Irawati Karve has done a brilliant job of analyzing several characters from the famed Indian mythological epic, Mahabharata in Yuganta: The End of an Epoch. My own knowledge of the epic comes not from having read it, but from hearing stories told by elders, reading Amar Chitra Katha comics, seeing the infamous TV serial, Mahabharata, and studying abridged versions of stories as part of my school curriculum. Karve’s essays on Mahabharata, its characters, and the way of life in that era(yuga), a scholarly and critical analysis with anthropological foundation, were beyond interesting to me – they were intriguing and thought provoking. This book deserves a good forward by someone scholarly to set the context properly for its readers.

The essay on Draupadi makes a sharp contrast between her and Sita, the heroine in Ramayana. The caste system in Hinduism is known to many. Karve does an interesting job of highlighting the sub-systems that exist amongst kshatriyas in the form of sutas. Karve points out several controversial aspects in Hinduism in her essays: that Hinduism plunged headlong in the bhakti way of deifying Gods only after the end of the Mahabharata era/yuga; as did the concept of going for war and conquest for land grabbing instead of the pride of winning. I found myself agreeing with her analysis of several key characters, including Karna, Gandhari, Bhishma, Kunti, Krishna and the Pandavas. She interprets the relationship between Arjuna and Krishna as one of friendship, and that Krishna gets deified as a God much later. In Mahabharata, Krishna is but a shrewd politician, and a mortal human. Missing in the collected essays are two key characters from the epic – that of Duryodhana and Shakuni.