Here are 33 books that Thirteen Plays of Bhasa fans have personally recommended if you like
Thirteen Plays of Bhasa.
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Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
Originally written in Malayalam and published in 1984, this Mahabharata-based novel won the Jnanapith award, the highest literary award in India, for M.T. Vasudevan Nair. The greatness of Mahabharata is that every character in the epic has a story worth telling about. In the dextrous hands of M. T Vasudevan Nair, the poignant tale of the second Pandava, attains a different dimension, forcing us to see the ancient epic in a new light. The book is a classic in every sense and in Malayalam, every word and punctuation has a lyrical quality. The English translation is excellent enough to create a long-lasting impact on the reader’s mind. A beautiful and lyrical book.
This is the story of Bhima, the second son, always second in line - a story never adequately told until one of India's finest writers conjured him up from the silences in Vyasa's narrative.
M.T. Vasudevan Nair's Bhima is a revelation:lonely; eager to succeed; treated with a mixture of affection and contempt by his Pandava brothers,and with scorn and hatred by his Kaurava cousins.Bhima battlesincessantly with failure and disappointments. He is adept at disguising his feelings,but has an overwhelmingly intuitive understanding of everyone who crosses his path.A warrior without equal, he takes on the mighty Bakasura and Jarasandha, and ultimately…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
This Kannada classic written by S L Byrappa humanises each character of Mahabharata and turns the ancient epic into a modern novel. The book won the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award and is one of the greatest Indian books written in any Indian language. There is no magic, gods, or superhumans in this novel and this makes it poignant, deep, and moving. This is Mahabharata as raw as it can get and reads like historical fiction. If Bhima is lyrical, Parva is powerful fiction. It grabs you from the first page and shakes up many of our beliefs.
The novel narrates the story of the Hindu epic Mahabharata mostly using monologue as a literary technique. Several principal characters found in the original Mahabharata reminisce almost their entire lives. Both the setting and the context for the reminiscence is the onset of the Kurukshetra War. Parva is acknowledged to be S.L.Bhyrappa's greatest work.Non-Kannadigas who have read it in it's Hindi and Marathi translations consider it one of the masterpieces of modern Indian literature.It is a transformation of an ancient legend into a modern novel.In this process,it has gained rational credibility and a human perspective.The main incident,the Bharata war,symbolic of…
Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
Karna is the classical tragic hero. The greatest warrior of Mahabharata, everyone who mattered wronged him. Rejected by his mother, teacher, lover, and God, the only person to stand with him was the antagonist of the epic. And that was Karna’s tragedy. He could have avoided the epic war and become the king of Hastinpura, but he chose loyalty over kingship. He could have sided with his brothers, but he chose friendship over brotherhood. The Marathi classic by Shivaji Sawant is an ode to Karna. Translated in many languages, it was one book that inspired me to become a writer.
The sixth son of Kunti, Karna is often reduced to an antagonist in most modern renditions of the Mahabharatha. In Mrityunjaya, The Death Conqueror: The Story Of Karna, a study of humanity, life and existentialism through Ved Vyasa's epic, Shivaji Sawant examines Karna's life. Summary of the Book The autobiography of Karna, this book contains six dramatic sililoquies to form nine parts. Four of these are in Karna's point of view, mixed with the view points of Kunti, Duryodhana, Shatruntapa, Vrishali and Krishna. The author makes a comparison between Karna and Krishna, changing the reader's perspective of Karna's "sins." About…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
This historical fiction is on the life of a quasi-mythical figure, the bhakti era saint, Meera. Narrated by Bhoj Raj, the husband of Meera Bhai, it is the poignant tale of India itself at the cusp of a historical event. The political and social questions Nagarkar raises in the book are relevant in every era and culture. The story of Meera, the princess who fell in love with Lord Krishna and her hapless husband who is forced to compete with God for his wife’s love. The beauty of Nagarkar’s English is bewitching. The loneliness of Rajkumar, the protagonist, throbs through every line. How difficult it would have been to be married to a saint, who is revered even after five hundred years of her death and whose compositions are still sung in temples, weddings, and homes? In my opinion, this is perhaps the best Indian English novel written so far,…
Cuckold is set in the historic 16th century, in the rajput kingdom of mewar the region is ruled by rana sangha, who has been trying to establish peace with the sultans of malwa, delhi, and gujarat his eldest son is maharaj kumar bhoj raj, who is the crown prince of mewar this fictional character is based on the real life rajpur prince, thakur bhojrajmaharaj kumar is the narrator of cuckold, and he is married to meera bai, the princess of mewar meera claims that she cannot cohabitat with the prince because she is already married to the hindu god, lord…
I’m Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and my research focuses on the Mahabharata, an epic narrative tradition from South Asia. As an Indian-American kid growing up in suburban Boston, my first introduction to the Mahabharata tradition was from the stories my grandmother told me when she would visit from Chennai and from the Mahabharata comics that she would bring me. Many years later, my friend and colleague Nell Shapiro Hawley (Preceptor of Sanskrit at Harvard University) and I began to work on a project that would eventually become our edited volume, Many Mahābhāratas. I’m excited to share some of my own personal favorite Mahabharatas with you here.
The Urubhanga or the Shattered Thighs is one of six Sanskrit Mahabharata dramas that are attributed to the playwright Bhasa (ca. 200 CE). There are two things about the Shattered Thighs that I find particularly fascinating. The first is that the hero of the play is Duryodhana, the leader of the one hundred Kauravas who is usually seen as the villain of the Mahabharata tradition. The second is that the Shattered Thighs violates one of the central rules of Sanskrit dramas by (spoiler alert!) depicting the central hero of the play physically dying on stage. There are multiple English translations of the Shattered Thighs, but I recommend the one by Andrew Skilton because it includes detailed endnotes that are helpful for non-specialist readers.
Two tragic plays that break the rules: both show the hero dying on stage, a scenario forbidden in Sanskrit dramaturgy. King Harsha's play, composed in the seventh century, re-examines the Buddhist tale of a magician prince who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save a hostage snake (naga). The Shattered Thighs, attributed to Bhasa, the illustrious predecessor to ancient Kali*dasa, transforms a crucial episode of the Maha*bharata war. As he dies from a foul blow to the legs delivered in his duel with Bhima, Duryodhana's character is inverted, depicted as a noble and gracious exemplar amidst the wreckage of the fearsome…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
Of the five recommended books, this is the most current. No wonder there are so many years in between. Maintaining that there are external influences in India is very dangerous academically. I like that Morales-Harley, a young scholar who knows Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, dared to do it.
I like his book because it is well written, well argued, and always leaves open alternative interpretation possibilities.
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman)…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and my research focuses on the Mahabharata, an epic narrative tradition from South Asia. As an Indian-American kid growing up in suburban Boston, my first introduction to the Mahabharata tradition was from the stories my grandmother told me when she would visit from Chennai and from the Mahabharata comics that she would bring me. Many years later, my friend and colleague Nell Shapiro Hawley (Preceptor of Sanskrit at Harvard University) and I began to work on a project that would eventually become our edited volume, Many Mahābhāratas. I’m excited to share some of my own personal favorite Mahabharatas with you here.
I first read this novel the summer before I started college and nearly fourteen years later, The Palace of Illusions remains one of my favorite Mahabharatas. This book is narrated by Draupadi, the shared wife of the five Pandava brothers. In the Sanskrit Mahabharata, Draupadi is an eloquent, headstrong, and intelligent heroine. While Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Draupadi is just as compelling as her epic counterpart, Divakaruni shows us aspects of Draupadi’s life that are absent from the Sanskrit Mahabharata, such as her childhood in her father’s palace and her relationships with her siblings Dhristadyumna and Sikhandi. Also, although The Palace of Illusions is set in ancient India, this novel sensitively addresses pertinent social issues in contemporary South Asia including transphobia and colorism.
The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half-history, half-myth, and wholly magical; narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the five Pandava brothers, we are -- finally -- given a woman's take on the timeless tale that is the Mahabharata
Tracing Panchaali's life -- from fiery birth and lonely childhood, where her beloved brother is her only true companion; through her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna; to marriage, motherhood and Panchaali's secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy -- The Palace of Illusions is a deeply human novel about…
I’m Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and my research focuses on the Mahabharata, an epic narrative tradition from South Asia. As an Indian-American kid growing up in suburban Boston, my first introduction to the Mahabharata tradition was from the stories my grandmother told me when she would visit from Chennai and from the Mahabharata comics that she would bring me. Many years later, my friend and colleague Nell Shapiro Hawley (Preceptor of Sanskrit at Harvard University) and I began to work on a project that would eventually become our edited volume, Many Mahābhāratas. I’m excited to share some of my own personal favorite Mahabharatas with you here.
Considered to be the longest poem in the world, the Sanskrit Mahabharata is comprised of around 1.8 million words (for comparison: the combined length of the seven Harry Potter books is barely 1.1 million words). At 928 pages, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling is by no means a short book, but it does make the massive Sanskrit epic very accessible for general readers. While the Sanskrit Mahabharata is primarily composed in couplets called shlokas, Carole Satyamurti’s masterful retelling is in blank verse, which is the meter of my two favorite English epics: John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jack Mitchell’s The Odyssey of Star Wars. I also especially love the way Satyamurti presents Karna, the secret elder brother of Pandavas and one of the greatest tragic heroes in world literature.
The Mahabharata, originally composed some two thousand years ago is an epic masterpiece, "a hundred times more interesting" than the Iliad and the Odyssey (Wendy Doniger), it is a timeless work that evokes a world of myth, passion and warfare while exploring eternal questions of duty, love and spiritual freedom. A seminal Hindu text, it is one of the most important and influential works in the history of world civilisation.
This new English retelling, innovatively composed in blank verse, covers all the books of the Mahabharata. It masterfully captures the beauty, excitement and profundity of the original Sanskrit poem as…
I love words, their sound, and their power. When I was a little girl, I would adopt one and make it my own. My parents long recalled my love affair with “nonsense,” which I would wield like a wand when hearing anything silly or irrational. I think words are interwoven with what we feel in a deep and inextricable way. I am also fascinated with how Indian thought offers millennia of wide and deep explorations of human experience in ways that trouble the basic assumptions of the modern West.
I love beautiful things and have been able to share beautiful things with my students with the help of Martha Selby’s translations and discussions of love poetry in three languages: Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil.
This book explores the subtle joys and sorrows of love–love shared and love thwarted, love enduring and love grown stale, love that is playful and love that is cruel. The women’s voices, in particular, leap off the page. Readers are invited to feel the ways that these ancient poems still resonate, as well as to discern the specificity and distinctiveness of these Indian conceptions.
This book presents new English translations of 150 erotic poems composed in India's three classical languages: Old Tamil, Maharastri Prakit, and Sanskrit. The poems are derived from large anthological collections that date from as early as the first centruy CE to as late as the eight century. In Martha Selby's masterful translations, the poems both stand on their own as poems in English and maintain the flavours of the original verses as reflected in idiom and structure. The poems are grouped according to themes, and annotated whenever a brief gloss is necessary. The book begins with several scholarly essays on…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I was drawn to the subject of Yoga already as a teenager. Much later, I did my Ph.D. Thesis on the subject of the Nāths. I find fascinating the wealth of esoteric ideas and assumptions at the root of their project: the search for the elixir of immortality through internalization of the principles of alchemy. I admire their ethos, their stories, and the whole fabric of legends that surrounds them. I have done some work on translating the poetry attributed to their founder, guru Gorakhnāth, and that made me appreciative of their wisdom and their views, even when I disagreed with some of those.
I admire the author’s attempt to approach the conceptual universe of the Nāth Yogis with a focus on their philosophy. Not an easy task, given the fact that their semi-legendary founder, guru Gorakhnāth, was not a systematic philosopher. Leaving aside the issue of actual authorship, what has been exposed here contains a great deal of metaphysical depth and complexity.
It is a pity that the Sanskrit text mentioned in the subtitle is not translated. “Some seek nonduality,” the text commences, “while the others seek duality. They don’t know the full truth, which is devoid of both nonduality and duality.” While the lack of translation is lamentable, the ideas expressed in this relatively short Sanskrit text are copiously discussed in this book, which makes it a great read.
The cult of the Kanphata Yogis is a definite unite within Hinduism, and its study is essential for understanding this phase of the religious life of India. the book is divided into three sections. The first two sections comprising chapters 1 - 13 deal with the cult and history of this sec. the third section containing chapters 14 - 16 opens with the Sanskrit Text Goraksastaka and its English rendering and annotations. The book is fully documented. It has a preface, Glossary, Bibliography, Plates and General Index. This book is an attempt to present a systematic and consistent account of…
