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<Myth>

For a story to be a myth, it must have travelled through time. It must have changed multiple hands on its meandering journey, with each hand shaping it in some way big or small. As this form of story travels from one point to another, it morphs into myriad ways. While the specificities of a myth that ground it in a certain socio-political or historical context may change, the ideas that form its core persist through time. 

You can tell a lot about a society from the mythology that it generates. These myths may serve as carriers of society’s dominant value system; they may reveal the things people feared, and the things they revered. A myth about a person can make them seem larger than life, or decimate their reputation; a myth about a place can draw people to it from far and wide, or it can drive people away. Present in all media, including oral, print, and electronic, myths have a way of affecting our psyche in deeply personal ways. 

At times, a myth is associated with falsification, a morphing of truth to support devious intentions. It is at odds with hard, empirical fact–data that seeks to reduce the world to pure information. While myth speaks to feelings, data speaks to rationale. While myth is characterised by fluidity, data remains unchanged. 

What do myths mean to you? How do you visualise a myth in your own creative work? How does the free circulation of myth — breaking the bounds of time and space — affect individuals and society? How do societies, individuals or state-systems at the centre of power create or rediscover a myth and provide their own meaning to it? What research and creative production possibilities might there be for exploring or reinterpreting a myth through innovative methodologies?

With such questions and concerns, we would like to receive submissions from artists, scholars, researchers or writers for our 18^th edition.

If you are a story-teller, writer, scholar, poet, visual artist, critic, photographer, social scientist, translator, curator or anyone who is interested in addressing the theme of ‘Myth’, do send your work in Marathi and/or English or in audio-visual form by March 15, 2023 to info@hakara.in. Please see the submission guidelines here. Select works will be published in the 18^th issue of हाकारा । hākārā. 

Ashutosh Potdar
Editor, हाकारा । hākārā

(Purvi Rajpuria will be the Guest Editor for the 18^th Hakara edition.)