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7 - Women in Muslim universities: Guardians of tradition or actors of change?
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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- Between Nation and ‘Community'
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- 15 April 2024
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- 01 December 2025, pp 335-405
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Summary
In their report on the ‘social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India’, the Sachar Committee (2004–2006) noted:
Women in general are the torchbearers of community identity. So, when community identity is seen to be under siege, it naturally affects women in dramatic ways. Women, sometimes of their own volition, sometimes because of community pressure, adopt visible markers of community identity on their person and in their behaviour. Their lives, morality, and movement in public spaces are under constant scrutiny and control.
The members of the committee thus hinted at the importance of context in defining women's role vis-à-vis their community. They suggested that Muslim women are more likely to act as guardians of community identity—either out ‘of their own volition’ or ‘because of community pressure'—at a time when large sections of India's Muslim population feel discriminated against. By adopting ‘visible markers’, women come to embody a community identity to be protected from external interference. In this type of context, any attack against women's visibly Muslim markers quickly comes to be seen as an attack upon the entire community. The recent row on the hijab ban in Karnataka (2022) is a good case in point.
Projecting women as guardians of community identity reinforces, in turn, the notion of the ‘Muslim woman’. Be it in the media or in political discourses, Muslim women in India and elsewhere are often projected as a homogeneous category—‘oppressed and often shrouded in a stifling burqa’. These images then feed into equally homogenising notions of Islam. To counter these (mis)representations, scholars have for a long time challenged the monolithic conception of the Muslim woman. In her anthropological study in Delhi's Zakir Nagar (near Jamia), Nida Kirmani stresses the need to examine how gender and religious identity ‘continuously form and re-form along with various other identities’, thus highlighting the ‘contextual nature’ of these identities. Before her, already, several scholars insisted on the need to take into account socio-economic factors, such as education or employment, in order to understand the living conditions of Muslim women in India.
10. - Understanding Global Intellectual Exchanges through Paratexts: Wadiʿ al-Bustani’s Introduction to His Arabic Translation of the Mahabharata
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 257-272
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Introduction
In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.
While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.
Acknowledgements
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp vii-viii
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6 - Bastions of Islam: The defence of Islam as a narrative of empowerment and contestation
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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- Between Nation and ‘Community'
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- 15 April 2024
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- 01 December 2025, pp 284-334
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Summary
In her ethnographic survey conducted in Aligarh city in the mid-1980s, the anthropologist Elisabeth Mann noted:
Islam nowadays has the potential to serve as a rallying point for those who see themselves as betrayed by their elites, persecuted for the creation of the two Pakistans in 1947, suspected by a growing Hindu chauvinistic militancy, and taken advantage of by unscrupulous and cynical politicians.
Mann was quick to remind the reader that tensions remained rife between Aligarh's Muslim elites and non-elites. However, she also recognised that external pressures—the constant suspicion of their loyalty since partition and, increasingly in the 1980s, the sharp rise of Hindu communalism—reinforced a sense of collective identity among co-religionists. In this context, she suggested that invoking Islam could serve as a ‘refuge for the persecuted’. What this chapter will argue is that it could also serve as a language of contestation and empowerment in a context perceived as increasingly hostile.
The 1980s saw a resurgence of communal tensions in India, fed by the development of identity politics. Following the Congress’ crushing defeat in 1977, political competition intensified at the centre, boosting opposition parties that spoke the language of caste or religion to mobilise their constituencies. Although these evolutions were already under way by the 1960s, it was mostly after the emergency that they became prominent at the national level, leading to a shift in norms from national unity to group-based interests in the mainstream political discourse. Other domestic and transnational evolutions accentuated communal tensions. Within India, reports of Muslims’ demographic growth enhanced a sense of insecurity among some sections of the Hindu population. So too did the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in neighbouring Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq. The boom of Gulf economies added to these tensions as part of the Hindu population feared that oil money may fund mass conversions to Islam and ‘give to Islamism in India a new glow of self-confidence in one sudden sweep’. These evolutions fed into the ‘vulnerability syndrome’ of the majority population that boosted the rise of the Hindu right.
6. - Rethinking Transnational Intellectual History and Epic Nationalisms through Lithographic Labour: Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas in India and Iran
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 161-185
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When Perso-Arabic script renditions of the Mahabharata receive popular or academic attention, it is often in defence of elite Indo-Islamic cosmopolitanism. Mughal engagement with the Mahabharata is held up as evidence of interest in Hinduism or pre-Islamic Indic traditions among Muslim South Asian dynasties. Because the Mughal Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War), was a courtly project, it is easy to overlook the fact that Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script reached broader, and increasingly transregional, publics, especially in the age of lithographic print. Focusing on the preparation and circulation of Persian and Urdu print editions of the Mahabharata, this chapter aims to reorient discussions of Persianate understandings of Sanskrit epics, emphasizing middle-class, popular readerships in both Iran and India.
Following a brief overview of the translation and circulation of the Razmnamah in Mughal India, the chapter analyses lithographic publications of Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of lithographic print in South Asia allowed for the relatively inexpensive publication and circulation of Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. The chapter argues for a reconsideration of the intellectual work of cadres of printers, translators, scribes, and other workers employed by Indian presses. Late nineteenth-century Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas reflected norms of production within a negotiated system of capitalist print labour, distinguishing them from their courtly manuscript predecessors.
The chapter subsequently turns to the transregional consumption and reception of these Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. In the late nineteenth century in both India and Iran, readers within a Persianate cultural–intellectual milieu understood the Mahabharata in a comparative frame, often with reference to the Persian epic poem, the Shahnamah. Popular audiences in Iran often read the two works through an emerging ‘national’ lens that associated epic literature with discrete peoples and nations. In India, on the other hand, middle-class Persian and Urdu readers often used both the Mahabharata–Razmnamah and the Shahnamah to claim an elite Persianate and cosmopolitan past.
Ultimately, the chapter reorients narratives of shared Indo-Iranian intellectual history by critiquing portrayals of Persianate transregional exchange as exclusively elite or courtly projects. Centring lithographic printers and popular reading publics, the chapter interrogates the reinterpretation of the Mahabharata within transregional communities of Persian and Urdu readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Frontmatter
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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A Note on Transliteration
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- 01 December 2025, pp ix-x
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Introduction
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 1-12
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Shri Krishna was a politician without parallel – accomplished as providence in building and dissolving empires – hence conceived to be the incarnation of God…. His aim was not merely to make the Pandavas [the] sole master. His aim was the unity of India.
—Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’, 1875In the Mahabharata a very definite attempt has been made to emphasize the fundamental unity of India…. That war was for the overlordship of India … and it marks the beginning of the conception of India as a whole, of Bharatvarsha.
—Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, 1946The speech of the Mahabharata is same as ambrosia In every era, it is interpreted in new ways Interpreted in ever new ways.
—Shaoli Mitra, ‘Nathavati Anathavat’, 1983Arguably, the Mahabharata is India's most influential political text. Kautilya's Arthashastra may seem a close contender, but it never attained the epic's social depth and was, in any case, forgotten for a millennium before its rediscovery in 1905. The Constitution of India certainly plays a more important role in shaping the modern Indian state, but, as a text, it hardly permeates popular consciousness in the way the Mahabharata does. For over two millennia, the Mahabharata has shaped Indian politics. It has nourished the statecraft of Hindu rajas and Mughal emperors, stirred anti-colonial nationalism and peasant rebellion, moulded Dalit–Bahujan and feminist activism. Beyond India, it has profoundly shaped political cultures across Southeast Asia, inspired pan-Asian thinking in China and Japan, activated the philosophical imagination of European and Arab thinkers, and conversed with Iranian nationalism.
Like one of its protagonists, the divine statesman Krishna, the Mahabharata exists in multiple avatars. The Sanskrit text, ascribed to Vyasa, coexists with versions in several Indian and extra-Indian languages. For many decades now, scholars have written about these textual traditions as well as about the popular appeal of Mahabharata stories. Historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers have all written about the epic. Admittedly, much more has been said about the pre-modern lives of the Mahabharata than about its modern incarnations – but even on the latter the scholarship is rich and growing.
In this milieu, why is a new book needed about the epic? We offer two compelling reasons. First, there exists no single volume that engages with the Mahabharata's role in shaping modern social, political, and religious thought.
Contents
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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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
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 108-136
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Introduction
The renewed and persistent interest in the Mahabharata in the twentieth century has most often been linked to the rise of the Indian national(ist) movement in general and a specific nativist and parochial understanding of nationalism in particular. Seen from this perspective, the interest in the Mahabharata stands for an understanding of modern India that is based on the presumption of an ancient and everlasting homogeneous identity of the Indian people as well as a forced equation of ‘Indian’ with ‘Hindu’. While this standard account of the relationship between the Indian epics and right-wing nationalism has been as influential as it is convincing, it fails to analyse the larger historical and epistemological changes that provided the background for the renewed interest in the epic as form. In order to address this epistemological aspect, I propose to look at the larger history of the epic and the construction of a national identity in a global context in order to ask what prompted the interest in the epics on a functional level. Why were they read and retold so many times apart from the certainly true but hardly sufficient reason of them serving as a reminder of and evidence for the existence of a historical basis for the allegedly homogeneous identity in question?
In order to engage with the global significance as well as the philosophical and political implications of the relationship between the epic and nationalism, I look at three specific actors and at how they drew from, as well as referred and contributed to, the discourse on the epic form through their specific reading and reception of the Mahabharata: Friedrich Schlegel's analysis of the allegedly shared roots of Indo-European philosophical thought in ancient folk literature (specifically in his book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808), Maithilisharan Gupt's attempt to recount the history of India as the history of the Aryan race from the mythico-historical times of the Mahabharata to the future of an independent India in his long narrative poem Bharat Bharati (1912), and Jawaharlal Nehru's seemingly uneasy (as well as rather sporadic) rejection of any form of a potentially political engagement with the Mahabharata as inevitably contributing to a parochial and Hindu supremacist notion of Indian nationalism.
Index
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 277-285
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9. - The Reception of the Mahabharata in Siam: Evolving Conceptions of Kingship
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 241-256
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In the Kingdom of Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, the great Sanskrit epic of the Ramayana, or rather the Thai-language Ramakien, composed under King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok (King Rama I, 1737–1809, r. 1782–1809), is omnipresent. It is the national epic of the Southeast Asian kingdom, taught not only in schools but encountered also in picture books and manga. The epic is deeply embedded in the kingdom's history and culture of everyday life. King Ramkamhaeng (‘Rama, the Bold’, r. 1279–98) of Sukhothai, named after the epic's hero, is today remembered in official historiography not simply as a great king but also as a founding figure of the Thai nation as a cultural community through his invention of the Thai script. He is depicted on banknotes, and major public works are named after him, such as a university and a major thoroughfare in Bangkok. And according to a late seventeenth-century chronicle, the former capital was founded in 1350 as Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya. Its founder took the title Ramathibodi (‘Rama, the Mighty’, 1315–69, r. 1351–69) upon ascending to his throne and founded the Phra Ram temple in the capital in 1369, the year of his death.
Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767 by an invading army from Burma. After a short intermezzo under the charismatic King Taksin (1734–82, r. 1767–82) ruling from Thonburi, the current capital and dynasty were founded by Taksin's former general, King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok. He added Ayutthaya to the city's full name and included Ramathibodi to his full royal title. In addition to having had a new version of the Ramakien written, he also had murals with scenes from the epic added to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where the kingdom's palladium of the same name is enshrined. The national dance drama of Khon is also based on the epic and can be found recounted in children's literature today. The epic is furthermore the source of proverbs and placenames far from royal palaces, such as Huai Sukhrip, or Sukhrip's Brook, a stream located near the city of Chonburi, close to Bangkok.
2. - ‘Epic’ Past, ‘Modern’ Present: The Mahabharata and Modern Nationalism in Colonial Western India
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- By Alok Oak
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 48-74
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Introduction
Ancient epics have played a significant role in the growth of modern nationalism. At the time of their conception, epics possessed no notion of nationalism. However, over the past three centuries, they have been routinely invoked in many parts of the world for fulfilling modern nationalist claims and aspirations. Political and cultural unity, key features of modern nationalism, were found to be described in ancient epics. Therefore, epics were routinely invoked either as repositories of a nation's past frozen in time (as with Homer or Virgil) or as a genealogical exercise meant to reconstruct an unbroken national–cultural lineage (as with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Both processes helped in nationalist revival.
The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were used by Indian subcontinental nationalists during the colonial and post-colonial periods to imagine a politically and ethnically (Hindu) unified image of the country. The study of Indian epics was facilitated by modern European Indology and the ‘discovery’ of India's ancient (largely Hindu and Buddhist) heritage during the late eighteenth century. Therefore, unlike the absolute devotional reverence and eschatological infallibility accorded to the epics during pre-modernity, Indians were open to investigating their historical context and using them for didactic–political purposes. History, coming to the aid of religious reverence, produced a strange concoction of nationalist rectitude and a strong antidote to colonial cultural hegemony. The fratricide depicted in the Mahabharata was seen as an act of reclaiming the unjust seizure of territory, rendering the epic's moral lesson ‘analogous to the colonial occupation of India’.
Epic studies developing during the nineteenth century drove European Indologists’ primary interest – namely, determining the remote antiquity of the Mahabharata, deciphering the urtext from latter recensions, and granting it lesser value in comparison to the Greco-Roman classics. European Indological discourses posited India as the opposite of ‘the West’ and hence inferior in character. Indian thought was presented as mythical and symbolic and therefore unworthy of the cold rationality articulated through logical arguments.
Indians attached multifarious significance to its epics. If the Ramayana was the adi-kavya (the original poem), the Mahabharata was varyingly rendered as an itihasa (history) and the ‘fifth Veda’ and even garnered equivalency to a Dharmashastra text. The Mahabharata also carried a powerful moral sermon on righteous violence (the Bhagavadgita), delivered by Krishna, the personification of the Absolute.
List of figures
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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- Between Nation and ‘Community'
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- 01 December 2025, pp xi-xii
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5. - The Production and Deconstruction of the ‘Ideal Indian Woman’ on the Basis of the Mahabharata in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 137-160
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Introduction
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have significantly shaped South Asian norms of gender roles. The ideals transmitted through them are still often considered the proper mode of conduct by many actors and social groups, especially those influenced by Sanskritic varna–jati (the Indian caste system) norms. While the most popular female prototype among many actors is Sita from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offers a number of exemplary characters as well. Not only Draupadi but also characters such as Damayanti and Savitri play an important role in shaping the myth of the ideal woman. The French philosopher Roland Barthes explains in his book Mythologies (1957) that myth is born out of history but disconnects from it and evolves into nature. As the content of the myth seems like an eternal truth, its motive appears invisible. The Mahabharata shaped an understanding of women and their role in society, which was accepted for centuries as the natural rule. The gendered basis of this discourse was rarely explicitly questioned until recent times.
This chapter begins by first tracing the origin of how mythological women became the ideal prototype in the nationalist discourse, which will be followed by a focus on M. K. Gandhi's politics regarding women. Traits which most of the epic female characters share are that they suffer silently and resist through loyalty and devotion – characteristics that modern reformers like Gandhi foregrounded in an attempt to mobilize women for the Indian nationalist cause. While his discourse elevated the status of women to a higher position, it came at a cost, and by fortifying the image of the ideal Indian woman, he put them in a gilded cage. The rest of the chapter will focus on feminist revision of myths, necessary to deconstruct the female prototype born out of the epics, based on the theoretical framework offered by Adrienne Rich's ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1972) and Alicia Ostriker's ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ (1982). For this, I will take into account several literary texts. Pratibha Ray's (b. 1943) Odia novel Yajnaseni (1984) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's (b. 1956) novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) are two important landmarks in this paradigm shift.
8. - East Asian Uses of Indian Epic Literature: Refractions of the Mahabharata in Japan and China, Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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- 01 December 2025, pp 217-240
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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.
About the Contributors
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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1. - The Mahabharata and the Making of Modern India
- Edited by Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, Julian Strube, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
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This chapter suggests that the Mahabharata has played a central role in the forging of concepts and practices of sovereignty in modern India. I argue that while British and Indian elites deployed the Mahabharata to legitimate the construction of centralized regimes of state sovereignty – imperial sovereignty and nation-state sovereignty – more socially marginal actors, such as ‘lower-caste’ and female activists, as well as sections of the middle-class literati, used the epic to express more democratic, polycentric models of sovereignty. These debates reverberated across state legislatures and princely courts, literary gatherings and peasant assemblies, theatres and secret revolutionary meetings. As Indians journeyed abroad, the Mahabharata came alive in political ritual and deliberation, uniting Indians with other anti-colonial Asians who were carving out their own projects of national sovereignty. The Mahabharata thus helped in decolonizing and democratizing sovereignty in South Asia. In every way, it fulfils the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's (1770–1831) definition of epics as embodying ‘the spirits of peoples’, ‘the proper foundations of a national consciousness’.
The Mahabharata and State Formation in Early Modern India
The Mahabharata was central to state formation in early modern South Asia. In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, called the Razmnamah (Book of War). There were earlier precedents of Indo-Muslim rulers and officials commissioning translations of the epic. The fifteenth-century ruler of Kashmir, Zayn al-Abidin, is said to have commissioned a translation into Persian, though the text has not survived. Later, Laskar Paragal Khan, governor of Chittagong in eastern Bengal, driven by intellectual curiosity (kutuhale puchhilek), asked Kavindra Parameshvar Das to author a Bengali translation in the early sixteenth century. Parameshwar, in turn, eulogized his patron as an incarnation of righteousness (dharma avatar). Translations of the Mahabharata legitimated regional state formation across South Asia.
However, the Mughal project had a wider pan-subcontinental legacy. Akbar aimed to create an Indo-Persian grammar of kingship that would enable mutual intelligibility and dialogue between Hindu and Muslim subjects across the empire. Audrey Truschke has argued that the translation occasionally abbreviated religious–philosophical discussions present in the epic, including criticisms of kingship and war, while emphasizing and expanding the discussions on just monarchy. The Mahabharata combined themes of martial heroism and ethical kingship in a manner that eminently suited the Mughal ruling classes.
Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus
- Volume 3, Part III
- Editor-in-Chief Maria Chiara Scappaticcio
- Edited in consultation with Eleanor Dickey
- Edited in association with Lucia C. Colella
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- May 2025
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- 28 February 2025
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The Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP) is a comprehensive, up-to-date and unique reference-tool in six volumes, gathering nearly 1500 Latin texts on papyrus. Editions are provided with both a palaeographic and a critical apparatus, translations of the texts into English and an exhaustive introduction and commentary. The texts in CLTP cover a wide chronological range and many different types and genres. They include both literary and documentary texts, dating from the first century BC to the Middle Ages. They provide new knowledge about the circulation of Latin, offering unique insights into textual transmission and indeed of Latin literature itself, but also into topics such as ancient education and multilingualism, economics, society, culture, and multiculturalism in the ancient Mediterranean world. The result is a lasting and crucial reference work for all those interested in the history of Latin and of the Roman world.
Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus
- Volume 5, Part V
- Editor-in-Chief Maria Chiara Scappaticcio
- Edited in consultation with Eleanor Dickey
- Edited in association with Lucia C. Colella
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The Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP) is a comprehensive, up-to-date and unique reference-tool in six volumes, gathering nearly 1500 Latin texts on papyrus. Editions are provided with both a palaeographic and a critical apparatus, translations of the texts into English and an exhaustive introduction and commentary. The texts in CLTP cover a wide chronological range and many different types and genres. They include both literary and documentary texts, dating from the first century BC to the Middle Ages. They provide new knowledge about the circulation of Latin, offering unique insights into textual transmission and indeed of Latin literature itself, but also into topics such as ancient education and multilingualism, economics, society, culture, and multiculturalism in the ancient Mediterranean world. The result is a lasting and crucial reference work for all those interested in the history of Latin and of the Roman world.