Author: Chaturvedi Badrinath
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 276
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788125035145
Description
In the stories where Mahabharata speaks of life, women occupy a central place. In living what life brings to them, the women of the Mahabharata show, that the truth in which one must live, is however, not a simple think: nor can there be any one absolute statement about it. Each one of them, in her own way, is a teacher to mankind as to what truth and goodness in their many dimensions are.
The twelve women of the Mahabharata whose life stories make up this book, range from Shakuntala, Savitri and Damayanti who are known only in sketches, from Sulabha, Suvarchala, Uttara Disha, Madhavi and Kapoti who are hardly know, and finally to Draupadi, know widely but frozen in popular culture and writing in two or three standard clichéd images.
The women of the Mahabharata are incarnate in the women of today. To read the stories of their relation-ships is to read the stories of our relationships. They demand from the men of today the same reflection on their perceptions, attitudes, and pretensions too, as they did from the men in their lives, and equally often from other men full of pretensions, even if they were kings and sages.
Badrinath’s ability to combine respect and love and to write with impressive scholarship and grace will unforgettably transform our experience of reading the Mahabharata
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Innocence, Love and Denial of Truth
SHAKUNTALA
The Humbling of the Arrogance of Knowledge
ANAMIKA
The Truth of Desire
URVASHI
DEVAYANI
UTTARA DISHA
The Power of the Truth of Love
SAVITRI
DAMAYANTI
Language, Meaning and Truth
SUVARCHALA
SULABHA
Turning the Face upon The Selfish World of Men
MADHAVI
One’s Sacrifice, Another’s Transformation
KAPOTA & KAPOTI
The Undeniable Truth of Hurt and Humiliation
The Undeniable Necessity of transcending them
DRAUPADI
INDEX