Overview

Recognized as the longest poem ever composed, the ancient Sanskrit Mahabharata epic tells the tale of the five Pandava princes and the cataclysmic battle they wage with their one hundred cousins, the Kauravas. This story is one of the most popular and widely-told narratives in South Asia, let alone the world. Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or

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9780197753552

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"<""In Krishna's Mahabharatas Sohini Pillai takes the trajectory of bhakti as it winds its way through the sub-continent seriously, and examines its narrative path in very different geographical locations and languages, revealing its shared landscape, thus helping us theorize bhakti from the ground up in ways which have not been attempted before. This is a work of meticulous and deeply original, textual scholarship and a fitting successor to the work of those such as Friedhelm Hardy, showing us the pan-Indian shared literary landscape and tropes of Krishna-ite devotion, much after the Bhagavata Purana.> * SRILATA RAMAN, Professor of Hinduism, University of Toronto * <""Scholars of Sanskrit epics and devotional literature will welcome Sohini Pillai's insightful book which illuminates the epic's richness by analyzing Villiputturar's Tamil Paratam and Chauhan's Bhasha Mahabharat. She breaks down the rigid boundaries that separate south and north Indian bhakti texts by documenting the mythological, episodic, and rhetorical strategies that both poets deployed to transform a gruesome tale of war into a celebration of Krishna.>"" - PAULA RICHMAN, William H. Danforth Professor Emerita of South Asian Religions"

“In Krishna's Mahabharatas Sohini Pillai takes the trajectory of bhakti as it winds its way through the sub-continent seriously, and examines its narrative path in very different geographical locations and languages, revealing its shared landscape, thus helping us theorize bhakti from the ground up in ways which have not been attempted before. This is a work of meticulous and deeply original, textual scholarship and a fitting successor to the work of those such as Friedhelm Hardy, showing us the pan-Indian shared literary landscape and tropes of Krishna-ite devotion, much after the Bhagavata Purana.> * SRILATA RAMAN, Professor of Hinduism, University of Toronto * “Scholars of Sanskrit epics and devotional literature will welcome Sohini Pillai's insightful book which illuminates the epic's richness by analyzing Villiputturar's Tamil Paratam and Chauhan's Bhasha Mahabharat. She breaks down the rigid boundaries that separate south and north Indian bhakti texts by documenting the mythological, episodic, and rhetorical strategies that both poets deployed to transform a gruesome tale of war into a celebration of Krishna.” - PAULA RICHMAN, William H. Danforth Professor Emerita of South Asian Religions

Author Information

Sohini Sarah Pillai is Assistant Professor of Religion and Director of Film and Media Studies at Kalamazoo College. Her co-edited volume (with Nell Shapiro Hawley), Many Mahabharatas, was published in 2021 by State University of New York Press.

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