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This volume looks at the problem from diverse periods and standpoints and shows us that this challenge is, in fact, a legacy of the Mahabharata and the responses to this challenge is what makes the text ever-contemporary to different readers of different times and positions.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
This volume looks at the problem from diverse periods and standpoints and shows us that this challenge is, in fact, a legacy of the Mahabharata and the responses to this challenge is what makes the text ever-contemporary to different readers of different times and positions.
