Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- 1. The Mahabharata and the Making of Modern India
- 2. ‘Epic’ Past, ‘Modern’ Present: The Mahabharata and Modern Nationalism in Colonial Western India
- 3. The Bhagavadgita and the Gandhian Hermeneutic of Non-Violence: Globalizing Selfless Action
- 4. A Nostalgia for Transcendental Closure: The Relationship between the Mahabharata and Notions of Nationalism in the Works of Friedrich Schlegel, Maithilisharan Gupt, and Jawaharlal Nehru
- 5. The Production and Deconstruction of the ‘Ideal Indian Woman’ on the Basis of the Mahabharata in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- 6. Rethinking Transnational Intellectual History and Epic Nationalisms through Lithographic Labour: Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas in India and Iran
- 7. ‘Philosophical Poetry’ or a ‘Failed Beginning’? A Metaphilosophical Enquiry into Wilhelm von Humboldt’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s Perspectives on the Bhagavadgita
- 8. East Asian Uses of Indian Epic Literature: Refractions of the Mahabharata in Japan and China, Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century
- 9. The Reception of the Mahabharata in Siam: Evolving Conceptions of Kingship
- 10. Understanding Global Intellectual Exchanges through Paratexts: Wadiʿ al-Bustani’s Introduction to His Arabic Translation of the Mahabharata
- About the Contributors
- Index
8. - East Asian Uses of Indian Epic Literature: Refractions of the Mahabharata in Japan and China, Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century
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- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- 1. The Mahabharata and the Making of Modern India
- 2. ‘Epic’ Past, ‘Modern’ Present: The Mahabharata and Modern Nationalism in Colonial Western India
- 3. The Bhagavadgita and the Gandhian Hermeneutic of Non-Violence: Globalizing Selfless Action
- 4. A Nostalgia for Transcendental Closure: The Relationship between the Mahabharata and Notions of Nationalism in the Works of Friedrich Schlegel, Maithilisharan Gupt, and Jawaharlal Nehru
- 5. The Production and Deconstruction of the ‘Ideal Indian Woman’ on the Basis of the Mahabharata in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- 6. Rethinking Transnational Intellectual History and Epic Nationalisms through Lithographic Labour: Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas in India and Iran
- 7. ‘Philosophical Poetry’ or a ‘Failed Beginning’? A Metaphilosophical Enquiry into Wilhelm von Humboldt’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s Perspectives on the Bhagavadgita
- 8. East Asian Uses of Indian Epic Literature: Refractions of the Mahabharata in Japan and China, Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century
- 9. The Reception of the Mahabharata in Siam: Evolving Conceptions of Kingship
- 10. Understanding Global Intellectual Exchanges through Paratexts: Wadiʿ al-Bustani’s Introduction to His Arabic Translation of the Mahabharata
- About the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1909, the Sino-Japanese poet Su Manshu painted an image of Cai Yan (Lady Wenji), a poetess of the late second century who had spent 12 years in captivity abroad before returning to the Han Empire, and sent it to his friend, the art collector Liu Jiping (also known as Liu San). Liu wrote a series of poems to appreciate Su's gift, including the following verses:
‘China’ is not a transformed pronunciation of Qin;
It was first seen in the poem Bharata.
It were monks who determined it as the country's name,
but within the country no one knows this.
Why would a Chinese literatus at the turn of the twentieth century write a poem mentioning the Indian epic Mahabharata to match a seemingly unrelated painting?
Until well into the twentieth century, the name of the Mahabharata had been mostly unknown in East Asia, except for a few isolated references in Buddhist texts. Against the sheer preponderance of Buddhist thought in the intellectual flows between India and China, it might even have seemed futile to look for an East Asian reception of the Mahabharata. Yet, over the centuries, various elements related to the Mahabharata circulated between South Asia and East Asia and played significant roles within East Asian culture itself.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian thought continued to play a major role in East Asia amidst intense contact between China, Japan, Europe, and India itself. In close interdependence with the notion of the ‘West’, the category of ‘Asia’ emerged in the Japanese and Chinese imaginary by the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals developed a globalized sense of their position in the world. India became a renewed object of study but, at the same time, also a ‘method’ to deal with the challenges posed by modernity. Interest in India and its role within ‘Asia’ was a significant element not only in understanding the geopolitical realities and ‘catching up’ with the ‘West,’ but also in the quest for a ‘world beyond the material and epistemological constraints’ posed by Western modernity. While Buddhism still played a crucial role as the connecting bond between the two macroregions of East Asia and South Asia, some intellectuals came to understand it in a wider framework that also encompassed other traditions such as that of the Mahabharata.
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought , pp. 217 - 240Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025