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A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhārata studies.
Many Mahābhāratas is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mahābhārata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mahābhārata has been not to consume it but to create it anew.
The many Mahābhāratas of this book come from the first century to the twenty-first. They are composed in nine different languages-Apabhramsha, Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. Early chapters illuminate themes of retelling within the Sanskrit Mahābhārata itself, demonstrating that the story's propensity for regeneration emerges from within. The majority of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Sanskrit epic. Readers dive into classical dramas, premodern vernacular poems, regional performance traditions, commentaries, graphic novels, political essays, novels, and contemporary theater productions-all of them Mahābhāratas.
Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mahābhārata's long life in South Asia, Many Mahābhāratas constitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mahābhārata studies.
"Many Mahābhāratas is aimed at specialists in the epic, who will appreciate this volume's inclusion of new voices alongside established ones, its expansion of disciplinary perspectives, and the satisfying continuities that unite the essays, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts." — Reading Religion
"Overall, the anthology is an excellent read. It thoroughly enriches and updates the field of Mahābhārata Studies. This is a groundbreaking volume assembling a range of eminent scholarship." — Religious Studies Review
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Foreword
Paula Richman
1. An Introduction to the Literature of the Mahābhārata
Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai
Part I: The Manyness of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
2. Ā Garbhāt: Murderous Rage and Collective Punishment as Thematic Elements in Vyāsa's Mahābhārata
Robert Goldman
3. The Invention of Irāvān
David Gitomer
4. Bodies That Don't Matter: Gender, Body, and Discourse in the Narrative of Sulabhā
Sally J. Sutherland Goldman
Part II: Sanskrit Mahābhāratas in Poetry and Performance
5. The Remembered Self: Arjuna as Bṛhannalā in the Pañcarātra
Nell Shapiro Hawley
6. The Lord of Glory and the Lord of Men: Power and Partiality in Māgha's Śiśupālavadha
Lawrence McCrea
7. What Are the Goals of Life? The Vidūṣaka's Interpretation of the Puruṣārthas in Kulaśekhara's Subhadrādhanañjaya
Sudha Gopalakrishnan
8. How Do We Remember Śakuntalā? The Mahābhārata and Kālidāsa's Drama on the Contemporary Indian Stage
Amanda Culp
Part III: Regional and Vernacular Mahābhāratas from Premodern South Asia
9. An Old Dharma in a New Age: Duryodhana and the Reframing of Epic Ethics in Ranna's Sāhasabhīmavijaya
Timothy Lorndale
10. Three Poets, Two Languages, One Translation: The Evolution of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
11. The Fate of Kīcaka in Two Jain Apabhramsha Mahābhāratas
Eva De Clercq and Simon Winant
12. The Power-Politics of Desire and Revenge: A Classical Hindi Kīcakavadha Performance at the Tomar Court of Gwalior
Heidi Pauwels
13. Blessed Beginnings: Invoking Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa, and Rāma in Two Regional Mahābhāratas
Sohini Sarah Pillai
Part IV: Mahābhāratas of Modern South Asia
14. How to Be Political without Being Polemical: The Debate between Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore over the Kṛṣṇacaritra
Ahona Panda
15. The Epic and the Novel: Buddhadev Bose's Modern Reading of the Mahābhārata
Sudipta Kaviraj
16. Draupadī, Yājñasenī, Pāñcālī, Kṛṣṇ ā: Representations of an Epic Heroine in Three Novels
Pamela Lothspeich
17. From Excluded to Exceptional: Caste in Contemporary Mahābhāratas
Sucheta Kanjilal
18. A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: The Mahābhārata as Dystopian Future
Philip Lutgendorf
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index