Sarala’ Nakula almost always remained in shadow, hardly ever came into lime light. He was noble and tried to live a life of virtue, was an accomplished warrior, although in the Kurukshetra War he didn’t do anything that was remarkable and memorable. He once held the earth on the tip of his spear so that …
WHAT DID YOU NOT DO TO THE KAURAVAS, MOTHER
The Great War fought on the battlefields of Kurukshetra had ended. But the victory was only partial because there were hearts to be won, tears to be wiped, back in Hastinapura. Reconciliation with the distraught Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, the old parents who had lost all their sons, was uppermost in the mind of Yudhisthira. Well, …
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ON KUNTI
This is a humble response to a comment I had received sometime back. The commentator who was kind enough to read the post on Kunti and Gandhari had expressed her strong displeasure on the way Kunti was depicted there. In that story Kunti and Gandhari quarreled and the commentator observed that Kunti was not one …
SARALA DASA AND JAGANNATH DASA ON A CERTAIN MORAL ISSUE CONCERNING KRISHNA
Jagannath Dasa wrote Bhagavatain Odia in the sixteenth century, about eighty years after Sarala Mahabharata was composed. Jagannath Dasa had to suffer for writing the most, or one of the two most, sacred Sanskrit texts in Odia language. I do not know when it got general acceptance in Odisha, but for a long time it …
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BABANA BHUTA
At a recent seminar on unwritten languages and oral myths, in a certain context, I referred to a bhuta (roughly, ghost) in Sarala Mahabharata, called Babana bhuta. Some were curious and wanted me to tell them some more about it. For them a bhuta, a character in grandmother tales, was an odd presence in a …
WHAT HAPPENED TO GANDIVA IN SARALA MAHABHARATA
Is what a friend wanted to know.As the Pandavas were climbing up the cold Himalayas to submit themselves to death, they had no weapons with them. They had discarded them. Except Arjuna, who had his divine bow, Gandiva, with him. It is not that he wanted it for his or his brother’s protection in the …
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EKALAVYA, KIRATASENA AND JARA: THE STORY OF THREE FOREST DWELLERS
Put these three unconnected stories in Sarala Mahabharatatogether and you see a connection. Together these tell us the moving story of the course of the relationship between the forest dwellers and the urban population. The two communities had their own distinct cultures, and the urban population looked down upon the forest dwellers as uncivilized and …
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KRISHNA AND THE WORLD HE CHOSE TO LIVE IN
In this post I am not answering any questions about Krishna, although there are questions which I have to answer some day, but am trying to look at him from a certain perspective. He arrived in the world as its protector, but I have sometimes wondered, whereas his being the protector is fine, at the …
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MORE ON KARNA AND ARJUNA
Commenting on the post “Why did Karna Want to Kill Arjuna?”, Mr. Confusedclarity observes that friendship with Duryodhana alone couldn’t be a strong enough motive for Karna to be so determined to kill his brother Arjuna. What he says is eminently reasonable, but Sarala’s narrative seems to suggest that for Karna, friendship was indeed an …
ON THE INVOCATION IN SARALA MAHABHARATA
Krushna Singh, the king of a small kingdom in what is today’s Southern Odisha, retold Vyasa’s Mahabharata in Odia, which is popularly known as “Krushna Singh Mahabharata”, more than two centuries after Sarala had composed his magnum opus. Noting that the great Sarala had deviated considerably from the classical narrative, he wanted to give the …
Sarala Mahabharata 