The great war of the Maha bharata is over. Or is it? This is a single extended family wracked in conflict. Both sides succumbed to treachery. Ashva tthaman, the young leader of the three survivors on the losing side, is incensed at his father’s murder. He returns after dark to the now sleeping encampment. The sacrifice of the unsuspecting champions, the "Dead of Night," ensues. The five sons of Pandu have escaped. After a final confrontation, a missile crisis, Ashva tthaman concedes defeat but redirects his missile into the wombs of the victors’ women. They miscarry, and cannot hope for more children. Now the survivors, victors and vanquished, must struggle to comprehend their loss. "The Women" of both sides are confronted by their men’s mangled corpses in a masterpiece of horror and pathos. But their potent curses must be curbed to usher in a new era. Maha bharata Books Ten and Eleven give voice to the vanquished, to the psychology of loss and the conflicting desires for understanding and revenge.

This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883-1896.

"A new translation of the end of the great Sanskrit epic, depicting the final years of the surviving heroes, their debates about the justice of war and the meaning of life, their ultimate deaths, and their experiences of heaven and hell. The author, a distinguished translator of Sanskrit texts, has put the text into clear, flowing, contemporary prose, with a comprehensive but unintrusive critical apparatus. This book will delight general readers and enlighten students of Indian civilization and of great world literature"--

Appealing to just war thinkers, international relations scholars, policymakers, and the public, this book claims that the historical Christian, Islamic, and Hindu just war traditions reflect political concerns with domestic and international order. This underlying realism serves to counterbalance the overly optimistic approach of contemporary liberal just war approaches.

“Bhishma,” the sixth book of the eighteen-book epic The Maha•bhárata, narrates the first ten days of the great war between the Káuravas and the Pándavas. This first volume covers four days from the beginning of the great battle and includes the famous “Bhágavad•gita (“The Song of the Lord”), presented here within its original epic context. In this “bible” of Indian civilization the charioteer Krishna empowers his disciple Árjuna to resolve his personal dilemma: whether to follow his righteous duty as a warrior and slay his opponent relatives in the just battle, or to abstain from fighting and renounce the warrior code to which he is born.

The Book of Shalya recounts in gory detail the final destruction of the Káurava army and the defeat of its leader, Dur·yódhana. In this first volume heroic duels and martial speeches abound as Shalya, the king of the Madras, is made general of the Káurava army, only to be slaughtered in his turn. The Book of Shalya recounts in gory detail the final destruction of the Káurava army and the defeat of its leader, Duryódhana. In this first volume heroic duels and martial speeches abound as Shalya, the king of the Madras, is made general of the Káurava army, only to be slaughtered in his turn. Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org