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Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy
One of the crucial components of this popular
consciousness, which I call epic culture, is the
tendency to bypass history and sometimes become
explicitly anti-historical.
myths in a pejorative sense. They
become targets of demystification,
which is usually guided by the belief
that once the secrets of myths have
been unravelled, the myths no longer
remain mystifying. For the last 150
years all these schools, whether
pushing for Marxist analyses in terms
of class or production relations,
Freudian analyses in terms of
psychosexuality and psychopathology,
or Structural analyses a là Levi Strauss
and Michel Foucault, make the same
tacit claim: where there were myths
there would now be philosophy or,
even better, the certitudes born of
hard, empirical knowledge. Sadly, the
wide use and popularity of such
specialised interpretations have not
given the ideologues the certitude and
cognitive security they have sought.
After so many decades, they still
expect the same triumphant
demystification of the same myths,
accompanied often by the same
slogans. As if the ideologues were
never fully convinced by their own
rhetoric. As if they believed that there
still persisted some dark mystery in
the decoded myths that did not allow
them to relax their guard against the
seductive power of the myths.
This dilemma dogs the practitioners
of many contemporary knowledge
systems. They are afraid of recognising
the inner strengths of a civilisation
organised around a dense network of
myths, at the heart of which are a few
eponymous epics, accompanied by
their myriad lowbrow, local or regional
variations cutting across innumerable
social divisions. Modern knowledge
seems oblivious of the partiality
towards the classical and the canonical
over the non-classical and the noncanonical
in a national state. The
classics allow the state to claim access
to the heart of a culture and to
establish a quid pro quo with it. Once
you move into the more amorphous,
multivalent products of human
imagination and try to make sense of
them, it is like grappling with a noisy,
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