Devy

It is an interesting fact of history that the concept of civilization emerged in northwestern Europe in the same decades of 1750s and 1760s during which the foundations of the colonial regime were laid in India after the East India Company’s successive victories in the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) (Febvre, 1998). While initially emerging as a concept to refer to and theorize the emergent modes of civility and urban sociability of the post-feudal bourgeois world in Europe, civilization soon came to be used…

No other text has survived the many historical vicissitudes of Indian civilization as the Mahabharata has done. The epic story has overshadowed all other forms of human expression, and remained a product of extraordinary cultural significance. In a nutshell, it is an unending story of five generations culminating in a war fought over 18 days. With dramatic twists and mythical turns in the narrative, the epic has never ceased to excite its audiences and viewers. And yet, it is considered inauspicious to keep the text at…