Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahabharata(AAR Religions in Translation)

This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahabharata Chapter One: The Implicit Literary Theory of the Mahabharata Chapter Two: Dharma and Rupture in the Game of Dice Chapter Three: The Eyesight of Insight: Dhrtarastra and Moral Blindness Chapter Four: Time that Ripens and Rots All Creatures Chapter Five: Heaven's Riddles or the Hell Trick: Theodicy and Narrative Strategies Conclusion: Dharma and Suffering Appendix: Glossary of Characters

About the Author :
Before joining the Religion Department at Boston University in 2010, Emily Hudson taught at Harvard University as a lecturer in the history and literature program. Situating herself methodologically at the crossroads of religion and literature, the history of religions, and religious ethics, Hudson's teaching and research interests focus on South Asian literature and literary theory and comparative religious ethics.

Review :
"Hudson differentiates her study [of dharma in the epic the Mahabharata] from previous works by examining the epic as a literary text, arguing that the dharma operates via 'narrative strategies' that convey ethical meaning... By combining reader-response and Sanskrit literary theory with narrative ethics, she is able to demonstrate the contentious relationship between suffering and dharma as experience by the characters in the Mahabharata and the impact it produces on its audience... Highly recommended." --CHOICE "Hudson s text is doing some 'disorienting' work of its own by opening up this space and allowing for the above reflections to take shape. It is work that is needed and welcome."--Journal of Religion