Many Mahābhāratas

✍ Scribed by Nell Shapiro Hawley (editor), Sohini Sarah Pillai (editor)

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 464
• Series: (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhāata 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Foreword
1 An Introduction to the Literature of the Mahābhārata
Always Wanting These Stories
The Story
The Mahābhārata Genre
A Contextual Introduction to the Essays
Part I: The Manyness of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
Part II: Sanskrit Mahābhāratas in Poetry and Performance
Part III: Regional and Vernacular Mahābhāratas from Premodern South Asia
Part IV: Mahābhāratas of Modern South Asia
A Story’s Cycle of Rebirth
Part I: The Manyness of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
2 Ā Garbhāt: Murderous Rage and Collective Punishment as Thematic Elements in Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata
3 The Invention of Irāvān
Introduction
The Texture of Battle Narration in the Bhīṣmaparvan
The Birth of Irāvān
The Death of Irāvān
Irāvān and the Rākṣasas
Conclusion
4 Bodies That Don’t Matter: Gender, Body, and Discourse in the Narrative of Sulabhā
Part II: Sanskrit Mahābhāratas in Poetry and Performance
5 The Remembered Self: Arjuna as Bṛhannalā in the Pañcarātra
Arjuna as Bṛhannaḍā in the Virāṭaparvan
Arjuna as Bṛhannalā in the Pañcarātra
Arjuna as Śiva, Arjuna as Śleṣa
6 The Lord of Glory and the Lord of Men: Power and Partiality in Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha
Kṛṣṇa’s Meeting with King Yudhiṣṭhira
Kingship and Kingdom in the Śiśupālavadha
Sharing a Single Throne
Conclusion
7 What Are the Goals of Life? The Vidūṣaka’s Interpretation of the Puruṣārthas in Kulaśekhara’s Subhadrādhanañjaya
The Puruṣārthas in Kūṭiyāṭṭam: A Counterpoint Narration of the Goals of Life
Day One: Preparations
Day Two: Vivādam—Dispute and Settlement
Day Three: Vinodam and Vañcanam—Amusement and Deceit
Day Four: Aśanam—Feasting
Day Five: Rājaseva—Serving a King
8 How Do We Remember Śakuntalā? The Mahābhārata and Kālidāsa’s Drama on the Contemporary Indian Stage
The Three Śakuntalās of Ensemble 86
Śakuntalā Alone—Rita Ganguly’s Tridhara
Igniting Cultural Memory in Kirtana Kumar’s Shakuntala Remembered
Conclusion
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
Dharmic Tension in the Mahābhārata
Who Killed Droṇa?
Bhīma’s Heroic “Triumphs”
Wrestling Gone Wrong: A New Winner in the Kirātārjunīya
Conclusion: A Different Dharma
10 Three Poets, Two Languages, One Translation: The Evolution of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu
Telugu Mahābhāratamu
Nannaya: Early Experimentations in Telugu
Tikkana: Dramatic Flair in Virāṭa’s Court
Ĕṛṛana: An Iconic Return to the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
Conclusion
11 The Fate of Kīcaka in Two Jain Apabhramsha Mahābhāratas
Early and Medieval Jain Mahābhāratas: An Overview
Two Jain Mahābhāratas in Apabhramsha
Introducing Kīcaka
Raïdhū’s Harivaṃsapurāṇa
Svayambhūdeva’s Riṭṭhaṇemicariu
12 The Power-Politics of Desire and Revenge: A Classical Hindi Kīcakavadha Performance at the Tomar Court of Gwalior
A Kauravādi-Vadha: Foregrounding the Martial Mood
The Martial Context: Claiming a K.atriya Status for the Tomars
Questioning Masculine Prowess in the Kīcakavadha
The Performative Tradition of Paṇḍvānī
Conclusion
13 Blessed Beginnings: Invoking Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa, and Rāma in Two Regional Mahābhāratas
Layering Kṛṣṇa in Villi’s Pāratam
Remembering Rāma in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat
Conclusion: Larger Patterns of Retelling the Mahābhārata in Regional Languages
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
In Search of Prajñā
Kabitvamay Itihāsa (A Poetic History): Bankim’s Ideological Project in the Kṛṣṇacaritra
Aitihāsik Kāvya: Tagore on the Mahābhārata
The Reader’s Prajñā
15 The Epic and the Novel: Buddhadev Bose’s Modern Reading of the Mahābhārata
On the Contemporaneity Problem
On Buddhadev Bose
On Modern Aesthetic Sensibility
Bose’s Reading of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
Yudhi..hira as the Central Figure
Yudhi..hira as a Hero in Search of the Self
16 Draupadī, Yājñasenī, Pāñcālī, Kṛṣṇā: Representations of an Epic Heroine in Three Novels
A Draupadi Caught in the Chaos of Partition
A Peacebuilding, Postcolonial Draupadī
A “Bluer” and Bolder Draupadī
Conclusion
17 From Excluded to Exceptional: Caste in Contemporary Mahābhāratas
Critique from the Margins
The View from the Forest in Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra
Re-reading Ekalavya in Kiran Nagarkar’s Bedtime Story
Conclusion: Writers from the Mahābhārata’s Margins?
18 A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: The Mahābhārata as Dystopian Future
Episode IV: On the Absent Presence of Indian Science Fiction
Episode V: The Kaurava Empire Trilogy
Episode VI: Ahead to the Future?
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

✦ Subjects

Hinduism, Indian Mythology, Classics, Epics