On Platial Imagination in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Abstract

This paper argues that the Mahābhārata is a self-conscious intervention in the religious imagination of early South Asia. It further suggest that the text seeks to constitute itself as the authoritative ‘reflective’ or ‘theoretical’ resource in early South Asian religious discourse and that this strategy is intimately related to antecedent Vedic forms of knowledge and practice. The paper shows how, by imagining significant places, the Mahābhārata naturalised a wide range of religious practices and ideologies that were distinctly non- or post-Vedic whilst establishing the capacity to legitimate or transform these new practices in Vedic terms and often by Vedic means.