Greek Mythology  (English, Paperback, Rajagopal Premkumar)

Like many Indian children, I too grew up hearing the vast, varied versions of mythical tales. A time when the lives of gods and men intersected history, religion, science, philosophy, and superstition into innumerable stories to create a rich and taming world filled with psychological complexity. At the core of these mythical tales, there exists a subtle idea of the superiority of god over humankind. But, Listening to some Indian mythical stories as a young boy, I was left unsatisfied by the portrayals of humankind in those tales. Later, when I was working on my Ph.D. research work, I read both Indian and Greek mythical tales in the same light and I found some similarities that both the tales are narrated to maintain the superiority of god over men. It was not as though the tales didn’t have powerful human characters. More than logic, Justice has been denied for human characters. The punishments assigned to Prometheus, Arachne, and Sisyphus were some examples of injustice. So my idea in writing this book is to retell the Greek mythical tales from a post-modern perspective to document what it feels like when reading these tales in the twenty-first century.