A dazzling and eloquent reworking of the Mahabharata, one of South Asia's best-loved epics, through nineteen peripheral voices. With daring poetic forms, Karthika Naïr breathes new life into this ancient epic.
Karthika Naïr refracts the epic Mahabharata through the voices of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens as well as abducted princesses, tribal queens, and a gender-shifting god. As peripheral figures and silent catalysts take center stage, we get a glimpse of lives and stories buried beneath the dramas of god and nation, heroics and victory - of the lives obscured by myth and history, all too often interchangeable. Until the Lions is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.
Release date:
November 12, 2019
Publisher:
Archipelago
Print pages:
290
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PAWN TALK: BRASS AND STRING This is Kurukshetra, Son. This is where our kings seek to die – kings, princes, generals, that whole heedless race of highborn war-mongers – for a skyway, swift and direct to heaven. Theirs, you say, their heaven, not ours, it will still be their heaven, as it is their earth, their honour, both already theirs, and with lives so slaked, heaven their only conquest left.
But this is Kurukshetra, this is where things could change, Son. I heard the sages swear: equal will all men be, in hell or heaven, once killed here. Think, if even the pariahs – Mahar and Shanar, Chamar and Chandal, Dhobi, Bhangi, they whose shades taint the land, so the scholars also swear – can attain casteless paradise, such an honour once slain, perhaps our lives too shall stand another chance on so holy a strand
as Kurukshetra, sculpted by Shiva’s own hand, then laid east of Maru, rainless Maru, north of wild Khandava, where Takshaka rules his crafty tribe, south of gentle Turghna yet westerly, not too far from Parin. Dharmakshetra, they call her too, this curl between two sacred rivers – Saraswati and Dhrishtadvati – that traverse the eight known worlds, gleaning virtues – alongside all the silt and loam and rubble – from each one to disperse on the divine hearse
that is Kurukshetra. On these sands, they’d abound: satya, daya, daan, kshama, tapas, suchi …Truth, Largesse, Purity, then – to uncurse generations still to be sown – Mercy and Kindness, Son, oh, and Celibacy, Sacrifice, and some other merits I can never name throng to make this Vishnu’s ground, its godly name his gift to an early, devout Kuru king.
Look, on Kurukshetra, night rises like another sun, a younger, more brilliant one. To the west stands the Pandava camp: Yuddhishtira’s legions face the break of each new dawn, theirs the demand for war to attain peace and justice, to retrieve his old realm, the land he strewed with ease like sand or dice, the subjects he cast away in less than a trice. Crown and honour should be his, our elders persist, noble soul who never lies, king with a single vice: avid, unskilled player.
While Kurukshetra can scarce contain the dark constellation of Duryodhana’s army: his men – a dazzle of fearless glory – suffuse the East, from centre to brim. Good, kind Duryodhana, our Kuru sovereign, ours, Son, like few have ever been. Duryodhana, eldest of the one and hundred mighty Kaurava sons of that purblind king Dhritarashtra. Duryodhana, far-sighted like few rulers ever care to be, reaping not one, nor a few but thirteen harvests of peace, safety, prosperity for all his people, even those of us that survive like vermin on outer rims.
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