ABSTRACT
Ashok Banker, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik are Indian authors who have mined the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and, overall, Hindu mythology to produce a series of novels, adaptations and commentaries. Ancestral self-fashioning generates a regime of seeing and receiving the authors as linked to, descended from and drawing upon older genealogies, texts and traditions. Having noted the self-fashioning of authors and their cultural production of Hinduism online, the chapter describes the making of celebrity Hindu authors in the age of “celevision”. The authors, therefore, only leverage existing conditions in which Hinduism is across screens and sites, to generate a celevision. The author in the age of Hindu celevision is at once a means of cultural capital and a marketable commodity, as J. Moran argued about star authors in America. Celevision thus names the everyday circulation of celebrity through the extensions of television culture as supported by the spread of screen technologies.
