Krishna’s Māhābhārata: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative

 

This talks draws from Sohini Pillai's recent book: Krishna’s Māhābhārata: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative. In this book, she 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 “devotion” focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna.

 

Examining over forty retellings in eleven different regional South Asian languages composed over a period of nine hundred years, Pillai's book focuses on two particular Māhābhārata: Villiputturar’s fifteenth-century Tamil Paratam and Sabalsingh Chauhan’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahabharat. Through close comparative readings, she reveals the similar ways in which poets from opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent transformed the story of the Sanskrit epic into narratives of emotional bhakti centered on Krishna. At the same time, Pillai also demonstrates how these different regional Māhābhārata retellings are unique pieces of religious literature. In this presentation, Pillai will be discussing how Villi and Chauhan each firmly place their Māhābhārata in specific regional Vaishnava bhakti literary cultures that speak to local audiences. For Villi, this literary culture is the South Indian Shrivaishnava tradition and for Chauhan, it is Tulsidas’s Bhasha corpus of poems dedicated to Rama. In this talk, she will primarily be analyzing often-neglected sources of information: opening invocations to different sections of both of these regional Māhābhārata retellings.

 

Ārti Dhan, Associate Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, will be the discussant for this lecture.

 

Dr. Sohini Sarah Pillai is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Director of Film and Media Studies, and the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Kalamazoo College where she teaches courses on religious traditions in South Asia, religion in cinema, and epic literature. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious narratives and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and the Ramayana epic traditions.

 

She is the author of Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (the American Academy of Religion’s Religion in Translation Series at Oxford University Press, 2024). Ongoing projects include Women in Hindu Traditions, a co-authored sourcebook with Emilia Bachrach and Jennifer D. Ortegren in the Women in Religions Series at New York University Press, and a monograph about cinematic adaptations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

 

She is also the co-editor with Nell Shapiro Hawley of Many Mahabharatas (SUNY Series in Hindu Studies at State University of New York Press, 2021), a member of the Steering Committee for the Hinduism Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and a member of the editorial board for Reading Religion.