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The Cousins tells one of the great stories of the world, set in northwestern India some 3, years ago. This is a world in which fisher girls become queens.
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Chopra were televised during these two decades.

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The personification of Hindu deities and demons, the grandeur of the production and film-sets, and the visualization of these stories that until then were only narrated orally in these shows was awe-inspiring. The television shows Ramayana and Mahabharata portray central stories surrounding the lives of the Hindu deities Rama and Krishna, respectively.

These stories include some of their heroics that establish their identities as deities amongst humans and thus, set them apart. He did, to reveal the entire universe, signifying that he was the embodiment of everything in this universe. Or the story where Krishna protects his devotee Draupathi by providing her with clothing when the cousins of her husbands attempt to humiliate her by disrobing her, as this video shows. This, I contend, is primarily because, as flagged above, the language that is used to describe the stories of these deities, i. It is this construction and resulting understanding that problematizes how we understand stories surrounding the deities.

There is a general level of acceptance and understanding that these characters are fictional; therefore, they enjoy a certain amount of legitimacy as fictions. In my view, Rama, Krishna, and other Hindu deities can be seen as superheroes, and to distinguish these stories from other superhero comics is problematic. More interesting both because its attitude to war is more conflicted and complex than that of the Greek epics and because its attitude to divinity is more conflicted and complex than that of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

It resembles the Homeric epics in many ways such as the theme of the great war, the style of its poetry, and its heroic characters, several of them fathered by gods , but unlike the Homeric gods, many of the Mahabharata gods were then, and still are, worshiped and revered in holy texts, including parts of the Mahabharata itself.


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It has remained central to Hindu culture since it was first composed. Hindus from the time of the composition of the Mahabharata to the present moment know the characters in the texts just as Christians and Jews and Muslims, even if they are not religious, know Adam and Eve.

To this day, India is called the land of Bharata, and the Mahabharata functions much like a national epic.

Time That Ripens and Rots All Creatures: Temporality and Its Terrors in the Sanskrit Mahabharata

The story may have been told in some form as early as BCE; its resemblance to Persian, Scandinavian, Greek, and other Indo-European epic traditions suggests that the core of the tale may reach back to the time when these cultures had not yet dispersed, well before BCE. But the Mahabharata did not reach its present form until the period from about BCE to CE—or half a millennium; it takes a long time to compose three million words.

It looks back to the Vedic age, and may well preserve many memories of that period, and that place, up in the Punjab. The Painted Gray Ware artifacts discovered at sites identified with locations in the Mahabharata may be evidence of the reality of the great Mahabharata war, which is usually supposed to have occurred around BCE. But the text is very much the product of its times, the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium. The Mahabharata was retold very differently by all of its many authors in the long line of literary descent.

It is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata ; there are hundreds of Mahabharata s, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions one reason why it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses.

Mahabharat Bangla Draupadi Vastraharan

The Mahabharata is not confined to a text; the story is there to be picked up and found, salvaged as anonymous treasure from the ocean of story. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not here is found nowhere else. The Mahabharata grew and changed in numerous parallel traditions spread over the entire subcontinent of India, constantly retold and rewritten, both in Sanskrit and in vernacular dialects. It grows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic, constantly reinterpreting it.

The loose construction of the text gives it a quasi-novelistic quality, open to new forms as well as new ideas, inviting different ideas to contest one another, to come to blows, in the pages of the text. European approaches to the Mahabharata often assumed that collators did not know what they were doing and, blindly cutting and pasting, accidentally created a monstrosity. But the Mahabharata is not the head of a brahmin philosophy accidentally stuck onto a body of non-brahmin folklore, like the heads and bodies of people in several Indian myths, or the mythical beast invoked by Woody Allen, which has the body of a lion and the head of a lion, but not the same lion.

But the powerful intertextuality of Hinduism ensured that anyone who added anything to the Mahabharata was well aware of the whole textual tradition behind it and fitted his or her own insight, or story, thoughtfully into the ongoing conversation.

It is a contested text, a brilliantly orchestrated hybrid narrative with no single party line on any subject. It was contested not only within the Hindu tradition, where concepts of dharma were much debated, but also by the rising rival traditions of Buddhism and Jainism.

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But the text has an integrity that the culture supports in part by attributing it to a single author and that it is our duty to acknowledge. The contradictions at its heart are not the mistakes of a sloppy editor but enduring cultural dilemmas that no author could ever have resolved.

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The great scholar and poet A. Ramanujan used to say that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time. For centuries Indians heard it in the form of public recitations, or performances of dramatized episodes, or in the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples.

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The hero Karna, who, in the Sanskrit version, slices off the armor that grows on his body and fights against his brothers, appears as Mohammed Ali Karna, who, when he goes over from the Hindu to the Muslim side, seizes a knife and circumcises himself. Reintepretations of this sort have been going on from the moment the Mahabharata began to be composed. Whenever the Mahabharata is told or retold, the ethical and religious questions it raises are given new, contemporary meanings.

And this new verse retelling by Carole Satyamurti takes its place in this honorable lineage. Nor is it a freely rendered retelling, since she sticks very close to the content, if not the wording, of the translations she used.


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And most significantly, she has told the story not in prose but in blank verse. The bare bones of the central story and there are hundreds of peripheral stories, too could be summarized like this, for our purposes:. The five sons of King Pandu, called the Pandavas, were fathered by gods: Yudhishthira by Dharma the moral law incarnate , Bhima by the Wind, Arjuna by Indra king of the gods , and the twins by the Ashvins. All five of them married Draupadi. When Yudhishthira lost the kingdom to his cousins in a game of dice, the Pandavas and Draupadi went into exile for twelve years, at the end of which—with the help of their cousin, the incarnate god Krishna, who befriended the Pandavas and whose counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield is the Bhagavad Gita —they regained their kingdom through a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides was killed.

They all went to heaven and died happily ever after. But the story of the Pyrrhic victory of the Pandava princes constitutes just a fifth of the epic, its skeleton. Many episodes, including some about women, are hooked on fairly securely to the fabric of the plot: a question about the ancestors of the Pandavas inspires the narrator to tell the story of the birth of their ancestor Bharata, from Shakuntala, the innocent maiden whom King Dushyanta seduced and abandoned a story that captivated Goethe ; Yudhishthira is consoled, after his own gambling disaster, by the tale of Nala, whose compulsive gambling lost him his kingdom and his wife Damayanti, until she managed to reunite them.

Other stories are told as moral lessons to the human heroes and heroines, such as the tale of King Shibi, who chopped off his own flesh to save a dove fleeing from a hawk both birds turned out to be gods disguised to test him ; and Savitri, whose steadfastness persuaded the god of death to spare her doomed husband. Philosophical and legal questions also arise out of the aporias of the plot and are answered in discourses that sometimes go on for hundreds of verses. Hindu tradition attributes the work to a single author, named Vyasa, but Vyasa is also the author that is, the father of the two fathers of the warring heroes, Pandu and his brother Dhritarashtra.

Thus Vyasa, the author, is himself a character in his own story. The text depicts women with powers and privileges they would seldom have again in Hindu literature. Women with multiple sexual partners appear with surprising frequency in the Mahabharata ; the text offers us, in four consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners sometimes premarital seriatim.