In the stories where the Mahabharata speaks of life, women occupy a central place. In living what life brings to them, the women of the Mahabharata show, that the truth in which one must live, is however, not a simple thing: nor can there be any one absolute of statement about it. Each one of them, of her own way, is a teacher to mankind as to what truth and goodness in their many dimensions are. The twelve women of the Mahabharata whose life stories make up this book, range for Shakuntala, savitri and Damayanti who are known only in sketches; from Sulabha, Suvarchala, Uttara Disha, Madhavi and Kapoti who are hardly known, and finally to Draupadi, known widely but frozen in popular culture and writing in two or three standard cliched images. The women of the Mahabharata are incarnate in the women of today. To tread the stories of their relation-ships is to read the stories of our relationships. They demand from the men of today the same reflection on their perception, attitudes, and pretensions too, as they did from the men in their lives, and equally often from other men full of pretensions, even if they were kings and sages. Badrinath’s ability to combine respect and love and to write with impressive scholarship and grace will unforgettably transform our experience of reading the Mahabharata.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chaturvedi Badrinath
Chaturvedi Badrinath was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. A philosopher, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, 1957-89, and served in Tamil Nadu for thirty-one years (1958-89). He was a Homi Bhabha Fellow from 1971 to 1973. As a Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University, 1971, he gave a series of four seminars on Dharma and its application to modern times. Invited by a Swiss foundation, Inter-Cultural Cooperation, he spent a year in Europe in 1985-86. In 1985 he was a main speaker at the European Forum, Alpbach, Austria, and at a conference of scientists at Cortona, Italy. From 1989 onwards, for four years, the Times of India published his articles on Dharma and human freedom every fortnight. He was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, during1990-92. He was one of the two main speakers at Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace conference, 1994, Seoul, South Korea. In 1999, at Weimar, he gave a talk on Goethe and the Indian Philosophy of Nature; and contributed to an inter-religious conference at Jerusalem with the Dalai Lama. He was one of the two main speakers at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation symposium on 'civilizational dialogue', Tokyo, 2002. Chaturvedi Badrinath's other published books are Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-one Essays (1993), Introduction to the Kama Sutra (1999), Finding Jesus in Dharma: Christianity in India (2000), and "The Mahabharata”An Inquiry into the Human Condition (2006). He lives in Pondicherry.
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