The World of the Orient, 2023, No. 3 171 СучаСний СХіД © 2023 G. Chatterjee, D. Roy and T. Putatunda; Published by the A. Yu. Krymskyi Institute of Orien� tal Studies, NAS of Ukraine on behalf of The World of the Orient. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecom� mons.org/licenses/by�nc/4.0/). ISSN 1682-5268 (on-line); ISSN 1608-0599 (print) Shìdnij svìt, 2023, No. 3, pp. 171–178 doi: https://doi.org/10.15407/orientw2023.03.171 UDC 316.346.2:233(540) QUEERING/QUERYING THE NATION: INTERROGATING ALTERNATIVE MYTHOGRAPHY IN DEVDUTT PATTANAIK’S SHIKHANDI Gourab Chatterjee PhD (Arts) School of Language and Literature Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) Patia, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 751024, India gou86rab@gmail.com ORCID: 0000�0002�5799�9666 Debanjali Roy School of Language and Literature Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) Patia, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 751024, India itsmeanjee@gmail.com ORCID: 0000�0002�2496�6091 Tanmoy Putatunda School of Language and Literature Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) Patia, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 751024, India tanmoy.putatunda@gmail.com The grand narrative of nationalism, which “has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope”, as observed by Cynthia Enloe, in her book Ba- nanas, Beaches and Bases, is essentially a gendered discourse and excludes any gender location that does not conform to the standards of heteronormative masculinity. Therefore, any attempt to locate and identify instances that debunk this gender binary in the history of the nation creates space for multiple localized narratives and destabilises the hetero�patriarchal power�centre of the nation�state. Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You by Devdutt Pattanaik, published in 2014, during the legal tug�of�war regarding section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, tries to create an alternate mytho�historical framework by selecting queer occurrences from Hindu mythologies to challenge the broader discourse of monolithic understanding of “Indian�ness”. This paper seeks to interrogate the subversive potentials of these narratives, deliberately chosen from “Hindu” myths, in critiquing and questioning the homogenised, hegemonic and masculinist constructs of the mytho�historiography of the nation. It also aims to explore the use of mytho�his� tory as an agent in shaping nationhood and validating the queer space in the narrative of the nation. Keywords: Devdutt Pattanaik; Gender; India; Mytho�history; Nation; Queer; Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You by Devdutt Pattanaik was published in 2014, following the year marked by the (in)famous verdict of the Indian Supreme Court