The essays in Many Mahābhāratas explore the relationship between the relatively fixed Sanskrit epic and the living tradition that existed before its codification and continues to thrive today. After an introduction by editors Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai, the book is divided into four sections, the first of which is dedicated to “The Manyness of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.” In the first essay, Robert Goldman revisits the question of what scholars have sometimes termed the “genocidal” violence of the epic and whether it is responsible to explain it away as a metaphor for the overcoming of egoism, as Mahatma Gandhi did.
In chapter 2, David Gitomer looks at the story of Arjuna’s half-Nāga son, Irāvān, who appears only briefly in the Critical Edition—where he is introduced and then killed quickly—but who (under the Dravidian form of his name, Aravān) is a major figure in the regional Tamil tradition. Gitomer suggests that Irāvān’s story may have entered the Mahābhārata from this regional tradition (rather than the other way around, as is often assumed) so that the authors could attract listeners by incorporating an existing popular figure into their narrative and also add some emotional punch by supplying a back story to the victims of the war in this section of the epic. The final essay in this section is by Sally Sutherland Goldman and analyzes the narrative of King Janaka and a female ascetic named Sulabhā to explore how the epic audience’s ideas about the physicality of sex (both the category and the act) serve as a scaffolding on which the authors construct their argument for the existence of a subtle body free from the distinctions and limitations of the physical world.
The second section, “Sanskrit Mahābhāratas in Poetry and Performance,” begins with Hawley, who takes as her source the early 3rd-century Sanskrit drama the Pañcarātra, which is based on the episode in which Arjuna disguises himself as a eunuch dancing master to hide his identity during the final year of the heroes’ exile in the court of Virāta. But while the epic exploits the situation for the broad comedy of a manly man in drag, the play uses first-person narration to allow Arjuna to question who and what he truly is during this period, introducing more complexity regarding sexed bodies. In the next essay (chapter 4), Lawrence McCrae looks at the ideology of the 7th-century Śiśupālavadha, arguing that its retelling of the episode in which the king Yudhiṣṭhira and the god Kṛṣṇa join forces to defeat Kṛṣṇa’s enemy Śiśupāla presents a depoliticized image of kingship imbued with emotional resonance through its portrayal of male bonds of affection. Next, Sudha Gopalakrishnan analyzes how the stock Brahmin clown character of the vidūṣaka presents a parodic version of the classical four goals of life in traditional Keralan drama. And in this section’s final essay, Amanda Culp looks at avant-garde techniques in three recent feminist stagings of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā that seek to undermine the gender roles established in the play, whose patriarchal tone far exceeds that of the epic story on which it is based.
The third section, “Regional and Vernacular Mahābhāratas from Premodern South Asia,” begins with Timothy Lorndale’s comparison of the Sanskrit epic with two Old Kannada versions to explore a phenomenon that is well-attested throughout South Asia, namely, inverting the epic to portray it as the “glorious defeat” of the true heroes, the Kauravas, by the treacherous Pāṇḍavas. In the remaining chapters of this section, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath demonstrates the centrality of the epic to the development of vernacular Telugu literature in the early centuries of the second millennium CE with careful analysis of Telugu prosodic and poetic conventions; Eva de Clercq and Simon Winant reveal how Kīcaka, the swaggering would-be rapist of Draupadī who is gruesomely killed by Bhīma in a “bed trick” episode, is redeemed in some Jain texts as a sinner-turned-monk; Heidi Pauwels uses the tools of performance studies and microhistory to explain what a 15th-century Hindi version of the epic tells us about social tensions in the Tomar court of Gwalior; and finally Pillai offers an important corrective to Sheldon Pollock’s argument about the political motivations behind the proliferation of vernacular Mahābhāratas by demonstrating that participation in local forms of Kṛṣṇa worship was also a central concern for the authors of these texts.
The final section, “Mahābhāratas of Modern South Asia,” begins with an essay by Ahona Panda that revisits an early 20th-century debate between two leadings lights of the Bengal Renaissance, the conservative Bankim and the more progressive Tagore. Panda sees Tagore’s humane and nuanced criticism of the virulently anti-European Bankim’s reconstructed historical Kṛṣṇa as a model for a hermeneutical way out of the impasse in which 21st century scholars and Hindu publics find themselves. In the next chapter, Sudipta Kaviraj turns to Bakhtin’s formulation of the difference between epic and novel and how it underlies the 20th-century Bengali modernist critic Buddhadev Bose’s reading of the epic as a novel built around the character development of Yudhiṣṭhira. Draupadī is the subject of the following chapter, in which Pamela Lothspeich compares depictions of the heroine in three popular novels written by Indian women in 1968, 1985, and 2008 to illustrate the development of Indian feminism.
In the penultimate chapter, Sucheta Kanjilal examines retellings of the epic by Dalit communities, focusing on the marginal figures of Niṣādas. She explores how such counternarratives can be used for the (perhaps mutually exclusive) purposes of either elevating marginality into exceptionality or attacking the very ideology that created the idea of social margins in the first place. Finally, Phillip Lutgendorf turns to recent science fiction graphic novels from India that set the epic in a future interstellar civilization where all the astras (attack spells) of the ancient text are reimagined as advanced weapons. Lutgendorf notes that when the epic is retold with these space-western conventions (which arrived late to India) the effect is not to problematize the epic’s portrayal of social hierarchies or gender roles, but rather to re-introduce them with imagery of muscled male bodies and impressive, world-destroying technologies.
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.
Brian Collins is a professor and Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University.
Brian Collins
Date Of Review:
January 17, 2025