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In the Mahābhārata (MBh), whipping is mainly resorted to by charioteers while driving their horses and the terms designating whips are therefore frequently found in the war-books. Used metaphorically, the expression "whip-like words" designates cutting, hurtful speech. Excessive whipping of draught-animals is considered cruel and is seen as a sign of low birth. When humans are whipped, this is regarded as particularly insulting, since such treatment is usually reserved for animals, but the outcome for the offenders is unequal: kings who whip brahmins are swiftly punished and cursed, whereas brahmins who flog kings get away with it scot-free. Such tales are most frequently found in the MBh's Anuśāsanaparvan, where they serve to underscore the brahmins' superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent study (Pontillo 2016) it has been argued that the Mahābhārata contains traces of a heterodox culture, the Vrātya-culture, and these emerge most clearly in connection with Bhīṣma and Droṇa. In this article it will be strongly suggested that any analysis of these two epic characters should take Kṛpa into account as well, since he has many features in common with them, especially with Droṇa. Furthermore, after a briefly outlined proposal to explain these commonalities, the function of the narrative character of Kṛpa will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the tropical landscape of Tamil Nadu in southern India, the eighteen-day long festival of Kūttāṇtạvar offers insights into the interplay of transsexuality, death, and regeneration within Tamil Mahābhārata folk cultures. The complexities of queer identity and expression within the context of Tamil Nadu’s cultural landscape, with its entailing myths and rituals, include an understanding of tropicality and the Tamil ecocultural notion of tinai, as conceptual frameworks that shape human-environment interactions and cultural practices. This festival, which is held annually during the months of April-May, has synchronised its rituals with the hot and humid summers. Most of the activities associated with the festival are scheduled primarily during night or dawn hours to avoid the intense midday heat, thus reflecting a practical adaptation to the tropical climate. Within this setting, queer identities find expression through the rituals and myths associated with the Kūttāṇtạvar’s festivals. This paper illuminates the transformative potency of myths and rituals in shaping queer identities and traditions all within the intricate montage of folk cultures in Tamil Nadu.

The epic Mahabharata has been adapted into varied genres—theatre, dance, movie, fiction, and television serial. This paper shall focus on two televised versions—one directed by B. R. Chopra and the other by Siddharth Tewary. Interestingly, both are simultaneously available and comparable through the research-friendly digital archive of YouTube and Disney+ Hotstar. The scene of “Draupadi’s disrobing” in the “Game of Dice” episode is the climactic scene of the epic that signals the inevitability of the war of Kurukshetra. Using digital apps, and a close examination of the visual medium this paper shall attempt a comparison of the damning and shaming of Draupadi and her subsequent defiance in the face of male arrogance in the “Game of Dice” episode as presented by B. R. Chopra in 1988 and later by Siddharth Tewary in 2013. It shall identify points of similarity and departure to comment on the diverse messaging strategies employed by the respective directors and argue whether they hammer in different messages. If the message is the same, which director is more potent in establishing it? The paper shall also showcase the power and potential of the visual medium in demonstrating the toxicity of the male gaze in action.

In this article, I discuss the vilification of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful sorcerer in the Mughal poet-laureate Shaikh Abū'l Faiḍ bin Mubārak, or 'Faiḍī's Mahābhārat and his correspondent apotheosis as the 'essence of the True God' in the Shāriq al-maʿrifat , a treatise also ascribed to Faiḍī. As I argue, this inconsistency, or ambivalence, is a common and overlooked facet of the elite Islamicate engagement with religious diversity and difference in early modern Hindustan. In the case of the Mahābhārat , however, Faiḍī's portrayal of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful illusionist reflects not only an Islamic discomfort with Vaishnavite theology, but Faiḍī's own performative insecurities as a Hindustani writer of Persian poetry and literary prose. Kṛṣṇa's so-called 'magic' lies in large part in his way with words: the verbal and social manipulation he uses to stoke the flames of conflict. The character thus becomes a kind of shadow or double of Faiḍī himself-a demiurgic author of the Mahābhārat upon which the poet can displace the classical Islamicate association of poetry with sorcery and deceit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Kembara: Jurnal Keilmuan Bahasa, Sastra, dan Pengajarannya is the property of Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Parmanu (2018) is a commercial action-cum-spy flick that recounts a highly stylized history of India's efforts to become a Pokhrannuclear weapons state through the narrative device of the Mahabharat, one of India's two great Sanskrit epics. In doing so, it renders India's quest for nuclear weapons in explicitly communal terms rather than national terms. Parmanu exemplifies Modi's co-optation of Bollywood for his personal gain and that of his party, the BJP. It also participates in the BJP's communal agenda of forging new, muscular image of India at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent study (Pontillo 2016) it has been argued that the Mahābhārata contains traces of a heterodox culture, the Vrātya-culture, and these emerge most clearly in connection with Bhīṣma and Droṇa. In this article it will be strongly suggested that any analysis of these two epic characters should take Kṛpa into account as well, since he has many features in common with them, especially with Droṇa. Furthermore, after a briefly outlined proposal to explain these commonalities, the function of the narrative character of Kṛpa will be examined.

In the Mahābhārata (MBh), whipping is mainly resorted to by charioteers while driving their horses and the terms designating whips are therefore frequently found in the war-books. Used metaphorically, the expression “whip-like words” designates cutting, hurtful speech. Excessive whipping of draught-animals is considered cruel and is seen as a sign of low birth. When humans are whipped, this is regarded as particularly insulting, since such treatment is usually reserved for animals, but the outcome for the offenders is unequal: kings who whip brahmins are swiftly punished and cursed, whereas brahmins who flog kings get away with it scot-free. Such tales are most frequently found in the MBh’s Anuśāsanaparvan, where they serve to underscore the brahmins’ superiority.

The myth of Kauṇḍinya has had a profound impact on the writing of Southeast Asian history, being used by historians in the early twentieth century to explain how the earliest kingdoms in the region were formed. However, the myth as we know it today has been constructed from fragments of information found in Sanskrit epigraphy and Chinese textual sources from three distinct time periods. Using a form of textual analysis first described by Michel Foucault under the heading of ‘archaeology’, this article attempts to isolate and examine the nature of the myth within each time period, as if uncovering distinct layers of an archaeological excavation. I have tried to show how each version of the myth is indelibly a product of its own time, drawing its significance from the religious, social and literary context in which it was recorded. In particular, while revealing elements of continuity and discontinuity in the transition of the myth, it also highlights important events in the transmission and reception of religious ideas and practice that may be connected to the wider themes of dynamics and stability in religious studies.

The present paper focuses on one of the competitive scenes staged during the Vedic classical mahāvrata rite: a sort of “agonistic” play performed between someone defined as abhigara, basically translated as “praiser,” and someone who is called apagara, interpreted as “reviler.” They appear to take part only in a verbal and not a physical duel. In fact, scholars consider the scene an example of a verbal contest. However, given that abhigara and apagara are never mentioned in the Rigvedic and Atharvavedic collections and rarely occur in the Vedic corpus, appearing mostly in sections concerning the peculiar mahāvrata ceremony, this dichotomous pair certainly sparks interest since they are associable with the Mahābhārata context. The analysis of the Vedic textual sources concerning the abhigara / apagara contest on the mahāvrata day, a survey of the terminology correlated to these two terms and their etymological reconstruction may offer a peculiar perspective on the relationship between violence, ritualism and narration in the Mahābhārata.

The current notion of the Vrātyas aggressivity seems to be mainly based on certain Vedic texts that record a biased account of their history. It is usually assumed that relevant passages refer to the aggression displayed by the Vrātyas during verbal confrontations with their opponents in order to determine the correct stance on ritual matters. However, even outside the Vrātya context, competitive hospitality and violent verbal exchanges may be found in the sapiential sphere, often in the form of riddles—the so-called brahmodya. Among the sections in the Mahābhārata that demonstrate epic traces of competitiveness in the field of sacred knowledge, this paper will primarily examine the Aṣṭāvakrīya-Upākhyāna (MBh 3.132–134), which features the sole Mahābhārata reference to the term brahmodya.

Ecology and environmental catastrophes have found an immense place in Indian classical literature. As Indian mythology shapes the culture of the country, worshipping nature remains an intrinsic part of it. The great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, is one of the earliest Sanskrit literary texts that lay a platform to edify people about the value and importance of ecological equilibrium. This paper aims at studying the relationship between nature, humans, and culture through select 21st-century Indian mythological retellings. For this purpose, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s retellings titled The One Who Swam with the Fishes (2017) and The One Who Had Two Lives (2018) from her Girls of the Mahabharata series have been taken as the primary texts. Primarily, it examines the role played by Nature in the lives of the protagonists as an important character. Theologically, in the Hindu culture, nature is venerated for possessing mythical supremacy. The present article reflects this supremacy of nature celebrated through the character of Yaksha. While investigating the employment of various techniques to illuminate nature’s unpredictable qualities such as soothing, nurturing, aesthetic, ethereal, powerful, destructive and alive, the study focuses on looking at how the characters are highly influenced by nature and on understanding the character of human influence on nature centralizing the idea that human existence is possible only if there is a harmonious coexistence with nature. Ecocriticism has been applied as a theoretical framework in the paper for critical analysis of human-nature interaction and the cultural implications of it reflected in select novels.

The current notion of the Vrātyas aggressivity seems to be mainly based on certain Vedic texts that record a biased account of their history. It is usually assumed that relevant passages refer to the aggression displayed by the Vrātyas during verbal confrontations with their opponents in order to determine the correct stance on ritual matters. However, even outside the Vrātya context, competitive hospitality and violent verbal exchanges may be found in the sapiential sphere, often in the form of riddles--the so-called brahmodya. Among the sections in the Mahābhārata that demonstrate epic traces of competitiveness in the field of sacred knowledge, this paper will primarily examine the Aṣṭāvakrīya-Upākhyāna (MBh 3.132-134), which features the sole Mahābhārata reference to the term brahmodya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focuses on one of the competitive scenes staged during the Vedic classical mahāvrata rite: a sort of "agonistic" play performed between someone defined as abhigara, basically translated as "praiser," and someone who is called apagara, interpreted as "reviler." They appear to take part only in a verbal and not a physical duel. In fact, scholars consider the scene an example of a verbal contest. However, given that abhigara and apagara are never mentioned in the Rigvedic and Atharvavedic collections and rarely occur in the Vedic corpus, appearing mostly in sections concerning the peculiar mahāvrata ceremony, this dichotomous pair certainly sparks interest since they are associable with the Mahābhārata context. The analysis of the Vedic textual sources concerning the abhigara / apagara contest on the mahāvrata day, a survey of the terminology correlated to these two terms and their etymological reconstruction may offer a peculiar perspective on the relationship between violence, ritualism and narration in the Mahābhārata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krsna Dvaipāyan Vyāsa, popularly known as Veda Vyasa, is regarded to be the greatest seer of ancient India. He was an erudite scholar. He is credited with writing the epic Mahābhārata and dividing the Veda into four texts. Unlike other texts, Krsna Dvaipāyana Vyāsa also features as an important character in the Mahābhārata. He is believed to be the grandfather of the main protagonists of the epic. His character in the Mahābhārata shows that he is supremely wise. Vyāsa lived around the 3rd millennium BCE. There are references in the epic and the Purānas to the fact that Vyāsa lived at the close of the DvāparaYug (era). The festival of Guru Purnima is dedicated to him. Indian mythology says that 'Vyāsa' is not a particular person's name. It is the name given to a compiler. It is thus evident that there were compilers of the Veda who preceded Krsna Dvaipāyana Vyāsa. However, as mythical as it may be, the chronicler of the Mahābhārata is the twenty-eighth Veda Vyāsa to be succeeded by Droni (Ashwathāma) in the forthcoming Dvāpara Yug. In the Mahābhārata, Vyāsa was worshipped as an incarnation of Brahmà, Narayana Vishnu and Maheshwara. Thus, the life of this great saint of ancient India is mired in many myths and realities, some of which are difficult to retrieve from the hold of time. The present study is an attempt to discern myth from reality and to draw a comprehensive sketch of the life and philosophy of the mystic based on the epic Mahābhārata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecology and environmental catastrophes have found an immense place in Indian classical literature. As Indian mythology shapes the culture of the country, worshipping nature remains an intrinsic part of it. The great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, is one of the earliest Sanskrit literary texts that lay a platform to edify people about the value and importance of ecological equilibrium. This paper aims at studying the relationship between nature, humans, and culture through select 21st-century Indian mythological retellings. For this purpose, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's retellings titled The One Who Swam with the Fishes (2017) and The One Who Had Two Lives (2018) from her Girls of the Mahabharata series have been taken as the primary texts. Primarily, it examines the role played by Nature in the lives of the protagonists as an important character. Theologically, in the Hindu culture, nature is venerated for possessing mythical supremacy. The present article reflects this supremacy of nature celebrated through the character of Yaksha. While investigating the employment of various techniques to illuminate nature's unpredictable qualities such as soothing, nurturing, aesthetic, ethereal, powerful, destructive and alive, the study focuses on looking at how the characters are highly influenced by nature and on understanding the character of human influence on nature centralizing the idea that human existence is possible only if there is a harmonious coexistence with nature. Ecocriticism has been applied as a theoretical framework in the paper for critical analysis of human-nature interaction and the cultural implications of it reflected in select novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the advances in computational literary analysis of Western literature, in-depth analysis of the South Asian literature has been lacking. Thus, social network analysis of the main characters in the Indian epic Mahabharata was performed, in which it was prepossessed into verses, followed by a term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) transformation. Then, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) word vectors were obtained by applying compact Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the term–document matrix. As a novel innovation to this study, these word vectors were adaptively converted into a fully connected similarity matrix and transformed, using a novel locally weighted K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm, into a social network. The viability of the social networks was assessed by their ability to (i) recover individual character-to-character relationships; (ii) embed the overall network structure (verified with centrality measures and correlations); and (iii) detect communities of the Pandavas (protagonist) and Kauravas (antagonist) using spectral clustering. Thus, the proposed scheme successfully (i) predicted the character-to-character connections of the most important and second most important characters at an F-score of 0.812 and 0.785, respectively, (ii) recovered the overall structure of the ground-truth networks by matching the original centralities (corr. > 0.5, p < 0.05), and (iii) differentiated the Pandavas from the Kauravas with an F-score of 0.749. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the advances in computational literary analysis of Western literature, in-depth analysis of the South Asian literature has been lacking. Thus, social network analysis of the main characters in the Indian epic Mahabharata was performed, in which it was prepossessed into verses, followed by a term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) transformation. Then, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) word vectors were obtained by applying compact Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the term–document matrix. As a novel innovation to this study, these word vectors were adaptively converted into a fully connected similarity matrix and transformed, using a novel locally weighted K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm, into a social network. The viability of the social networks was assessed by their ability to (i) recover individual character-to-character relationships; (ii) embed the overall network structure (verified with centrality measures and correlations); and (iii) detect communities of the Pandavas (protagonist) and Kauravas (antagonist) using spectral clustering. Thus, the proposed scheme successfully (i) predicted the character-to-character connections of the most important and second most important characters at an F-score of 0.812 and 0.785, respectively, (ii) recovered the overall structure of the ground-truth networks by matching the original centralities (corr. > 0.5, p < 0.05), and (iii) differentiated the Pandavas from the Kauravas with an F-score of 0.749.

The Mahabharata (composed in Sanskrit sometime between 400 BC and 400 AD), is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It has been used as a source of inspiration for various literary, artistic, and cultural expressions, and its themes and characters have been reinterpreted to reflect contemporary political and social concerns. This has led to the creation of new interpretations and revisions of the epic, which have challenged traditional narratives and added new perspectives to the epic’s cultural significance. Focusing on Kavita Kané ‘s The Fisher Queen’s Dynasty, the paper suggests that the trauma experienced by Satyavati in her infancy shaped her character and her actions as the Queen of Hastinapur. The author analyses the influence of trauma in her life and how it led to her determination to re-establish a powerful clan. The author’s perspective offers a unique interpretation of Satyavati’s character and highlights the importance of considering the impact of traumatic experiences on an individual’s life and behaviour. The protagonist’s abandonment by her father was a traumatic event that influenced her emotional fabric and perception of the world. She was constantly haunted by a past that fuelled her insecurities and anxieties. The paper analyses this modern narrative representation of female desire for power and autonomy (which is repressed by the patriarchy) and how this desire can originate in past traumatic experiences.

What value does a leading historian of modern South Asia ascribe to bhasa literature? Meant as an introduction to a volume of papers dedicated to Dipesh Chakrabarty, this essay proposes to read through some of his work and draw out a couple of general responses to this central question. The first one concerns Chakrabarty's larger philosophical engagement with the condition of colonial modernity in India. In his treatment, bhasa literary corpus is a site of difference as well as belonging. He searches for the difference that marks Indian experience of colonial modernity in the literary. The value of bhasa, in this instance, lies in its ability to provide a ground for resistance to the uniform march of enlightenment and capitalist modernity. And, bhasa enables an awareness of historical difference precisely because it provides a sense of belonging. This sense of belongingness is closely tied to a place, a particular location as well as to a sense of everyday intimacy. As the hybrid site of difference as well as belonging, bhasa is then the constitutive cradle of what Chakrabarty calls 'History 2s'. The second one concerns Chakrabarty's more specific analysis of the evolution of history as an academic discipline in modern India. He delineates a sharp devaluation in the political worth of the literary that the rise of rational-scientific history writing brought about in the middle decades of the twentieth-century. As he studies the intellectual careers of particular historians, part of his intent is to elaborate on this process of devaluation. The essay situates this reading of Chakrabarty in a larger discursive context. It briefly looks at the work of some other scholars of modern South Asia who share these intellectual concerns, and seeks to create, as it were, a dialogue between Chakrabarty and others. The essay concludes by briefly introducing the papers in the volume. In different ways, they extend Chakrabarty's preoccupation with the relationship between history and literature, and with the subject of modernity in India at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies how Sarala Dasa's Mahabharata was received in the colonial Odia public sphere in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It received the attention of early antiquarian scholars like Rajendralal Mitra who used the composition as a source to study Odisha's historical past. The antiquarian exercise created the discursive environment in which the first popular print editions arrived in the market. Despite its popularity, the educated public initially dismissed Sarala's Mahabharata as a work of little merit in comparison to the Sanskrit Mahabharata. However, the perception soon changed, and it began to receive the attention of scholars like Mrutyunjaya Rath and Gopinath Nandasharma who conducted the first serious antiquarian-philological studies of the epic in Odia. This essay traces the development of Odia language scholarship on Sarala Mahabharata, and its relationship with the popular Odia nationalist self-assertion. It concludes by tracing the contours of a debate on the temporal and spatial location of Sarala which took place immediately after independence and the subsequent publication of its definitive edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent publication (Divine Descent by Simon Brodbeck, 2022) proposes to resolve a long-standing theological conundrum of Hindu mythology on the basis of a literary-holist or "synchronic" reading of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, seeking thereby to displace earlier scholarship treating this theme. This review essay provides a thorough analysis of the arguments of Divine Descent and the closely linked matter of the two competing methodologies in the reading of the Sanskrit epics: the "synchronic" or holist approach championed by Brodbeck and the "analytic" approach, which views the Mahābhārata as a historically layered text. Ultimately, I argue here that the latter "analytic" solutions to the conundrum, which it was Brodbeck's purpose to challenge, account for the matter far more persuasively. In particular, I make special reference to a 1960 study by Paul Hacker as a work of persisting value for understanding the historic development of the avatāra system over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This play is a new interpretation of Urvashi and Arjuna from the epic Mahabharata. Immortal Urvashi of heaven was the life partner of mortal emperor Pururavas of earth, Arjuna's fortieth ancestor. The story is that Urvashi, assigned to be an eternal virgin who was denied motherhood, experiences the bliss of motherhood because of Arjuna. Indra, Arjuna's father, has brought him to heaven so that he might annihilate Indra's enemies. Urvashi, who has fallen in love with Arjuna, approaches him for love but is rejected by Arjuna. Urvashi curses Arjuna to become a eunuch. Arjuna, who has realized that Urvashi was Pururavas' wife, tells her in despair that she is no different from his biological mother Kunti and his stepmother Indrani, Indra's wife. Urvashi's dormant motherhood bursts forth as she hears this. At the end of the story, Urvashi embraces Arjuna with maternal love, lays him on her lap, and sings a lullaby. Arjuna and Urvashi are the protagonists of this play. The other characters include Urvashi's two friends and two nymphs who appear in the interlude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study accounts for disparate portrayals of divine destroyer Śiva in the normative Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata as opposed to Kālidāsa's amatory Kumārasaṃbhava and Raghuvaṃśa by contrasting the primary and secondary Sanskrit epic authors' respective reliances on the Mānavadharmaśāstra and the Kāmasūtra. By arguing, per Richard Johnson's postpoststructuralism, that these mythological and philosophical differences deliberately reflect those poets' specific sociohistorical contexts, this inquiry accounts more accurately for Śiva's classical-epic depictions than do Stella Kramrisch's and Wendy Doniger [O'Flaherty]'s investigations informed by Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and Don Handelman and David Shulman's researches influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's poststructuralism. The present work, in revising such prevailing Indological notions as Romila Thapar's traditional construal of the "classical," Donald R. Davis Jr.'s anthropocentric definition of puruṣārtha (human aim), and Sheldon Pollock's unvarying characterization of śāstras (treatises), models a historically aware approach that appreciates the interrelationship of mythological philosophy and philosophical mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in, The Palace of Illusions portray a different image of Draupathi, the princess of Panchaal, the daughter of King Dhrupad and the wife of the five Pandavas. The author in her work highlights epic through the eyes and mouthpiece of Panchali. Panchali is here, voice of the current work. The writer writes her poignant work, hearing stories about magic and illusions, about great epics and legends, about religion, politics, and relationships during her childhood. She takes her inspiration from the great epic Mahabharata, which is believed to take place during the Dvapar Yug. Mahabharata is a fascinating tale of apsaras and asuras. It has many mythological tales of heroes and their valour. In the current study deals with the post-modernist pespective through the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard. The postmodernist believes, that these grand narratives which function in a way, that they become a totalizing factor in determining the myths, legends and tales and provide legitimation for the same. He then believes that these grand narratives become an overarching umbrella for the stories and hide the facts and pieces of information which are as valid as the narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "greatness" of the Mahābhārata, its mahat/mahā quality, refers primarily to its intended dynamism as a powerful engine generating the spread of Brahminic teaching throughout the world, casting "heathen" (nāstika) teachings and their patrons into shadow for all time. The Brahmin authors worked to accomplish this end in two main ways. First, they devised a tremendously engaging tale that depicted the decisive victory of a king (Yudhiṣṭhira Pāṇḍava) who accepted Brahmin claims to deserve monopoly-control over teaching the norms of society. Second, they made this tale an extensive magisterium of Brahmin ideology and philosophy, affording to all in society, women and śūdras as well as Aryan men, encouragement to seek the forgiveness of past wrongs at tīrthas and access to the teachings of mokṣa without Vedic initiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus of Indian women's literature has the power to define the borders of community, class, and gender. Challenging the existing patriarchal set-up, writers from all corners of the nation speak not only to subvert the patriarchy but also to claim their authority and bring subdued voices to the fore. In Volga's gynocentric retellings of the ancient epic "Ramayana," Volga's The Liberation of Sita and Yashodhara deconstruct the traditional epic by recentering female characters that were marginalized in the original. The Liberation of Sita and Yashodhara tell the story of Buddha's wife after his unexpected departure, and they exemplify an active remaking of the past, a revision, and a reinvention of tradition. Thus, the author creates a female collective by representing ancient tradition from alternative points of view and networking with women across ages and generations. This paper interprets the depiction of the female characters in the select texts not merely as exalted figures but as bold voices. The female characters of the epic are victims of patriarchy, yet they are not depicted as mere sufferers. The author has given them a strong voice and dignity, narrating words of wisdom which are the result of their experiences of struggle with pain. Hence, the study shows Volga's evolved understanding of feminism as more than a simple conflict between men and women, but a larger issue that cannot simply be reduced to binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Draupadi serves as a crucial link between warring characters in the Mahabharata (an ancient Indian Sanskrit epic), particularly through her polyandry. Born of fire, personifying purity, yet bound by a matrimonial covenant, she is caught in a complex marital relationship with five husbands that completely changes her life and also theirs. In consonance with the aims of gynocriticism, literary depictions of women seek not only to reconstruct but also to critique patriarchal conventions. Drawing on the perspective of feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2005), with its tools of speech acts, presupposition, vocabulary, and modality, this paper seeks to examine the varied representations of Draupadi in three translated texts of the Mahabharata by Buitenen, Ray, and Divakaruni. The aim of the paper is trifold: to study the construction of Draupadi through the events of her marriage and post-marital occurrences, to examine her power/powerlessness vis-àvis others, and to explore the othering of her character against the notions of dharma (right conduct or action) in marriage. The analysis reveals that Buitenen's translation emphasizes destiny and dharma, but it does not provide a voice to Draupadi and constructs her as an embodiment of ideal womanhood. In contrast, Ray and Divakaruni represent Draupadi as expressing emotions, opinions, and judgments of her own self and of others. She appears powerless and oppressed before patriarchal conventions yet reclaims power through her vivid articulations and her questioning of phallocentric norms. Thus, the women writers humanize Draupadi, lending her agency and critiquing misogyny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kavita Kané's Lanka's Princess is the retelling of Ramayana3 from the perspective of the often misrepresented and misunderstood character of Surpankha,4 the daughter of rishi (sage) Vishravas and rakshasi (monster) Kaiskesi. Kavita Kané uses myths as a pretext to defy the idea of an ideal femininity in her book. Kané's representation humanizes the character of Surpankha (translation: woman with sharp fingernails) who was born as the beautiful princess Meenakshi, but her defiant demeanor caused her brother Ravan to give her the name of Surpankha. Kané's work exhibits the inner thought process of an unwelcome girl child in the family who has always been ignored by her mother and overshadowed by her brothers. The "violent restlessness" which is appreciated in the behavior of Ravan as a marker of heroism is often criticized when embodied by Meenakshi (Kané 28). The present study undertakes a textual analysis of Lanka's Princess and further analyzes how Kavita Kané's reinterpretation of the marginalized character of Surpankha challenges the stereotypical characterization of Surpankha as the "other" of Sita, who is the embodiment of obedience. In this light, the rewriting of Surpankha's story by Kavita Kané focuses on the neglected aspects of Surpankha's identity, which have been crucial in the formation of her female subjectivity. Moreover, Lanka's Princess as a text strives to liberate her from the stereotypical image of a disfigured monster by demonstrating her as a woman "who has survived hatred, loss, and rejection" (Arekar 131). This research has the potential to invigorate and intensify the impulse to challenge the universally accepted patriarchal discourse concerning the representation of women in Indian mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper undertakes to propose inclusion of the great epics of the world -- Greek and Indian--in the curriculum of Higher Education to highlight the ethical and human values imparted by them and to ingrain and inseminate in today's youth high code of conduct and cross-cultural sensitivity. This is invariably vital for the students of arts, humanities, social sciences and other sciences to understand and come to terms with human predicament and also to unearth the underlying subtexts such as the sacred Bhagavat Gita which directs one to right living and the pejorative ones which reveal denial of poetic justice to the biologically and emotionally vulnerable. This lends space for the students to imbibe the standards of right living and at the same time critically interrogate the inherent autocracy under the pretext of virtue and to evolve not only cultural but a moral sensitivity that strikes a balance between absolutism and relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to answer the question concerning the possibility of reinterpreting tapas and locating it in the risk society. The authors, referring to Ulrich Beck’s concept, look for the ways out of the “kingdom of shadows”, possessed by a constant sense of threat, both in the global and local sphere. The article takes a cross-sectional look at tapas in old Indian literature, looking for possibilities of its contemporary implementation on non-Indian grounds, as a response to the deteriorating psycho-physical state of 21st century society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the toponym Hazāra, and its original Uraśā or Araśa, which still survives in the Damtau? or Dhamtau? valley, Abbotabad. The level plain of Dhamtaur valley is locally known as Rush or Arash. The name variants recorded by the ancient writers were: Arash, Arsa, Uraśa and Uragā. It is not unlikely therefore that the original spelling was Aruśa which, in the course of time, changed into Uraśa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karna, salah satu tokoh dalam novel Mahabharata karya Nyoman S. Pendit—novel adaptasi dari Epos Mahabharata. Mengingat bahwa Karna merupakan salah satu tokoh dalam karya sastra, penulis ingin mengetahui kepahlawanan tokoh Karna dengan kerangka berpikir Semiotika Teeuw. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memaknai kode-kode bahasa, sastra, dan budaya pada tokoh Karna dalam novel dengan maksud menemukan makna terdalam dari tokoh Karna. Dalam penelitian ini ditemukan bahwa perjalanan hidup dan kepahlawanan Karna adalah ajaran hidup manusia yang melaksanakan dharmanya di dunia.Dari ketiga hasil analisis kode-kode tersebut, ditemukan bahwa kepahlawanan Karna tidak hanya terletak dari kesetiaannya pada Kaurawa, melainkan pula perjalanan hidupnya dari lahir, kebenciannya terhadap Pandawa, kutukan yang ia dapatkan, hingga pada akhirnya bersatu dengan Pandawa di Surgaloka bahwa hidupnya merupakan pahlawan bagi yang melaksanakan dharma. Perjalanan hidup Karna yang melaksanakan dharma dapat menjadi bahan pembelajaran bagi manusia untuk hidup pada jalan dharma.