What is it about?

The Jaiminīya Āśvamedhikaparvan (Jaimini's Book of the Horse Sacrifice) is a ca. 12th century text that is fashioned as a sequal to the Mahabharata epic. This article analyzes the episode of king Mayūradhvaja from this text, and suggests that we see the appearance of violence – and self-directed violence in particular – as a feature of Bhakti devotionalism in the Vaishnava world from around this time. This is a motif running through several episodes in this text. We argue that this happens because various religious groups closely follow, compete, and borrow from each other’s texts and practices. This also marks a point of inflection in the emotional makeup of Bhakti.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Our article tracks the various emotional valencies of violence in the literary and religious spheres of medieval India. This is important not only for Vaishnava studies, but for scholars interested in this other religious groups from this period as well. Our analysis includes a comparison of the Sanskrit text with a 16th century Kannada rendition - Lakśmīśa's Jaiminibhārata. We make observations on what is expanded or elided from the source text, and try to reflect on why these changes occurred, perhaps as a function of Lakśmīśa's time and place. We also spotlight the literary importance of this text - Jaimini's Book, which was rapidly translated into various languages, genres and media over the next centuries.

Perspectives

I enjoyed reading the Sanskrit and Kannada source texts. The latter, is an especially elegant text. The bizarre stories and the strategies for 'epicizing' and 'Vedicizing' the text are interesting. There is much to be done with this cluster of texts, and I hope our article triggers some studies into Jaimini's Book.

Naresh Keerthi
Ashoka University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Split in bhakti, United in bhakti, Cracow Indological Studies, July 2024, Ksiegarnia Akademicka Sp. z.o.o.,
DOI: 10.12797/cis.26.2024.02.02.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page