After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata

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"Although the Mahabharata has no true ending-we are told at one of its beginnings that this text is coterminous with life itself-Wendy Doniger has given us a smooth, beautifully readable English finale to this monumental epic. She stays very close to the Sanskrit original, deals adroitly with the various textual problems, offers illuminating annotation, and is above all faithful to her readers and their need for a modern, friendly version of the heroes' ascent to heaven (and of the central figure's descent to hell). Doniger has captured the cadences and the intense emotions of epic Sanskrit at a moment of overwhelming drama."

-David Shulman, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

After the War presents a new translation of the final part of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic poem about a devastating fraternal war. In the aftermath of the great war, the surviving heroes find various deaths, ranging from a drunken debacle in which they kill many of their own comrades to suicide through meditation and, finally, magical transportation to both heaven and hell. Wendy Doniger, a distinguished translator of Sanskrit texts, puts the text into clear, flowing, contemporary prose, with a comprehensive but unintrusive critical apparatus.

WENDY DONIGER is the author of over forty books, including translations of Sanskrit texts as well as books about Hindu mythology and cross-cultural mythology, particularly about illusion, animals, gender, and sex.

I've worked on the Mahabharata for many years, but most in- tensely during the last four years of my teaching at the University of Chicago, when I was privileged to teach the second quarter of second year Sanskrit, the heart of the basic three-year sequence, and to read the last books of the Mahabharata with my students. I put this manuscript together while teaching my very last class, and I am particularly indebted to the students in that class, from whom I learned so much: Brigid Boll, Danica Cao, Liam Frisk, Ria Gandhi, Nathan Katkin, Sricharan B. Sheshashai, Justin Smolin, Tapan Srivastava, and Benjamin Yusen. I owe even more to my last few brilliant teaching assistants, Nell Hawley, Itamar Ramot, and Josephine Brill, who tactfully endured my rather cavalier attitude to Sanskrit grammar and encouraged even my most far-fetched interpretations.

A great deal has been written about the meaning of the Mahabharata as a whole, some by me, but I do not aspire to add to it here. Readers will find in Appendix 5: Bibliography for Further Reading a selected list of useful books about the Mahabharata and in Appendix 4 a succinct summary of the parts of the earlier plot that are referenced in the four final books. This Introduction will analyze key episodes in the final books in greater detail and will sketch the early lives of the main characters. It will also discuss some of the central concepts on which the final books depend and attempt to justify the decisions that I made in translating it from the Sanskrit.

I must note in passing that both the South Asian tradition of retelling episodes from the Mahabharata and the European scholarly tradition have largely neglected the final books, perhaps because of their darkness and their unresolved ethical challenges. This neglect is, as I hope the reader will discover, most unjustified, underrating the high emotion, mythological inventiveness, meta- physical complexities, and conflicted characters that animate these books. Moreover, it is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion. I hope this brief introduction will show how important these final books are to the Mahabharata as a whole, how they not only confront many of the paradoxes of the earlier books but also tell a unified and self- bounded story of their own, and how wrong the native and scholarly traditions have been to neglect them.