Essays on the Mahabharata.

• Author: Brockington, J.L.

This substantial volume contains twenty-three articles in all on various aspects of the Mahabharata; however, the first ten of them have been published already in the Journal of South Asian Literature 20.1, 1985, and are republished here with only minor revision (and the unexplained transposition of the fifth and sixth papers). The usefulness of having these available in book form, and indeed the value of the whole volume, would have been enhanced by better proofreading; practically every page is disfigured by a misprint, usually minor, but occasionally more serious, as for example on p. 10, where a Telugu manuscript "is dated saka 1974 (c. 1973 A.D.)," and the omission of the appendices to the first article.

Two of the original articles are primarily textual in nature--John Dunham's on the manuscripts used in the Critical Edition and that by Daniel Ingalls and son using a computer to produce a concordance of the text--and they are now joined by Madhav Deshpande's well-argued investigation of "The Epic Context of the Bhagavadgita." The last links also with several on the structure and nature of the Mahabharata: Ruth Katz, "The Sauptika Episode in the Structure of the Mahabharata" and James Fitzgerald, "India's Fifth Veda" from before, to which are added Braj Sinha's survey of Arthasastra categories in the Mahabharata (perhaps more on Buddhist texts than epic ones), a study of Janamejaya's snake sacrifice by Christopher Minkowski, and a stimulating essay by A. K. Ramanujan, "Repetition in the Mahabharata," which suggests the replication of episodes as a central structuring principle of the epic. There are also implications for its nature in Gary Tubb, "Santarasa in the Mahabharata," which examines Anandavardhana's views. Several articles look more specifically at the mythical and religious aspects: Mary Carroll Smith, "Epic...