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This book highlights debates in the epics among men and women from all sections of society. These debates criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability through the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Arjuna and Krishna: Friends Discuss the Family
- 3: Varna: Defined by Birth or by Action?
- 4: Gender and the Dharma of Singleness, Marriage, and Desire
- 5: What is Gender?
- 6: Female-Male Non-Sexual Union
- 7: Revenge, Forgiveness, and Gender-Crossing
- 8: Rebirth, Gender, and Rage
- 9: Gender and the Dharma of Parenting
- 10: Citizens, Rulers, and Non-Violence
- 11: Kindness to Animals: the Dharma Most Available to All
- 12: Animals and the Joys of Intellect: Tulsidas's Crow Narrator and the Hanuman Chalisa
About the author
Ruth Vanita taught at Delhi University for 20 years and is now Professor at the University of Montana. She was founding volunteer co-editor of Manushi, India's first nationwide feminist magazine, and an activist in the Indian women's and civil liberties movements from 1978 to 1991. The author of many books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination; A Play of Light: Selected Poems; Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India (new edition 2020), she has published over 70 scholarly articles and translated several works of fiction and poetry from Hindi and Urdu. She co-edited the pioneering Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History. Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared from Penguin in 2020.
Summary
This book highlights debates in the epics among men and women from all sections of society. These debates criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability through the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling.
Additional text
This is a beautiful book that will be useful and inspiring for many readers interested in the magnificent and brilliant Mahābhārata and Rāmāyana, and that will also prompt helpful contemplation of what it should mean to behave justly and expect just treatment in return.
