Reimagining Dharma: The Major Themes in Devdutt Pattanaik’s Mythological Corpus

Abstract

Devdutt Pattanaik has emerged as one of India’s most prolific and widely read interpreters of mythology, bridging classical narratives and contemporary concerns across books such as Myth=Mithya, Jaya, Sita, Shikhandi and Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You, The Pregnant King, and Business Sutra. This article synthesizes and analyzes the major themes that recur in his oeuvre: (1) myth as a cultural operating system and a technology of meaning; (2) the relational and contextual ethics of dharma; (3) pluralism, perspectivism, and the decentralization of canonical authority; (4) gender fluidity, the queering of myth, and embodied knowledge; (5) hunger, fear, and exchange as drivers of social and economic behavior; (6) leadership, organization, and the Indian management imagination; and (7) the cartography of sacred time and space.