The Pregnant King

Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 349
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780143063476

Description

Among the many hundreds of characters who inhabit the Mahabharata, perhaps the world's greatest epic and certainly one of the oldest, is Yuvanashva, a childless king, who accidentally drinks a magic potion meant to make his queens pregnant and gives birth to a son. This extraordinary novel is his story.

It is also the story of his mother Shilavati, who cannot be a king because she is a woman; of young Somavat, who surrenders his masculinity to become a wife; of Shikhandi, a daughter brought up as a son, of Arjuna, the great warrior with many wives, who is forced to masquerade as a woman after being cursed by a nymph; of Ileshwara, a god on full-moon days and a goddess on new-moon nights; and of Adi-natha, the teacher of teachers, worshipped as a hermit by some and as an enchantress by others.

Building on Hinduism's rich and complex mythology- but driven by a very contemporary sensibility- Devdutt Pattanaik creates a lush and fecund work of fiction in which the lines are continually blurred between men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Confronted with such fluidity the reader is drawn into Yuvanashva's struggle to be fair to all – those here, those there all those in between.

AN EXTRACT from the Book:

‘I am not sure that I am a man,’ said Yuvanashva. ‘I have created life outside me as men do. But I have also created life inside me, as women do. What does that make me? Will a body such as mine fetter or free me?’

Contents

Author’s Note
Key Characters

Chronology of Events
Prologue
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five
Book Six
Book Seven
Book Eight

Epilogue