Thus Spake Bhisma

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About the Book:

Thus Spake Bhisma is a singular triumph of creative art, with Bhisma Pitamaha as the center of consciousness as he remembers from the vantage-point of his bed arrows on which he lies dying. The story spans several generations and as the pitamaha looks at this panorama of life, he goes on selecting incidents and episodes and intensifying what he presents. This is most certainly not just another 'Mahabharata Retold', but rather represents, as Dr. Sujit Mukherjee remarks in his Preface to the book, "yet another approach to our Great Book to the reading of which there can be no end… And when Bhisma himself tells us how and what happened - though not always why - we have to listen with that much more attention".

The book can be read as the spiritual autobiography of an epic hero who emphatically disavows his heroic role, seeing his whole life as a series of acts of the ego. The demythologizing which Bhisma thus starts with himself goes deeper and touches the very core of the ancient epic, raising many questions pertinent to the tradition itself, and finally turns the narrative into a vision, inducing a startlingly new and heightened awareness of what it is to be a man.

About the Author:

Born in 1932 at singhwara, Darbhanga in Bihar, MURARI MADHU-SUDAN THAKUR was educated at Patna University from where he took his Master's degree in English in 1955, standing first in the university. He taught for nearly a decade at Patna University before going on to teach English at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal, under the Colombo plan. In 1965 he was invited to teach at the Department of Religion at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, where he lectured on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Indian tradition. On return from abroad, he ran a weekly journal from Patna, organized and set up an ashram for community work and retreat at Singhwara, travelling extensively all the while. In 1983, he was asked by Tribhuvan University to take up teaching and joined in September 1983 as Visiting Professor of English at the Central Department of English at Kirtipur in Kathmandu. He has been there ever since except for occasional trips abroad including a trip to Lesbos in Greece to give talks on the Upanishads.

He has translated Tulasidasa's Hanumanbahuka into English (1971) and published a book on Nepal called Nepal A Miscellany (1975).
 

Preface

Pronunciation

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

Appendix

    I Names of characters   II Place names  III Special terms