Dear All

Any responses to the question below – about whether any parts of the Mahābhārata imply a rereading or reevaluation of the Hidimbi/Hidimbā story – would be gratefully received.  It is from a Professor in the English department at Ashoka: Jonathan Gil Harris.

"I am writing a book on Indian “masala” adaptations of Shakespeare, and I am currently puzzling through the ways in which Shakespeare’s use of the device of the play-within-a-play — particularly in The Taming of the Shrew — resonates for many Indian readers with the Mahabharata’s nesting of stories-within-stories.  I am particularly interested in how this device allows readers to shift perspective on a tale, and reread (or doubly read) a tale-within-a-tale or its framing tale.  I am focusing for now on the episode in the Mahabharata (9th sub-parva of the Adi Parva) where Bhima meets and marries the rakshasa forest-dweller Hidimbi, a witch or “chudail” in modern Hindi; her magic passes on to their son Ghatotkacha, who fights for the Pandavas.  Reading the story at face-value, it might be interpreted simply as an illustration of how a potentially dangerous feminine threat is defused and how the magical powers associated with it are patriarchally appropriated.  But how might the Mahabharata’s readers RE-read the story in light of the subsequent stories-within-stories?  Is there anything else in the Mahabharata that allows us to retrospectively re-interpret Hidimbi, her dangerous magical powers, and Bhima’s/the Pandavas’ appropriation of these?  (I’m thinking here of parallels with the tale of Medea in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where an interpretive metamorphosis is enabled by its tales-within-tales — she is first presented as a dangerous, murderous black witch who submits in love to Jason, but she is subsequently seen more sympathetically as a woman wronged by a greedy man.)"

-- 

Alex Watson

Professor of Indian Philosophy

Ashoka University

https://ashokauniversity.academia.edu/AlexWatson

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