Overview

Winner of the Award for Excellence in Religion: Textual Studies from the American Academy of ReligionThis book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

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9780199860784

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Reviews

The book is a stimulating combination of close attention to textual detail and reflection on the reading process. By bringing literary theory into contact with Mahabharata studies it does welcome wonders for both; it is original and will be influential...The tone is passionate yet restrained; the argument is engaging and direct...The project is clearly an important one both for the author and for the field of Mahabharata studies. --Simon Brodbeck, author of The Mahabharata Patriline: Gender, Culture, and the Royal Hereditary

This is a very rich book in many respects and provides an approach to the study of the MBh and its individual characters that could profitably be taken up by others. ... this book is very well worth reading and its central thesis about the dissonance created by the disconnect between dharma and duhkha offers new lines of research into both great Sanskrit epics. * Greg Bailey, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *

Author Information

Before joining the Religion Department at Boston University in 2010, Emily Hudson taught at Harvard University as a lecturer in the history and literature program. Situating herself methodologically at the crossroads of religion and literature, the history of religions, and religious ethics, Hudson's teaching and research interests focus on South Asian literature and literary theory and comparative religious ethics.

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