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New Books in Indian ReligionsInterviews with Scholars of Indian Religions about their New Books Author: Marshall Poe
Interviews with Scholars of Indian Religions with their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions Language: en Genres: Hinduism, Religion & Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)
Thursday, 4 June, 2026
Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
