A study of the ritual reenactment of part of the Mahabharata epic as performed in the Tontaimantalam region of Tamil-speaking southern India. Frasca (religion, U. of California, Davis) explores the 2000-year history, the troupes, the literary corpus, performance techniques, and the significance to the place of performance. Includes a glossary without pronunciation, photographs, diagrams, and maps. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A unique dramatization of India's greatest epic poem, fifteen times longer than the Bible, The Mahabharata has played to enthralled audiences throughout Europe, the Far East and America. Regarded as the culmination of Peter Brook's extraordinary research into the possibilities of theatre, the production has been hailed as the 'theatrical event of this century' (Sunday Times). British audiences encountered The Mahabharata, on stage and television, in the late eighties. This volume contains the complete script of Carriere's adaptation in Peter Brook's translation, with introductions by each of them.
The internationally renowned team of Peter Brook, Marie-Helene Estienne and Jean-Claude Carriere together revisit the great Indian epic The Mahabharata 30 years after Brook's legendary production took world theatre by storm.Destruction never approaches weapon in hand. It comes slyly, on tiptoe, making you see bad in good and good in bad.The devastation of war is tearing the Bharata family apart. The new king must unravel a mystery: how can he live with himself in the face of the devastation and massacres that he has caused?An immense canvas in miniature, this central section of the ancient text is timeless and contemporary, asking how we can find inner peace in a world riven with conflict.
In Until the Lions, Karthika Nair retells the Mahabharata through multiple voices. Her poems capture the epic through the lenses of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens but also abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god. As peripheral figures and silent catalysts take centre stage, we get a glimpse of lives and stories buried beneath the edifices of god and nation, heroes and victory; a glimpse of the price paid for myth and history--all too often interchangeable.
The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the first volume in what will ultimately become a multi volume edition encompassing all eighteen books.
Many Mahābhāratas is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mahābhārata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mahābhārata has been not to consume it but to create it anew. The many Mahābhāratas of this book come from the first century to the twenty-first. They are composed in nine different languages—Apabhramsha, Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. Early chapters illuminate themes of retelling within the Sanskrit Mahābhārata itself, demonstrating that the story's propensity for regeneration emerges from within. The majority of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Sanskrit epic. Readers dive into classical dramas, premodern vernacular poems, regional performance traditions, commentaries, graphic novels, political essays, novels, and contemporary theater productions—all of them Mahābhāratas. Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mahābhārata's long life in South Asia, Many Mahābhāratas constitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mahābhārata studies.
A comprehensive and authoritative single-volume reference work on the theatre arts of Asia-Oceania. Nine expert scholars provide entries on performance in twenty countries from Pakistan in the west, through India and Southeast Asia to China, Japan and Korea in the east. An introductory pan-Asian essay explores basic themes - they include ritual, dance, puppetry, training, performance and masks. The national entries concentrate on the historical development of theatre in each country, followed by entries on the major theatre forms, and articles on playwrights, actors and directors. The entries are accompanied by rare photographs and helpful reading lists.
Saiva Philosophy is an outgrowth of the religion characterized by the worship of the phallic form of God siva. Saivasm as a religion has persisted since the pre-historic time of the archaeological finds of Harappa and Mohenjodaro. It has a continuous history of at least five thousand years. It is a living faith praciced all over India. AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF SAIVA PHILOSOPHY first appeared as part of Volume III of Bhaskari in 1954 in the Princess of Wales Saraswati Bhavan Texts Series. The work is now reprinted as an independent volume to meet an increasing demand of the interested readers and scholars.
Peter Brook is one of the most influential directors of our time, whose productions are a byword for imagination, energy and innovation. He was born into a Russian émigré family in London and, after a turbulent time at Oxford University, he veered between directing West End comedy, new work from abroad and opera at Covent Garden. By the 1960s he was moving towards greater experimentation, with controversial works like The Marat/Sade, films like Lord of the Flies, and landmark stagings of Shakespeare of which the most famous was the 'white box' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1970, at the height of his success, he moved to Paris and immediately set off with a group of actors to Persia, Africa, Mexico and the USA in an attempt to discover a universal language of theatre. Since then, Brook has continued pushing at the boundaries of theatre and film. In this first authoritative biography, arising out of an association and friendship with Brook of more than forty years, Michael Kustow tells the revealing story of a man whose life has been a never-ending quest for meaning.
