UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how regional religious traditions in premodern South Asia transformed the Mahābhārata, an epic about a catastrophic war between two sets of royal cousins, into a narrative of bhakti or “devotion.” The two texts at the heart of this project are Villiputtūrār’s fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahābhārat. While composed more than two hundred years apart in distinctly different regional South Asian languages, these retellings share a striking similarity. They both revolve around Krishna, a Hindu deity who became central to flourishing Tamil and Bhasha bhakti traditions. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān each reframe the Mahābhārata as a bhakti narrative poem focused on Krishna.

“Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata” makes two broad contributions to the study of South Asian religions. First, this dissertation offers a comparative study of bhakti poems in two languages from opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent. Despite the plethora of scholarship on bhakti literature, South Asian bhakti traditions have largely been examined separately in their own regional contexts. In this study of Villiputtūrār’s Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, I show how bhakti functions as a shared literary mode in these retellings while also paying careful attention to their distinct regional differences. Second, this project challenges an established position in South Asian Studies that relegates devotional literature and courtly literature to mutually exclusive worlds. The Pāratam and the Mahābhārat have been labeled as courtly texts based on patronage claims in each poem. Pushing back against the court/temple divide in contemporary scholarship, I analyze the devotional contexts of these Mahābhāratas and their intersections with the courtly. This dissertation reveals that the poems of Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān were part of a pan-South Asian development in which courtly and devotional literary cultures were closely linked.