Sarala Mahabharata in the colonial Odia public sphere

ABSTRACT The paper studies how Sarala Dasa’s Mahabharata was received in the colonial Odia public sphere in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It received the attention of early antiquarian scholars like Rajendralal Mitra who used the composition as a source to study Odisha’s historical past. The antiquarian exercise created the discursive environment in which the first popular print editions arrived in the market. Despite its popularity, the educated public initially dismissed Sarala’s Mahabharata as a work of little merit in comparison to the Sanskrit Mahabharata. However, the perception soon changed, and it began to receive the attention of scholars like Mrutyunjaya Rath and Gopinath Nandasharma who conducted the first serious antiquarian-philological studies of the epic in Odia. This essay traces the development of Odia language scholarship on Sarala Mahabharata, and its relationship with the popular Odia nationalist self-assertion. It concludes by tracing the contours of a debate on the temporal and spatial location of Sarala which took place immediately after independence and the subsequent publication of its definitive edition.