Krishna's Mahabharatas

An empirically rich and detailed study of regional Mahabharatas, Sohini Pillais Krishna's Mahabharatas is a major contribution to scholarship on Hindu epic and devotional traditions. Bringing together two understudied texts composed in Tamil and Bhasha, Pillai traces the growing devotional emphasis given to the figure of Krishna in regional Mahabharatas, reshaping how we view the project of vernacularization and the growth of bhakti in the second millennium. * HARSHITA MRUTHINTI KAMATH, Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory University. *
Sohini Pillai boldly tackles the complexities of the unruly epic's chaotic development over millennia, and even more daunting, its ever-expanding retellings. She masterfully juggles the broad perspective with an acute eye for detail. At the heart of the work is a comparison between a Tamil and a Hindi retelling, influential respectively in contemporary performances in Tamil Nadu in South India and Chhattisgarh in the North, including by Dalit groups. Written engagingly in a broadly accessible way, the book also offers selections from a number of lesser-known retellings to delight the connoisseur. * HEIDI R. M. PAUWELS, Professor of Asian *
In Krishna's Mahabharatas Sohini Pillai takes the trajectory of bhakti as it winds its way through the sub-continent seriously, and examines its narrative path in very different geographical locations and languages, revealing its shared landscape, thus helping us theorize bhakti from the ground up in ways which have not been attempted before. This is a work of meticulous and deeply original, textual scholarship and a fitting successor to the work of those such as Friedhelm Hardy, showing us the pan-Indian shared literary landscape and tropes of Krishna-ite devotion, much after the Bhagavatapurana. * SRILATA RAMAN, Professor of Hinduism, University of Toronto *
Scholars of Sanskrit epics and devotional literature will welcome Sohini Pillai's insightful book which illuminates the epic's richness by analyzing Villiputturar's Tamil Paratam and Chauhan's Bhasha Mahabharat. She breaks down the rigid boundaries that separate south and north Indian bhakti texts by documenting the mythological, episodic, and rhetorical strategies that both poets deployed to transform a gruesome tale of war into a celebration of Krishna. * PAULA RICHMAN, William H. Danforth Professor Emerita of South Asian Religions *