Tag Archives: Mahabharata


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Manmatha Nath Dutt: The lost hero

(From Open Magazine. Link to the complete article given below)

What does the expression ‘Elysium Bower’ remind you of?  I wonder how many people will think of John Keats and Endymion, a poem published by Keats in 1818. One of India’s greatest translators was Manmatha Nath Dutt (Shastri), 1855-1912, who translated from Sanskrit to English and did much more. Chronologically, he translated the Valmiki Ramayana (sequentially from 1892 to 1894), Markandeya Purana (1896), Bhagavata Purana (1896), Vishnu Purana (1896), Hari Vamsha (1897), Mahanirvana Tantra (1900), Agni Purana (1903-04), Mahabharata (1895-1905), Kamandakiya Nitisara (1896), several samhitas anddharmashastra texts (1906, 1908-09), Garuda Purana (1908) and Rig Veda Samhita (1906-1912).  Compared to Kishori Mohan Ganguli (the translator of the Mahabharata), Manmatha Nath Dutt was much more prolific.  (Ganguli did not translate any of the other texts—not Puranas, not Hari Vamsha, not Valmiki Ramayana).  But compared to Manmatha Nath Dutt, Ganguli is much more known, probably because the Ganguli Mahabharata translation is available online, while the Dutt one isn’t. (The language used in the two Mahabharata translations present an interesting contrast, but that’s a different story.)  Apart from this remarkable body of translation work, Dutt wrote a biography of the Buddha (1901), retold stories from the Puranas (1893-94, the four volumes titled Gleanings from the Indian Classics), retold stories about famous women in Hinduism (1897), wrote a book on Hindu metaphysics (1904) and wrote another book on the dharma of householders (1905).  These were also in English.  I have not been able to track down anything by Manmatha Nath Dutt written in Bengali, or in any other language.  (In compiling a list of his works, I came across a stray reference to a monograph in Bengali known as Banglar Meye (Women of Bengal), but I am not sure what this was.)

The Ganguli translation was funded and published by Pratap Chandra Roy. Thanks to Pratap Chandra Roy and Pratap Chandra Roy’s wife, we know something about Ganguli.  (P. Lal compiled an annotated Mahabharata bibliography in 1967).  The negative reference to the Dutt translation in this annotation may also have something to do with Dutt receiving less attention than he deserves.)   We know almost nothing about Manmatha Nath Dutt and about this amazingly productive period from 1892 to 1912, a period of 20 years. There is a piece written by Shashi Shekhar in The Pioneer in 2011 and there is a German website with some information.  That’s about it.

Read more at this Open link

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Book Excerpt: Why I am a Hindu by Shashi Tharoor

Why I am a Hindu

Pages 24-27

…. When Buddhism sought to reform Hinduism, Hinduism turned around and sought to absorb it too, by including the Buddha as a reincarnation of Vishnu and his agnostic teachings as merely a nastika form of the mother faith. As a result Buddhism has hardly any strength or presence in the land of its birth, having been absorbed and overtaken by the religion it sought to challenge. Hinduism could well have tried the same with Christianity and Islam, too, had it been allowed to do so; but these faiths were not interested in being embraced by Hinduism, since they saw themselves as the revealed Truth rather than as one among multiple versions of truth.

Hinduism is also unusual in seeing God, Man and the universe as co-related. As the philosopher Raimon Panikkar has explained, in Hindu thought, God without Man is nothing, literally ‘no-thing’; Man without God is just a ‘thing’, without meaning or larger purpose; and the universe without Man or God is ‘any-thing’, sheer unexisting chaos. In Panikkar’s explanation, nothing separates Man from God; ‘there is neither intermediary nor barrier between them’. So Hindu prayers mix the sacred with the profane: a Hindu can ask God for anything. Among the tens of thousands of sacred verses and hymns in the Hindu scriptures are a merchant’s prayer for wealth, a bankrupt’s plea to the divine to free him of debt, verses extolling the union of a man with a woman, and even the lament of a rueful (and luckless) gambler asking God to help him shake his addiction. Prayer and worship, for the Hindu, are thus not purely spiritual exercises: they enhance the quality of his life in the material world, in the here and now.

 GANESH, MY ISHTA-DEVTA

Hindus are often asked, during certain ritual prayers, to imagine their ishta-devta, their personal God, or rather that way of imagining the abstraction of the Absolute in an anthropomorphic form that most appeals to them. I pick Ganesh, or Ganapathi, as we prefer to call him in the South, myself, not because I believe God looks like Him, but because of the myriad aspects of the godhead, the ones He represents appeal most to me.

Om maha Ganapathe namaha,
sarva vignoba shantaye,
Om Ganeshaya namaha…

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And now, a dapper Ravana: Amar Chitra Katha undergoes makeover

Benevolent kings and their beauteous queens stroll in palace gardens or verdant forests while loyal servants eavesdrop and evil enemies plot. Meanwhile, marauding armies scale impossibly high walls and are beaten back by animals that can miraculously talk. A courtier outwits his king every single time and a poet brings strong men to their knees with his intelligence.

This complex cast of characters operating in a fantastical world held us in thrall every single issue of Amar Chitra Katha that we devoured eagerly. As the legendary comic brand reaches its 50th year of production, with over 450 titles to its credit and an astounding 100 million copies sold in over 35 languages, like any 50-year-old, it is emerging from its own version of a mid-life crisis.

Although adored by two generations of Indians, in the last 10 years, some of the adulation has been countered by scepticism bordering on outrage about what has been labelled Amar Chitra Katha’s ‘regressive’ content, both in its art and script.

A number of scholarly writings have come up, criticising and condemning the comics for reinforcing stereotypes: women characters are too subservient, caste hierarchy is established by skin colour, with upper caste characters invariably lighter toned, and its religious biases are clear. The controversy has been similar to what the Enid Blyton pantheon faced, forcing it to rethink its golliwogs and dwarves.

Beards and saris

If all this had happened in an Amar Chitra Katha, a single word from the superhero (placed in a spiky speech bubble) would have reduced the grumbling detractors to tiny, powerless creatures to be borne away on a tidal wave of nostalgia and affection. But real life is less forgiving. Thus, recently, when young artists in the comic house’s studios pointed out that there were no women in the crowd scene in a new title on Sardar Patel, Reena Ittyerah Puri, Executive Editor, immediately had it rectified by removing beards and adding saris for some of the crowd.

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Book Review: Sauptik: Blood and Flowers by Amruta Patil

By Nilesh Mondal

sauptikMythology remains a vast source of interesting and sometimes intimidating stories that writers have constantly been trying to draw from. Whether it is the subtle parallels drawn from mythology, or the more direct approach of retelling or reimagining epics and adapting them into more contemporary narratives, both have been tried by many writers to varying degree of success. However, Amruta Patil’s second attempt to combine the tales of Mahabharata and the knowledge from Puranas, after the highly successful Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, is neither of the two. It is one which deals with Indian mythology head on; narrating the epic we’ve known and loved always with glorious precision and straight-forwardness.

This is why Sauptik: Blood and Flowers sets a precedent for a very different kind of mythological retelling, one that is both devastatingly thought-provoking and disarmingly honest, one which depends entirely on the epics themselves to impart readers with lessons on life and justice, and the art of war.

From the very beginning, we know this isn’t going to be the usual run-of-the-mill bit of story-telling, since Sauptik is first and foremost, a graphic novel. I’d leave the analytical scrutiny of Amruta Patil’s artwork to those more experienced in those fields. To me, the usual reader, the artwork serves both as a reminder of a bygone era of paintings done by artisans in a king’s court, done on fabric and papyrus and other media, and a sense of aesthetics that is a complete departure from the prevalent genres of digital manipulation of art. In her art, done as a mixture of techniques ranging from watercolour to acrylic paints to charcoal to collages, battles and scenarios come alive in their entire magnificence. She also drops the conventional rectangular structure used in most comic books, instead experimenting with various alternatives, sometimes splaying the art over the entirety of the pages, sometimes having multiple scenes unfold on the same page, etc. The use of motifs and symbols of importance as depicted in the epic and Puranas are layered and repetitive. All in all, it is a visually stimulating collection of artwork rich in colours and details, which keeps the reader riveted throughout the entire book.

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Chitra Divakaruni’s next: Ramayan from Sita’s point of view

Indian-American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who had used Draupadi as the narrator for her novel based on the Mahabharata, is now writing a book which is a retelling of the Ramayana from Sita’s point of view.

Writing about women has been very important for the McDavid professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and many of her books have women protagonists.

Her latest work “Before We Visit the Goddess”, published by Simon & Schuster, is about three generations of mothers and daughters who discover their greatest source of strength in one another. Read more

Source: The Indian Express


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New release: The Serpent’s Revenge: Unusual Stories from the Mahabharata

serpents_revenge-front Featuring some of the most interesting but lesser known stories of the Mahabharata, is Puffin Books’ new release titled ‘The Serpent’s Revenge: Unusual Stories from the Mahabharata’. The book is authored by award-winning writer Sudha Murty, her first in the mythology genre.

“I belong to the land of Hubli, a city in Karnataka. During my younger days, we didn’t have digital media or electronic gadgets the way we do now. So the best part of my day was the one I spent either in listening to stories from my elders or reading them,” Says Sudha, “These stories were often based on our epics and hence, did not always follow the logic of real life. So I perpetually had questions on the whys and hows about the stories’ sequence of events. However, no one could completely satisfy my curiosity or withstand my endless questioning. Little did I know that my curiosity would follow me into adulthood and culminate into this book for my young readers. My hope is that this book answers at least some of the same innocent questions that I also wondered about as a child.”

‘The Serpent’s Revenge’ is the first book in the series of four and will release on 25th October.

About the author:

Sudha Murty is the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation. A prolific writer in English and Kannada, she has written novels, technical books, travelogues, collections of short stories and non-fiction pieces, and the hugely popular children’s books which have been bestsellers. Her books have been translated into all the major Indian languages, and she has received many awards.

 


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I never stopped reading the Mahabharata: Shashi Tharoor

Shashi_TharoorThe Hindustan Times has published a short interview with author and politician Shashi Tharoor on June 21.  Tharoor’s masterpiece, The Great Indian Novel, is on the paper’s list of greatest Indian novels.

“It was ambitiously conceived and written with all my heart and soul, but “greatness” is a quality for others to judge,” he says when asked if he always knew he was writing a great piece of work. “I am glad it is still in print a quarter of a century later, and after 42 reprints, Penguin is planning to bring out a Silver Jubilee hardback edition in October.” Continue reading →


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India: What keeps the mythology genre ticking?

For a decade, Indian authors have been capturing readers’ mind space with reinterpretations of mythology. What keeps this genre ticking?: The Hindu

Krishna UdayasankarThere was a time when bookstores were filled with campus love stories set in IIT and IIM campuses. Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone – What not to do at IIT (2004) spawned many campus capers until readers were fatigued by the genre and the stories had little recall value. Continue reading →


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@MeghnaPant to present Mahabharata in 100 tweets

This unique digital storytelling event which is being sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Twitter (@TWfictionfest) will see Meghna Pant (@MeghnaPant), author of Happy Birthday and Other Stories and One and a Half Wife, retelling the epic Mahabharata in 100 tweets. Not an easy feat by any chance, Meghna is gung-ho about this challenge. She says, “I truly believe that a good story is a good story no matter what the length. Twitter is a challenging medium. Honestly, it’s also my way of making peace with Twitter, as a writer I initially found 140 characters stifling. But I soon realised that it’s one of the most important platforms we have today.” Continue reading →


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Criticism: Tagore’s Chitra and Folklore’s Hidimba: Power of the Feminine

Dr. Usha Bande casts a critical glance at Tagore’s Chitrangada, based on the Mahabharata story of the warrior-princess, and Hidimba, a folklore figure from the present Kullu area of Himachal Pradesh in India.

tagoreSomehow, Chitrangada and Hidimba stand out as epitomes of feminine power and feminist assertion in the Mahabharata as well as in literature. The role assigned to them in the Epic (Mahabharata) and in folk and mainstream literatures focuses on their strength, independence of spirit and intelligence. Rabindranath Tagore’s lyrical drama Chitrangada is based on the Mahabharata story of the warrior-princess whose quest for love has both feminine and feminist overtones.  Similarly, Hidimba, the present Kullu area of Himachal Pradesh, is a folklore figure who has become a part of folk psyche and has achieved divinity. These two women are not identical; though contemporary, they belong to distant parts of the land, with different value systems and social set-ups but both are strong and both represent an era that illustrates women’s authority and agency. It is interesting to explore how Rabindranath Tagore makes changes in the Mahabharata story to give his heroine the attributes he would like modern Indian women to possess and how the folklore of Himachal Pradesh elevates Hidimba from the daemonic to the human and then to the divine. Continue reading →