ABSTRACT
The royal re-fit the Mahbhrata showcases through the VaiapyanaJanamejaya and Ugraravas-aunaka dialogues is presented as occurring in a world without many katriyas, their bloody culture now (through the gods’ business) in legends; but the royal function survives. This north-western region and capital, traditionally (albeit self-selectedly) the centre of the valued world, could now be a local province. The text’s authorial vision ‘can be seen as providing an early
3 in conceptualising Vaiapyana and Ugraravas’s position with respect to the Bhrata tale, cf. derrida 1996:67-8: ‘the interpretation of the archive … can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it … By incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to it, the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas.’ The implications of this insight for me, as i enter
Brahminic Vaiava ideological grounding for an empire’ (Fitzgerald 1983:625); but one centred elsewhere.
