The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata

The Mahabharata, one of the most popular epics in India, has impacted literary and cultural thought through the centuries. It is of immense religious and philosophical importance in India and is considered to be part of itihasas, literally that which happened, or sacred history. Though the Mahabharata is distant in time, something of its indefatigable, insistent formulation of the pivotal dilemmas of our shared human moral imagination, remains insistent and inextinguishable even today.

The book closely reads the conceptual and narrative intricacies of the epic through the four foundational terms of dharma (law), artha (worldliness), kama (desire) and moksha (freedom), offering riveting insights on the moral psychology of Indic civilization. Drawing from scholarly forays in philology, history, religious studies, and pre-modern Asian traditions, this critical attention by a literary scholar to the Mahabharata’s own narrative impulses and the internal vigor of select episodes brings to fore the gripping dilemmas that animate the epic.

The book travels through an atmospheric and exuberant pre-modern milieu to provoke prescient metaphysical and ethical questions that are only accumulating in relevance in the contemporary era.