Mahabharata Now
Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics

The Mahabharata is at once an archive and a living text, a sourcebook complete by itself and an open text perennially under construction. Driving home this striking contemporary relevance of the famous Indian epic, Mahabharata Now focuses on the issues of narration, aesthetics and ethics, as also their interlinkages. The cross-disciplinary essays in the volume imaginatively re-interpret the ?timeless? classic in the light of the pre-modern Indian narrative styles, poetics, aesthetic codes, and moral puzzles; the Western theories on modern ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of science; and the contemporary social, ethical and political concerns. The essays are all united in their effort to situate the Mahabharata in the context of here and now without violating the sanctity of the ?written text? as we have it today. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indian and comparative philosophy, Indian and comparative literature, cultural studies, and history.

Foreword Peter Ronald deSouza. Acknowledgements. Introduction.Part I: Narration 1. Of Gambling: A Few Lessons from the MahābhārataSibaji Bandyopadhyay 2. Methodology of the Critical Edition of the MahābhārataSaroja Bhate3. Significance of the Early Parvans: Modes of Narration, Birth Stories and Seeds of Conflict Sibesh Bhattacharya4. Understanding Yudhiştòhira’s Actions: Recasting Karma-Yoga in a Wittgensteinian Mould Enakshi MitraPart II: Aesthetics5. Aesthetics of the Mahābhārata: Traditional Interpretations Radhavallabh Tripathi 6. Karnòa in and out of the MahābhārataNrisinha Prasad Bhaduri Part III:Ethics 7. Care Ethics and Epistemic Justice: Some Insights from the MahābhārataVrinda Dalmiya 8. Who Speaks for Whom? The Queen, the Dāsī and Sexual Politics in the Sabhāparvan Uma Chakravarti9. Moral Doubts, Moral Dilemmas and Situational Ethics in the MahābhārataPrabal Kumar Sen10. Of Sleep and Violence: Reading the Sauptikaparvan in Times of Terror Anirban Das11.Himòsā–Ahimòsā in the Mahābhārata: The Lonely Position of Yudhiştòhira Gangeya Mukherji12. Just Words: An Ethics of Conversation in the MahābhārataArindam Chakrabarti

Arindam Chakrabarti is Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii,Manoa, USA.

Sibaji Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Cultural Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata, India.