A canonical great poem, or mahākāvya, of the Sanskrit canon, depicting a well-known episode from the Mahābhārata.
Magha’s The Killing of Shishupala, written in the seventh century, is a celebrated example of the Sanskrit genre known as mahākāvya, or great poem. This adaptation from the epic Mahābhārata tells the story of Shishupala, who disrupts Yudhishthira’s coronation by refusing to honor Krishna, the king’s principal ally and a manifestation of divinity. When Shishupala challenges Krishna to combat, he is immediately beheaded.
Magha, who was likely a court poet in western India, draws on the rich stylistic resources of Sanskrit poetry to imbue his work with unparalleled sophistication. He expands the narrative’s cosmic implications through elaborate depictions of the natural world and intense erotic sensuality, mixing myth and classical erudition with scenes of political debate and battlefield slaughter. Krishna is variously portrayed as refined prince, formidable warrior, and incarnation of the god Vishnu protecting the world from demonic threat.
With this translation of The Killing of Shishupala, presented alongside the original text in the Devanagari script, English readers for the first time gain access to a masterwork that has dazzled Indian audiences for a thousand years.
The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies.
Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. Using William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage.
Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations.
Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.
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