RajaRao’s The Serpent and the Rope is loud with resonances from the epictale of Rama, the god who moves through phases of marriage, exile,and the loss of his consort, as does Rao’s hero. In Midnight’s Childrenthe honeycombed structure of multiple mini-narratives reflects thedigressive form of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Characters likeClare and the avenging Christopher in Cliff’s No Telephone to Heavenreplay in their West Indian context classic roles drawn both from acreolized Yoruba mythology and from the English ‘Great Tradition’.The Kathakali dance cycle offers Arundhati Roy a rich allusive back-ground against which to situate the reductions of the postcolonialpresent in The God of Small Things.Crossing the adventures of indigenous gods with European realism,superimposing images from other worlds on Westernized city land-scapes, post-independence writers relied on an intensely practicalhybridity––the blending of their different cultural influences, anupfront and active syncretism––to unsettle the inheritance of Europe.In postcolonial discourse the term hybridity, usually attributed to thechallenging work of Homi Bhabha, could be seen to refer to a bewil-dering array of different kinds of mixing. In relation to much post-independence writing, however, the fact is that novelists, playwrights,and poets probably had little option but to be syncretic. No matterhow determined were writers’ efforts at reclamation, in a postcolonialsociety coming to terms with the corrosion of tradition during colo-nial occupation, cultural purity was not on offer. Indigenous mythcould not give automatic access to a national essence or ‘soul’. Yet,far from syncretism being a disadvantage, the powerful mutatingenergies of mixed genres like the myth-based novel or the Caribbeanor African modernist poem made available symbolic languages withwhich to signify the vivid contrasts of, for example, expandingpost-independence cities like Bombay, Kingston, or Accra.The impact of European modernism on writers from Soyinkathrough to Rushdie and Ben Okri vividly illustrates not only theimpurity of influence in postcolonial writing, but also the fact thatcultural mixing was intrinsic even to the processes that led writers tomyth in the first place. Montage effects and mythic adaptations were,as we know, championed by Anglo-American modernist poetry.