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Towards a Theory of Rewriting: Drawing178 from the Indian Practiceadvances in both literary theory and Culture Studies in the twentiethcentury. Translation Studies went on to make seminal contributionsto every theoretical paradigm or critical approach which came to beconsidered revolutionary or avant-garde: deconstruction,postcolonial studies, feminist studies, subaltern studies, even queertheory. 2 Translation theory has effectively offered tools forinterrogating asymmetrical relations between hegemonic andmarginalized cultures, patriarchal structures embedded in discourses,the marginalization of subaltern cultures within cultures which arethemselves marginalized globally, the appropriation of culturalresistance in translation and the operation of market fundamentalismin translation, to mention only the more obvious areas. In fact,Translations Studies scholars like Lefevere, Bassnett, Hermans, andVenuti even called for the demolition of the Euro-centrism of thediscipline in the West. Sujit Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi and AyyappaPanikker in India offered theoretical paradigms which challenged theWestern notions on translation. No wonder translation theory looksso exhausted today and descriptive Translation Studies areproliferating.The vast unchartered terrain of cultural rewriting offerschallenges for Translation Studies scholars to widen their horizons,and in the process bring the discipline closer to Culture Studies. TheIndian tradition of rewriting is quite remarkable. Literary rewritinghas, of course, occupied the attention of Translation Studies scholarsand literary theorists alike. It needs hardly be stated that, unlike inthe West, where faithfulness in translation was an inviolable idealtill quite recently, literary texts were not translated, but merelyrendered in a new form, i.e. rewritten in India. That such rewriting,starting with the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in the variousspoken languages of India, had both aesthetic and socio-politicalimplications, especially in contexts like the Bhakti movement, iswidely recognized today. But the tradition of inter-semioticrewriting, as in the rewriting of literary texts in performing arts, has