ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the fault lines of gender, sexuality and desire within the ambit of statecraft, networks of power and patriarchal order. It localises the modern retellings of the epics amidst the upsurge in the popularity of myths in the current Indian publishing market/cinematic/televised terrain. The chapter reads the Mahabharata as an illustration of mythopoeic epic imagination, which is at once religious, sacred, a politico-social document, and an itihaasa in contravention to Western notions of history. The stories and myths of the Mahabharata recited in homes and public spaces generations after generations have led the form of this colossal epic to remain fluid and “open to continuous additions and accretions, empowering the epic with an unusual capacity to cast and recast moral values and mores”. Simultaneously, the vulnerable nature of masculinity, the ideal that animates the world of the Mahabharata, is also made apparent.
