Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata

Argument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, discussing the Mahābhārata’s upākhyānas, subtales that branch off from the central storyline and provide vantage points for reflecting on it.
Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.

Vishwa P. Adluri is Adjunct Associate Professor of Religion at Hunter College, New York and the author of numerous articles and essays on the Mahābhārata. His work mainly focuses on the reception of ancient thought—both Greek and Indian—in modernity. Vishwa has a PhD in Philosophy from the New School, New York and a PhD in Indology from Philipps-Universität Marburg.

Joydeep Bagchee is a post-doctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. His current research focuses on the intersection of the textual sciences, philology, textual criticism, and the history of science. Joydeep is co-author, with Vishwa Adluri, of The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism (Anthem Press, 2015).

'This is not just one among numerous books written on the Mahābhārata, but a fresh scholarly look at some controversies about the epic, leading to some definite conclusions.(...) This volume could be seen as the beginning of approaching the Mahābhārata from the perspective of the upākhyāna and “a new way of navigating the epic, using not the so-called heroic epic as our guide but the epic’s own musings about itself and its characters, provided self-reflexively via its narration of its upākhyānas”. (...) With fourteen chapters on a wide range of topics—from the connection of Rāmāyaṇa’s Uttarakāṇda to the Mahābhārata to the depictions of some Mahābhārata’s characters—Argument and Design is a welcome relief from the existing predictable literature on the Mahābhārata, and could be a good starting point for anyone who wants to critically study the epic “as a whole.” '
Swami Narasimhananda, Reading Religion (http://readingreligion.org/books/argument-and-design)