Literary first.
The story must work as literature before anything else — character, atmosphere, conflict and emotional truth come first.
About ĀKHYĀNA
Ancient stories.New ways of seeing them.
ĀKHYĀNA is a literary project devoted to rediscovering stories, characters, ideas and traditions from ancient India and reimagining them for the modern reader. It explores the vast and often overlooked landscape of ancient Indian literature — stories of gods and mortals, kings and wanderers, warriors and women, desire and duty, love and loss, ambition and sacrifice.
Some of these stories have remained deeply embedded in cultural memory. Others have faded into the margins of the texts that preserved them. ĀKHYĀNA seeks to bring both back into view, not simply by retelling them, but by asking what they might reveal when encountered through a contemporary literary lens.
Rooted in ancient sources but shaped through imagination, research and storytelling, ĀKHYĀNA creates literary works that enter the spaces between what the old stories tell us and what they leave unsaid. The goal is not to turn the past into a museum piece, but to make its stories feel immediate, human and alive again.
Because the questions these stories ask — about love, power, duty, identity, consequence, mortality and the choices that define us — have never truly belonged to the past.
What we believe
Stories are not relics.They are living things.
Ancient India left behind an extraordinary world of stories — stories of gods and mortals, kings and wanderers, desire and duty, memory and loss, wisdom and transformation.
Some became famous. Others disappeared from the margins of the texts that preserved them. Many were never given the literary attention they deserve.
ĀKHYĀNA begins there.
We return to these stories not simply to retell them, but to ask what they might still mean when encountered by a modern reader.
The questions
A civilisationof questions.
Ancient Indian literature rarely offers only simple answers. It asks questions about duty, desire, responsibility, consequence, identity and the nature of a good life.
What does duty demand when it conflicts with compassion? What happens when devotion becomes obsession? What does a person owe to another human being?
These questions belong to no single age.
This is why these stories still matter.
The approach
Respect the source.Reimagine the story.
ĀKHYĀNA does not treat ancient texts as raw material simply to be reproduced word for word.
Nor does it dismiss them as stories belonging to another time.
The work exists in the space between the two.
We remain attentive to the originating sources, their contexts and what they actually preserve. Where the story is silent, we allow literary imagination to explore what might have existed within those silences.
Where a work is an adaptation, the relationship to its source is acknowledged. Where it is expanded, interpreted or reimagined, that distinction matters.
The ĀKHYĀNA principles
Rooted in tradition.
Ancient sources, traditions and cultural contexts are treated as foundations rather than decoration.
Imaginative where necessary.
The gaps between what has been preserved and what might have existed are spaces where literary imagination can work.
Philosophically engaged.
These are stories worth thinking about long after they have been read — stories that continue to raise difficult questions.
What ĀKHYĀNA is not
Not a mythologyencyclopedia.
ĀKHYĀNA is not intended to catalogue every deity, dynasty, scripture or story from ancient India.
It is not a textbook, an academic archive or a collection of simplified retellings.
The purpose is narrower and, hopefully, more meaningful: to find stories that still have something to say and give them the space to say it.
Sometimes that means returning to a familiar story and looking at it differently. Sometimes it means bringing an almost forgotten one back into view.