havecrayonswilltravel:

glockgal:

havecrayonswilltravel:

My sweet, coming of age story that was supposed to be about a little girl discovering the wonders of British India, magic and growing into herself is morphing into some horror fantasy beast.

WHOOPS.

I need a better resource for Hindu mythology than Wikipediaaaahhhhh.

LOL ‘wonders’ indeed. One wonders why the British are there.

Exploitative conquering fuckheads aside, I hadn’t actually decided whether I wanted to make it accurate and critical or slam on the rose colored glasses and do this with painfully obvious shades of Kipling (because damn personal responsibility, I like Kipling) before the crazy jilted lover showed up plotting to kill a house full of posh British people.

Which I’m not sure if that sort of addresses the issue right there or not…  But when a mythology gives you flesh eating, shape changing ghouls with venomous fingernails, you are pretty much obligated to find a way to work that into the story.

This mythology (and still very current and very alive religion AND culture) belongs to a billion + people in the world, and it’s distributed in a variety of ways depending on where you worship - but there is one story that threads the beauty of Hinduism as well as the ancient mythological aspects in all variations of Hinduism. It was written by Hindus, for Hindus with glorious Hindu heroes doing the battles with fantastic Hindu villains.   I’d recommend you reading The Ramayan.  There are a billion versions of this story - I read the comicbook as a child; I watched the televised series as a teenager; I read a random (and rather sexy) novelization and feasted my eyes on a beautiful graphic design version as an adult. It still brings tears to my eyes.  

Just make sure you don’t watch, like, Sita Sings the Blues, please. Or any other version depicted by people who think that Hinduism is just a kooky-cool myth with elephant gods and ten-headed demons and Kali-Ma and rakshas, available for white people to congratulate themselves for foraging through or mocking or playing with or consuming. The mythology is still pretty prevalent for modern Hindus.

(and as a kid I also read The Little Princess and all the other British depictions of ‘Hindoo’. That’s growin’ up colonialised for ya!)