Indian Mythology

Study of Indian Mythology and its relevance in Business and Marketing

1. Introduction

1.1. Meaning of Mythology

Mythology is a collection of ancient wisdom in the form of stories, poetry, rituals and symbols that a culture dives and indulges in. This kind of ancient wisdom is used generation after generation to derive knowledge and life lessons from it. One strange thing about mythology and the various stories surrounding it is that none of the mythology stories and anecdotes that we hear of are verified but these are accepted culturally and in only in rare cases, will they be accepted worldwide.

Being the diverse country that India is, the various cultures and religions originate from some or the other mythological story or incident. Indian

Etymologically speaking, this particular word is composed of two Greek words, ‘mythos’ meaning ‘story of people’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘story by the people’. In broader purview of things, there has always been a dissonance between the concept of ‘myths’ and ‘mythology’. Both of these concepts together try and give explanations for everything that is in this universe. Mythology, apart from what Wikipedia describes it, is also a collective study of the myths and its interpretations. Apart from the definitions given by the dictionaries and other scholars, mythology, in very generic terms is the collection of stories that find their origins in the past historical events and in most of the cases, they are said to be socially accepted, within a culture or within an array of multiple cultures. All these stories converge to give out various interpretations and the society imbibes them in their general habits and in their lifestyles and try to learn life lessons from the

Taking cues from our mythological interpretations and learning, writers have started to narrate stories and combine them with the modern day world. The book, ‘The difficulty of being good’ by ‘Gurcharan Das’ is one example of how writer took snippets from Vyas’ immortalised classic Mahabharta and related to the modern day living, relating behaviour of people in organizations to characters from the book ranging from Duryodhana and Draupadi. Devdutt Pattanaik and Chitra Banerjee are two of the prominent writers who have incorporated the importance of mythology in the minds of young readers with the help of books like ‘Jaya’, ‘Sita’ and ‘A palace of illusions’, as many of them narrated the classical mythological books from the point of view of one prominent character from the book. By the help of these books, the researcher and many young readers started building association with the mythological characters and started to notice that their way of living and code of conduct could be different but deep down certain phenomenon remained the same, the likes of female empowerment as demonstrated by Draupadi in the book by Chitra Banerjee and the autocratic prowess of kings like Duryodhana. This made the researcher interested in understanding how the mythological interpretations have shaped the way we Indians do business. The need