Gender and Narrative in the Mahabharata.

• Position: Book review

Gender and Narrative in the Mahabharata. Edited by SIMON BRODBECK AND BRIAN BLACK. Routledge Hindu Studies Series. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2007. Pp. xx + 326.

This volume consists of eleven contributions by individual scholars (including both editors) and a general introduction by both editors. It grew out of a research project, "Epic Constructions: Gender, Myth, and Society in the Mahabharata," at the School of Oriental and African Studies conceived by the late Julia Leslie, and culminating in a conference at SOAS in July 2005, at which the papers in this volume were first presented (p. xviii). The contributors include both senior Mahabharata scholars such as James Fitzgerald and Alf Hiltebeitel and younger scholars and those whose primary scholarly concentration is not the Mahabharata.

The focus of the volume is well conveyed by its title: the contributors for the most part seek to examine the issues of gender as they are embedded in and enacted by the epic narrative. Or, as the editors put it, "in this book we are primarily interested in how gender plays itself out in the characters, the unfolding of the story, the social world within the narrative, and the structure and symbology of the text as a whole" (p. 16); they are explicit about concentrating on the narrative rather than on the didactic and prescriptive portions of the text. This seems an excellent approach: throughout the Mahabharata it is stories that dramatize the complications and costs of pursuing dharma, that put flesh on the bones of legal prescriptions, and regularly when a character (notably Bhisma) is asked about a particular point of law, he responds with a story.

As is always the case with collective volumes, particularly those...