AFTER THE WAR THE LAST BOOKS OF THE MAHABHARATA

DescriptionComposed sometime between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Mahabharata’s 75,000verses narrate the legendary battle between two branches of the Kuru clan ofNorth India, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and its aftermath. Storytellers in allof South Asia and far beyond have entertained and instructed through this greatestof epics for generations past. But, as the translator says in her introduction,they have generally ‘underra[ted] the high emotion, mythological inventiveness,metaphysical complexities, and conflicted characters that animate the last books[which]...tell a unified and self-bounded story of their own’.In Book Fifteen (Ashramavasika, Living in the Hermitage) a wild-fire consumesKunti, King Yudhishthira’s mother, and Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, the parentsof the Kauravas, living out their final days in the forest. But did they die ameaningless death? Fate catches up with all, even gods, in Book Sixteen (Mausala,The Battle of the Clubs), when Lord Krishna embraces death and his Yadavaclan is annihilated in a drunken brawl and an attack by bandits, in fulfilmentof Gandhari’s curse. It is time for the Pandavas to ascend to heaven, in BooksSeventeen (Mahaprasthanika, The Great Departure) and Eighteen (Svargarohana,Climbing to Heaven), but not before Yudhishthira is tested by a dog, to ascertain hissteadfastness in the moral law.Bringing to bear her many years of study of the Mahabharata, Wendy Donigerrenders the complex narrative in exceedingly lucid prose. The absorbing storyand her masterful translation will appeal to the general reader and the scholaralike. Read more