Retelling Your Identity: How Myths Influence Who We Are
Diwali, also known as Deepavali, is an Indian festival that evokes a wave of smiles and excitement. It’s a time when families come together, eat lots of delicious food and sweets, and light lamps and fireworks. Diwali is a time-honored festival celebrated by millions of people across the globe. At Asian Girls Ignite, every year we hold a Diwali CelebrAsian. This year, it was a beautiful gathering filled with laughter, lights, games, food, and a strong reminder of what makes America so culturally diverse.
Every year when Diwali comes around, it is broadly described as the Indian festival that celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. If we were to delve into the mythological backing behind this short synopsis, we’d find that Diwali is honored for different religious reasons in different parts of India and the diaspora across the world. For some, the festival originates from the Hindu myth of King Rama returning from exile after defeating Ravana. For others, Goddess Lakshmi is celebrated during Diwali as a forerunner of prosperity and wealth. No matter what the reason for Diwali is to a certain Indian community wherever they are in the world, the general theme of light over darkness unifies all celebrations.
Like Diwali, many Indian festivals are born from Hindu mythology.
Hindu mythology is voluminous and rich. It is packed with stories that describe the adventures and lives of the various deities. Stories and the act of storytelling help us connect to the cultural background of our ancestors. Reading or listening to stories helps bridge the gap between where you came from and finding out who you are, it ties you to the values and mentalities that shaped your grandparents, and parents.
My Diwali Light by Raakhee Mirchandani – A story about a girl sharing her favorite holiday, Diwali, with family, friends, and neighbors serves as a heartfelt tribute to community, immigrant culture, and the Festival of Lights.
While most of your peers know and understand miracles in a Western Christian context, the extent of the supernatural in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and other religious texts can feel stretched to audiences outside of those faiths. When the other Indian festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, comes around, how do you explain to your friends that this god being celebrated is symbolized as an elephant with a mouse for a vehicle? Or that he appears in different forms? This conundrum isn’t exclusive to American-Indian kids who practice Hinduism, but to all second-generation kids who have beliefs that differ from the overarching belief systems found in the West.
Believing in something different from your friends and neighbors can sometimes feel isolating, especially when the stories of your belief are so starkly distinct from theirs.
Having to decode the belief system layered in these myths while growing up in a Western country can feel challenging. If you have grown up hearing these myths and stories and it’s part of the fabric of your belief, you can find yourself hard-pressed for clarity when explaining the same to peers who have grown up in different systems of belief. You want the storytelling to buy you enough acceptance in their social circle but still demarcate your unique identity and culture.
Storytelling plays a huge role in cultures not for the characters they expose one to, but for the inherent values that are embedded in the story.
Tokenism in Shared Spaces
When a topic related to your culture comes up in the classroom, your classmates may look at you as the expert on said topic. And it’s perfectly okay if you don’t know the finer details or have an insider’s view of what’s being discussed. It is important to note that culture is practiced in various ways and carries different meanings to people. You are one person belonging to a rich, layered, and complex culture. Your one experience of your culture does not represent all of it.
And no one can interpret your culture accurately, unless they have lived experiences in it through a keen and observant lens. So if you’re not an anthropologist or mythologist, how do you talk about your myths when asked about them?
The Inner Shaping of Mythology
It has to be noted that mythology has a trickle-down effect on how we view the world. In his TED talk, mythologist and writer Devdutt Pattanaik relays the story of Alexander the Great meeting a monk. They inquired about what the other person was doing; the monk replied that he was doing nothing and Alexandar responded that he was conquering the world. They both laughed at each others’ answers.
Both Alexander and the monk had different perspectives of the world because of the myths and stories they had each grown up with. Alexander was raised on the stories of great Greek warriors and adventurers; how life should amount to greatness and not be spent doing nothing. Alexandar was raised in a world that believed life could be lived only once, and it had to be glorious so that one could enter the afterlife.
The monk on the other hand had been raised on the myth of a conqueror who took over the world and wanted to place a flag on the highest mountain to commemorate this. After reaching the peak, the conqueror was met by the sight of countless flags, each placed by someone who had reached the peak before him. The conqueror felt insignificant. His great feat paled upon learning that there had been others before him who had accomplished the same, and that his feat would not leave a mark. In Hindu mythology, life is cyclic, people and the gods come back in different avatars. In the monk’s perspective, the great achievements in one life meant nothing in comparison to all the lives he would continue to be reincarnated to live.
So to each, his perspective of life was constructed by the myths and stories they had been raised on.
The myths you know don’t have to fit the world and moral framework of the myths that your friends know of in Western socio-religious understanding. Also, myths don’t fall into the straightforward embrace of fact and realism.
Explaining the myths of your faith (that has not originated in the West) to white friends can feel confusing, especially when you are a young person learning it yourself. The reactions you get could cause you to want to keep to that cultural side of your identity under wraps, away from your ‘American’ side. But you shouldn’t have to divide your identity into parts, and keep one away from the other. You are allowed to have all the sides of you exist in togetherness.
Look for Meaning
While myths are cryptic in nature, question what your biggest takeaway from them are. What does a certain object or character symbolize? Look for any possible hidden meaning in the myth, but also bear in mind that myths, like life which they influence, are multi-faceted and you don’t have to understand it all in one go. The same myth can change its meaning to you at different points of your life stages—as a child, adult, and young adult.
Myths can inspire you and confuse you. They can feed ideologies that people then point at, to justify certain social issues. They can feed movements that people use to liberate themselves from social norms.
As much as myths can shape your world, you don’t have to tie your world to a myth. Find the middle ground of where myths help influence your life and lean on the strength and wisdom that they exist to give you.
