Stung by a Charso-Bee: Daljit Nagra's Macaronic Ramayana.

This essay argues that Daljit Nagra's idiosyncratic adaptation of the Ramayana , in which he fuses multiple versions of the ancient epic (from different parts of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), is more than just a comic version of the Sanskrit classic but represents a serious attempt to ensure an old text's relevance to a new readership. One way that Nagra manages to reach a highly diverse and widely dispersed audience is through his extensive use of interlingual wordplay, a technique that stylistically echoes the earlier diasporic writer Salman Rushdie. Reading this transnational version of the Ramayana through the lens of Jahan Ramazani's concept of a macaronic poetics, the essay analyzes the lexicological, phonological, and typographic effects of Nagra's poem, which combine to produce a faithful retelling of the ancient Hindu epic in a language and style that is thoroughly of the twenty-first century and uses translingual puns to connect the Ramayana to a Western audience as well as the Indian diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]