Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don't Tell You

Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don't Tell You. By Devdutt Pattanaik. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2014. 179 pp.

Devdutt Pattanaik's collection of Hindu tales is an enjoyable and absorbing exploration of queer themes in Indian written and oral mythology, and it is an addition to the Zubaan-Penguin joint list of gender-focused publications. Queerness is understood by the author to question notions of maleness and femaleness, in terms of both gender and sexuality. Included in the book are stories of men who become women and vice versa, the creation of children without both a father and a mother, men who wear women's clothes, and people who are neither male nor female or a little of both.

The book begins with a series of statements reflecting a variety of sexual and gender identities and some short introductory paragraphs that attempt to highlight the cultural filters of which scholars must be aware before understanding queerness in Hinduism. Pattanaik touches on the importance of yuga (eras) in Hindu mythology, suggesting that the literal approach taken by many Western scholars leads to the conclusion that Brahmanic hegemony is endorsed by Hindu mythology. The author gives us only a brief survey in these pages of Hinduism, its roots in the Vedic tradition, and its transformation as Puranic traditions later gained prominence. There is brief reference to the origins of the term Hinduism by British colonizers as a matter of administrative convenience, but in these few pages Pattanaik does not give us a sense of the academic debate surrounding this term when it comes to categorizing Hinduism as...