Retinting Ancient Cultures’ Literary Mythological Histories to Obscure Modern Conceptual Palettes’ Neutral Hues

About the Lecture: 

Although assuming present-day experiences’ relevance to compared ancient cultures’ aspects homogenizes them, their vibrant differences reveal vivid alternative trends.  This talk highlights three—creative science mediation, recognized religious rule, and implicit political criticism—in metaphorical primary pigment and paratwilight colors to differentiate Roman Ovid’s and Indian Kālidāsa’s significant-deity depictions in amatory-epic sexuality, authority, and society myths.  Their authors, not required by classical Roman and Indian cultures to accept the latest sciences as givens, did not need to render their gods’ love affairs in the same reds torrid with the latest lovemoves livening Roman and Indian sexuality sciences.  So, Ovid, amplifying his own romance manual, emblazons his immortals’ overtures, while Kālidāsa, somewhat censoring his simply inherited sexology, mildens his divinities’ trysts.  Moreover, the amatory-epic authors disparately aurified their foremost emperors melding worship with governance.  Whereas independently patronized nonpriest Ovid de-limns imperial dynastic deities to coat figuratively, with fool’s gold, the throne for his monarch Augustus, compromised by personal commitments, emperors-supported priest Kālidāsa symbolically goldleafs so much that the malleable imperial aureate seat resists dings only when occupied by Candragupta II, a sovereign sufficiently skillful to be equated with the dread god whom the author worships most.  Ultimately, Ovid and Kālidāsa, residing in times when and climes where harsh truths had to be whispered to powers-that-be, implicitly advocated reforming their imperial societies from opposite ends of a cerulean political spectrum.  Ovid portrays his Julio-Claudian sovereigns’ repressions of individuals, society, and the universe—in stories of those rulers’ immortal ancestors—in the palest of azures to contrast the bright white ideals (dissension, autonomy, and stewardship) that he respectively and progressively suggests instead.  Yet, Kālidāsa conservatively reserves the deepest of indigos to imbue his differently sected imperial Gupta employers for overemphasizing cultural patronage, outreach to local non-Hindu groups, and personal power hunger in the respective manners of decreasingly part-incarnation epic kings.  Allowing thus for Ovid’s and Kālidāsa’s distinctly tinted love-science poetizings, imperial-deity sanctifyings, and social-control counterings illuminates literary creativity, patriotic religiosity, and societal recovery in more of their variegated varieties.

About the Speaker: 

Shubha Pathak is an Associate Professor in American University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her interpretations of Greek, Indian, and Roman epics reflect her training as both a social and behavioral scientist and a historian of religions. The author of Divine Yet Human Epics and the editor of Figuring Religions, she currently is delving into literary innovations, religious influences, and political critiques couched in the earliest Roman and Indian amatory epics, as well as surveying cycles shaping the cosmic mandates of panthea’s supreme deities, cognitions and emotions motivating inter-religious interactions, and heuristic narratives’ uses in cross-cultural studies. Shubha will be visiting from April 20-24, 2026.