Ramayana and Mahabharata in Indian Art & Literature (Hardcover)

Eternal Epics, Enduring Conversations: Perspectives on the Ramayana and Mahabharata What is it about two poems — composed across centuries, transmitted through countless tongues, endlessly retold and reimagined — that makes them as indispensable to the twenty-first century mind as they were to the ancient one? The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are not merely India’s foundational epics; they are the civilizational bloodstream of a subcontinent, pulsing through its architecture and embroidery, its theatre and theology, its moral anxieties and its deepest longings. This richly conceived volume refuses the comfortable illusion that these texts yield themselves to any single reading. Here, assembled with impressive scholarly range, are essays that pursue the epics into the granite-strewn sacred landscape of Kishkindha and the gilded murals of Angkor Wat, into the feminist subtext of Sita’s silences and the ego concealed within Karna’s honour, into Buddhist retellings and Jain rationalisations, into Chamba embroideries and Thanjavur glass paintings where Christian artists painted Hindu deities with reverent, ambiguous hands. To read these pages is to discover that India’s great epics were never the exclusive property of any creed, caste, or kingdom. From Northeast India’s tribal oral traditions to Thailand’s royal Ramakien, from Kerala’s millennium-old theatre to a silver plaque in Banaras — the epics travelled, adapted, and endured because they addressed something irreducibly human: the struggle between duty and desire, between pride and principle, between the world as it is and as it ought to be. This volume is, in the truest sense, a conversation that refuses to end.