Dear Colleagues,

 

Please excuse me for mentioning a new publication to which I have contributed. A two-panel gathering was held in October 2010 at the 39th Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, WI that was conceived to coincide with the roughly half a century since the completion of the Pune Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. Seven of the papers from that conference have been updated and comprise, along with an Introduction, the latest issue of the Journal of Vaishnava Studies 19,2 (2011) under the overall heading "Mahabharata Conference." The contents are:

 

Vishwa P. Adluri, Introduction: The Critical Edition and Its Critics, A Retrospective on Mahabharata Scholarship

 

T. P. Mahadevan, The Three Rails of the Mahabharata Text Tradition

 

Christopher Austin, Evaluating the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata: Inferential Mileage and the Apparatus Materials

 

Alf Hitebeitel, On Sukthankar's 'S" and Some Shortsighted Assessments and Uses of the Pune Critical Edition (CE)

 

Joydeep Bagchee, Inversion, Krsnafication, Brahmanization: The Explanatory Force of Some Extraordinary Figures of Speech

 

Vishwa P. Adluri, Frame Narratives and Forked Beginnings: Or, How to Read the Adiparvan

 

Wendy J. Phillips-Rodriguez, The Critical Edition: The End of Mahabharata Textual Scholarship?

 

Simon Brodbeck, Analytic and Synthetic Approaches in the Light of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata and Harivamsa

 

Alf Hiltebeitel

Department of Rreligoin

George Washington University