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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Bihani Sarkar, "Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
Description: It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (I. B. Tauris, 2021), this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises - much of them translated for the first time into English - to provide a complete history of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries.Looking at...