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Kṛṣṇa Goes to War: Translating The Bhāgavata’s Battle Scenes

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Abstract

This paper examines the depiction of battle scenes in a singular dated and undispersed illustrated manuscript of the Latter Half of the Tenth Book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (1688), inscribed with an action-oriented Brajbhāṣā text. While certain conventions and compositional devices are consistently used throughout the manuscript to evoke the drama and chaos of warfare, each battle is nevertheless individualized with the narrative unfolding along a distinctive trajectory. The broader goal is to understand how the narrative is transformed as it is translated.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Pika Ghosh for her close reading of many drafts of this article and for her invaluable suggestions and comments and to Monika Horstmann for reviewing my translations.

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Correspondence to Neeraja Poddar.

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Poddar, N. Kṛṣṇa Goes to War: Translating The Bhāgavata’s Battle Scenes. Hindu Studies 22, 105–122 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-018-9224-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-018-9224-6

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