Indian Epics

The Āpaddharmaparvan, 'the book on conduct in times of distress', is an important section of the great Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata which, despite its significance for Mahābhārata studies and for the history of Indian social and political thought, has received little attention in scholarly literature. This book places the Āpaddharmaparvan within its literary and ideological contexts. In so doing it explores the development of a conception of brahmanic kingship morally justifiable within the terms of a debate largely set by various alternative social movements of the period. This book further explores the implications for our understanding of the Mahābhārata that follow from the Āpaddharmaparvan's presentation as a poetically cohesive unit within itself and within the wider parameters of the Mahābhārata.

This article concerns the performance of Kūṭiyāṭṭam enactments of Mahābhārata narratives and the written texts on which those performances are based. The Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition of Sanskrit drama enactment in Kerala has been recognised by UNESCO as a 'masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity' but is also profoundly concerned with written texts. I argue that the ways Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers have modified and elaborated upon the dramas' texts have resulted in enactments more devotionally oriented than are the texts themselves, and that this distinctively devotional performative practice has contributed to the tradition's longevity. I also argue that performances in secular settings in recent decades represent both an opportunity and a danger to the tradition. devānāmidamāmananti munayaḥ śāntaṃ kratuṃ cākṣuṣaṃ / … nāṭyaṃ 'Sages regard drama as the visible and pacifying sacrifice to the Gods….' Kālidāsa, Mālavikāgnimitra (1.4)

We try to understand the significance of the vindictive curse cast upon the Sacrificial Fire by the vengeful sage Bhrgu, and of its consequences — if we seek to grasp the meaning of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the great bird Garuda, his struggle against his snake siblings, his successful quest for the divine Soma, and his conflict and ultimate accommodation with Indra — and if we examine the vicious Snake Sacrifice of King Janamejaya, how these prior events led up to it, and how it is surprisingly aborted — we find ourselves in the presence of metaphors and imagery whose content is not easy to grasp. In this book we show, following the well-developed complex of insights that René Girard has developed in his extensive studies on violence and the sacred, that everywhere their focus is on the differentiation of “bad” violence from “good,” and on the necessity to block the “bad” violence of uncontrolled
reprisal (which Girard’s mimetic theory describes as part of a mimetic cycle of desire, rivalry, revenge, and retribution) by means of the controlled “good” violence of sacred ritual sacrifice — which, alas, despite religion’s meticulous care to distinguish the good from the bad, can all too easily degenerate, thanks to the mimetic mechanism Girard has uncovered, into “bad” violence all over again.

Following up my paper “Patterns of Tejas in the Epics” delivered at WSC 12 (Helsinki 2003) this paper purposes to examine the way the notion of tejas — formerly (in vedic times) just yet another of many kindred Daseinsmächte or substance-powers such as ojas, varcas, yaśas and the like — attains paramountcy in the puranic synthesis of common traditional lore, becoming a regular attribute of the parameśvara in his different personae, on the one hand, as well as crystallizing specific tejas mythologemes around the most characteristic traits of each of the great hindu gods, on the other.

This paper is an attempt to present the positions of women in Hindu civilization within the context of justifying the purity of women in Vālmīki’s celebrated epic poem ‘Rāmāyaṇa’ and prominent contemporary Indian writer Premchand’s story ‘Nirvāsan’. Even though the date of composing the ‘Rāmāyaṇa’ is not certain, it is estimated that it took place in literature between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. On the other side, ‘Nirvāsan’ belongs to the date in more recent times as late 19th and early 20th centuries AD. This shows us clearly that the traditions and customs have never changed throughout the centuries. Literary intersections demonstrate how to transfer culture from generation to generation. Patriarchal social structure in India will be discussed with the method of radical feminist theory. Women can be seen as in the second plan compared to the men according to this feminist theory argument. Moreover, women are exposed to physical and psychological violence because of the patriarchal system. Patriarchal society is a structure in which men are superior to women in every sense and women are forced to live under the domination of the men. In this social structure, the authoritarian male has a more respectable position in the family and in social life than the woman. Women can be perceived as the object of men’s power and authority. This study aims to provide an insight to the people about Indian culture through the texts by analyzing above mentioned literary works.

Vartak proposed that the grouping of seasons and lunar months changes by one month every 2,160 years due to precession, which was adopted by Oak, who uses a period of 2,000 years for the change of one lunar month. I have called this hypothesis the "Vartak-Oak hypothesis". According to this hypothesis, seasons consist of different pairs of luni-solar months as time changes. To confirm this hypothesis, the combinations of months and seasons were searched in the Indian texts going back to the Vedas. The listings of explicit mentions of seasons and months conform to the standard configuration from the earliest times till now. However, the combination has changed in East Indian calendars. According to the "Vartak-Oak hypothesis," the grouping of seasons and lunar months should have changed by one month every 2,000 years due to precession. There is no evidence of it in the Indian literature.

The theory of the yugas has been connected to the story of the Mahābhārata since the late layers of the Epic itself, and it subsequently became a fundamental element of the justification for explaining its adharmic elements by linking its story to the Kali Yuga.  The story of Rāma, on the other hand, never had an important link to the yuga theory, except for a rather vague placement of Rāma’s story in the Tretā Yuga. This chapter looks at Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa in order to ascertain if the text provides a basis for a connection between the Rāmāyaṇa and the Tretā Yuga.

https://crossasia-books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/xasia/catalog/book/530 This paper deals with Agni-parīkṣā, a Hindi poem rooted in the Jain Rāmāyaṇa tradition, published for the first time in 1961. Its author, Ācārya Tulsī, a famous Jain leader, features Sītā as the main character of the story and truly sympathizes with her as the epitome of women let down by their men and society. In 1970, the poem provoked agitation among sanātanī Hindus. The ensuing court judgement found some passages of the poem to be offensive and eventually all its copies were confiscated by the State Government of Madhya Pradesh. After court battles, also defending the poem, its revised version was published in 1972. This paper firstly offers a contextualized analysis of the poem’s narrative and its characteristic features drawing on Jain Rāmāyaṇas. Secondly, it discusses the relevant passages of Agni-parīkṣā’s 1961 and 1972 versions, seeking an answer to the question why and how this telling composed by Ācārya Tulsī, who did not intend to insult anyone’s feelings by his poem, was found offensive by traditionalist circles of contemporary Indian society.

The present paper focuses on Aśvaghoṣa's treatment of King Śuddhodana and Kapila-vāstu, the latter's kingdom, in the Buddhacarita (BC) and the Saundarananda (SNa). As I shall try to demonstrate, the poet's depiction of Śuddhodana is strongly reminiscent of, and, I think, very likely based on, Brahmanical accounts of the rājadharma (BC 9.48) and the dharmarāja (BC 1.75) as they can be found, first and foremost, in the Mahābhārata (MBh). As for his description of the Śākya kingdom, it is obviously meant to be evocative of the "golden age" or, conversely, of its lack of any characteristic of the kaliyuga, which again points to Aśvaghoṣa's likely acquaintance with epic descriptions of the kaliyuga and/or the yugānta as they can be found, e.g., in the so-called Mārkaṇḍeya section of the MBh (esp. 3.186 and 188).

One could scarcely draw together two larger topics than the Mahābhārata (Mbh) and dharma. The former, a tale of a fratricidal and internecine battle interspersed with theme-expanding stories, moral tales, fables, and didactic tracts, claims to be 100,000 stanzas long; the text constituted in the Critical Edition in the mid 20th century by a team of scholars comes to some 75,000.  The Mbh has arguably been the most influential and significant cultural product to emerge from South Asia in the last two millennia. The word dharma, on the other hand, has, since perhaps the 5th century BCE (or a little later), been the preeminent term of ideological expression in South Asian thought, and lent itself to the collective name for one of South Asia's most enduring genres, dharmaśāstra. The word is, as has often been noted, of central importance to the Mbh; indeed, in many respects, the Mbh both marks a significant moment in the semantic development of dharma (Hiltebeitel 2011: 20-29) and demonstrates its emergence as a term encoding cultural and ideological legitimacy.

— The Vedas are considered to be the oldest surviving literature of India. They are preserved in an intact form through memorizing and transmission from generation to generation over centuries, thus very likely to have an unaltered, authentic record. Vedas have been extensively studied by large number of scholars from diverse disciplines for the last two centuries. They abound in poetic metaphor and allusions yet give an account of people, places and events along with the prevailing belief systems at that time. The belief systems in Vedas have commonality with Iranian and European traditions, collectively referred to as Indo-European. Many scholars have studied Vedas to find the footprints and trail of Indo-Europeans whose languages have noticeable commonality. In this paper we make use of network analysis methods to interpret Rig-Veda to get a sense of how events and beliefs have evolved over time and geographies.

SUMMARY: As in the case of its great predecessor, the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the very title of the Forest Book (Araṇyakāṇḍa) of the 16th-century Rāmcaritmānas by Tulsīdās (1532-1623) seems to suggest that it provides its reader with descriptions of flora and fauna, landscapes and natural phenomena typical of wilderness. However, the actual situation stands in sharp contrast with this presupposition – this book contains only a few descriptions of nature per se, although relatively rich 'natural' terminology can be easily found scattered all over it.
The main aim of this article is to investigate these passages in which Tulsīdās uses the descriptions and terms relating to forest and other natural phenomena, as well as to consider what purpose they serve.

In the opening part of his seminal study of performing traditions of Tulsīdās's Rāmcaritmānas, The Life of a Text, Philip Lutgendorf discusses the structure of the poem's narrative realized through the series of four dialogues. His very apt observations bring to light the existence of the interface between the oral (as well as the aural) and the written. They also serve as a convenient starting point for an analysis of the relevant parts of the poem, set in a wider context of the Orality/Literacy Debate. Aiming at systematizing and broadening our knowledge of the composition of the Rāmcaritmānas and also of the factors behind its rapid spread in North India, this paper scrutinizes the opening passages of the poem, in which the process of the creation of the Rāmcaritmānas, its genealogy and its structure are revealed. In the analysis, the relevant features of the oral mentality thesis outlined by Walter J. Ong in his Orality and Literacy are referred to; an attempt to explore the social impact of oral residues in a chirographic, i.e. writing, culture is also made. In view of the problematic antithesis between the oral and the written manifest in Tulsīdās's poem, as well as in view of its religious importance, it seems that this analysis may help to reexamine the Western understanding of the concept of "scripture" .

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In seguito alla fatale partita a dadi i cinque fratelli På∫∂ava sono stati costretti a ritirarsi per dodici anni in esilio nelle selve e a trascorrere un tredicesimo anno sotto mentite spoglie. A questo punto Yudhiß™hira insegna ad Arjuna una formula meditativa, ricevuta da Vyåsa in persona, che gli renderà possibile procurarsi armi divine da Indra e Rudra, indispensabili per superare le difficoltà dell'ultimo anno di esilio. Arjuna si arma e parte per compiere l'impresa, salutato da Draupadoe. Il suo cammino si volge a Nord, finché incontra un asceta che gli ingiunge di fermarsi. Al suo diniego questi si rivela come Indra sotto mentite spoglie e gli concede un dono. Arjuna chiede di ottenere armi divine. Gli viene risposto che le riceverà solo dopo aver incontrato il dio ˙iva. L'eroe si dedica quindi a terribili macerazioni sulle cime dello Himålaya. Timorosi del pericolo rappresentato da quest'ascesi di una crudeltà inaudita, gli dèi si rivolgono a Indra che li rassicura: Arjuna non mira a scalzare il loro potere, ma solo a ottenere la visione di ˙iva per chiedergli le armi. ˙iva assume le sembianze di un montanaro, membro di una tribù montana di cacciatori. L'antidio Maeka si tramuta in cinghiale e assale Arjuna. Il montanaro e l'eroe trafiggono simultaneamente con due diverse frecce l'animale. Arjuna rivendica la priorità sulla preda e dichiara di voler uccidere