ABSTRACT
Sarala Devi’s lifelong interest in the woman question led her to concentrate on exploring the depiction of women in Sarala Das’s monumental fifteenth-century Odia epic. She believes that women in the modern world have a lot to learn from the lively and vivid portraits of women presented in Sarala Das’s Mahabharata. The women in Sarala Das’s epic, Sarala Devi argues, differ fundamentally from their counterparts in Vyasa’s epic in being endowed with intensely human attributes and not divine qualities. Even when presented as unmistakeably human they are not always presented as likeable and reasonable. Sarala Devi’s work represents an early attempt at applying a sociological analysis to a foundational text. She meticulously maps the social world of fifteenth-century Odisha as depicted in Sarala Das’s Mahabharata and locates women in it. An interesting aspect of her analysis is the way she presents points of contact between the past and the present. The book derives its significance in the evolving Odia critical discourse from its developing a proto-feminist approach to a literary classic.
