Going Beyond Translation: The Transcreation and Cultural Reimagining of The Bhagavad Gita

Abstract

This paper examines a transcreation of The Bhagavad Gita in The Legend of Bagger Vance, a novel by Stephen Pressfield (1995) and a Hollywood film (2000). The novel’s plot presents an adaptive appropriation of the Gita: recontextualized within a game of Golf, it seems to imbue the Gita with various creative interventions. Pressfield’s novel was eventually made into a film by Robert Redford, starring Will Smith, Matt Damon and J. Michael Moncrief. It is possible to look at processes of textual transfers in two ways: on the one hand, they show the transfer of texts across cultures and languages, which has been commonplace in postcolonial times and in multilingual cultures like the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, they also show the transformation, perhaps even the watering down, of a significant, philosophical and scriptural text like the Gita into a casual, playful work. At best, LoBV emerges as a creatively re-contextualized, parabolic work. At the same time, it also raises questions about the nature of textual transfer, the presence of the transferer in the text, and the rebirth of texts in varied contexts. To observe these issues, the paper will be divided into three parts: the first part overviews Ramanujan’s theory of retelling; the second part discusses the presence of that theory in the context of the Gita and its transcreated version, exemplified in LoBV; and the third part offers our considerations.