

• The epic in pop culture • Orature and the epic

• The epic in performance • The epic and the image

• Speculative adaptations of epics • Marginality politics and the epic

• The epic as anime and anime as epic • The epic vis-à-vis (post)modernities

• The epic in translation • Postcoloniality and epics

• Games and the epic • Future of the epic

The seminar will be held in-person with each participant allotted 10 minutes for their presentation.

Abstracts of 250-300 words must be sent through the Google form:

https://forms.gle/pGuKpuq2cJZtsrp99 positively by January 31st, 2024. Intimations will reach by

February 7th, and full-length papers (for a 10-minute presentation) of selected abstracts must

reach dmmemorialconferencejude@gmail.com by February 21st, 2024. The format and rules for

submission will be sent after the selection of the abstracts.

All other queries can be addressed to dmmemorialconferencejude@gmail.com.

Important Dates and Links:

Deadline for abstract submission: January 31st, 2024

Google form for abstract submission: https://forms.gle/pGuKpuq2cJZtsrp99

Intimation on the abstract: February 7th, 2024

Deadline for full paper submission: February 21st, 2024

Date of the seminar: February 28th, 2024

Convener:

Sri Ishan Chakraborty

Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
Jadavpur University