Review: Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik

 

 

Dr Pattanaik (a medical doctor who became a pharmaceutical executive and then a writer on mythology and an amateur Indologist) has written ”Jaya”, a modern (and highly condensed) “retelling” of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata.  The Mahabharata, in its canonical Sanskrit version (which was likely finalized sometimes in the first 500 years CE) consists of 18 parts of varying length, and is by far the longest epic poem in the world (a 100,000 verses, ten times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined). The poem itself states that this is an expanded version of an earlier, much shorter epic, so there is no question about the fact that it has multiple authors who have added and subtracted (mostly added) material over hundreds or even thousands of years to what was probably a much more compact original. A complete English translation (complete as far as possible at that time) was carried out by Krishan Mohan Ganguly and published in 1896 and is available online at Sacred Texts.  It is, of course, extremely long and is written in somewhat archaic and ornate English (for example the word “puissant” is used every time one of the characters is described as powerful; which, as you can imagine, happens a lot in an epic about powerful people), but it has a certain old-fashioned charm and I can attest that dipping into it to look up a particular episode, or just at random, can be an addictive exercise. Scholars, meanwhile, have continued to refine the canonical text,  and new, presumably more authoritative, collections and translations continue to be published. Not being a scholar of either Indic literature or the Mahabharata, I will say no more on that topic, so on to Jaya. Continue reading Review: Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik

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