Contemporaneity of the Mahabharata Narrative

Anirban Bhattacharjee (PhD, CSSSC & JU, Kolkata) is an Assistant Professor of English at Santipur College and a visiting faculty at IISER, Kolkata. He has a sustained interest in the Mahabharata and is part of several international research groups on the text. He presented the opening plenary of the 2018 meeting of South Asian Literary Association. His recently edited volume is titled Mahabharate Himsa (2022). Dhrubajyoti Sarkar teaches at the Department of English, University of Kalyani. His research interests are religious nationalism and religion-culture interface in the context of nineteenth-century South Asia.

Contributors ix Foreword xii Sibaji Bandyopadhyay Preface and Acknowledgement xxiii Introduction 1 Anirban Bhattacharjee and Dhrubajyoti Sarkar PART I 1 Asvamedhaparva: Jaimini and Vyasa 17 Sekhar Kumar Sen 2 Nilakantha’s Mahabharata and Presentist Objections to His Work 37 Christopher Minkowski 3 Dramatic War, Fabulous Stories, and Legendary Kings: Persian Adaptation of Mahabharata as Razmnama 48 Kashshaf Ghani 4 On Adaptation and Appropriation: Some Observations on the Sources of the Mushalaparva in Kashiramadasa’s Bengali Mahabharata 66 Soham Pain 5 Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Lonely Middle Course: A Reading of the Mahabharata in Krishnacharitra 83 Dhrubajyoti Sarkar 6 Relocating Mahabharatian Dystopia in Post-independent India: Reading Rangabharata as a Political Caricature of the Nehruvian Times 99 Pinak Sankar Bhattacharya 7 “Doomsday Epic”? P. Lal’s The Mahabharata of Vyasa and the Influence of European Modernism 110 Prayag Ray 8 Irreverent Readers, Worshipful Viewers: Post-emergency Epics and Diverging Indian Nationalisms 121 Sucheta Kanjilal 9 Orality of “Then” and “Now”: Narrating the Mahabharata on Television 138 Sneha Roy Choudhury 10 Psychobiography and Authorial Subjectivity in the (Re) presentation of Draupadi: Towards a Feminist Mythopoeia in Select Retellings of the Mahabharata 153 Komal Agarwal 11 A World of Images: The Visual Identity of the Mahabharata 170 Sankha Banerjee PART II 12 The “Avengers” in an Itihasa: Reading Revenge in the Mahabharata 183 Kanad Sinha 13 Otherwise than Being: The Mahabharata, the Animal, and the Eruption of the Ethical 202 Anirban Bhattacharjee 14 The Mahabharata War and Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence and Nationalism 212 Kalyan Kumar Das Afterthoughts: In Search of the Antecedents to the Mahabharata Concept and Ideal of Anrisamsya: Random Reflections 224 Ranabir Chakravarti Index 241