Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
UNITED STATES, April 16, 2010: Growing up in San Bernardino, I was immersed in the rituals and mythology of Hinduism. My parents are from an area of India called Gujarat. They immigrated to the US, via the UK, in 1980 and have spent the last thirty years living in and running a motel off Route 66. This made for an interesting childhood, to say the least.
My father’s daily devotional practice involved a morning puja during which he bathed a collection of murtis and stuck marigold petals to their foreheads with a dot of red paste. The world of the Ramayana was ingrained in me through the cultural nuances of living with Hindu parents. For instance, every time I sneezed, my mom or dad would say, “Sita Rama.” I had no idea what the phrase meant, just like I had no idea why we had a framed illustration of a giant monkey carrying a mountain.
Fast forward about twenty-five years. I started to become interested in the Hindu Deities — both as a part of my cultural heritage, but also from an artistic standpoint. I discovered a wonderful English-language fantasy adaptation of the Ramayana by the esteemed author Ashok K. Banker. His retelling weighed in at roughly three thousand pages, and it took me the better part of a year to read. As I read, the mythology sprang to life with full force, in all its wisdom and I could feel my life being changed. For the first time, I began to see and understand the characters Rama and Sita as my parents did. I began to understand why it would be considered auspicious to speak their names, or why the monkey God Hanuman’s devotion to Prince Rama — epitomized by the extraordinary feat of moving a literal mountain of medicine — would be worthy of worship. It all began to make sense as I discovered a story that is the bedrock of Hindu and Indian culture.
The more I began to understand the Ramayana, the more inspired I felt to carry on the tradition of retelling the tale by creating an illustrated version. Since most people aren’t inclined to sit through a thousand-page-long adaptation, I relied on graphic storytelling to capture peoples’ attention and imagination and convey large chunks of the plot. At the very least, it will help people understand why Hindus honor a blue warrior and a flying monkey holding a mountain — and maybe help some Indian American kids out there find a 21st century bridge to the ancient stories their parent made them learn.