The Mahabharata: A Celebration of Wonder, not Heroism

In January 2023 the world of Indology lost Alf Hiltebeitel, prolific Mahabharata scholar who hewed new pathways through that thorny thicket to reveal fresh vistas of understanding. Freud’s India explored personal experiences following his father’s death and his own divorce that recalled Freud’s life and Freud’s connection with India through Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose (‘an extraordinary professor who had founded a local psychoanalytic group in Calcutta’—Freud, 1922). Bose sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on Ananta which he kept on his desk. This features as the cover.

Freud’s Mahabharata immediately captures our interest since Freud never mentions the Mahabharata. The cover is a sketch drawn from a portrait of Freud by a Bengali artist Jatindra Kumar Sen commissioned by Dr. Bose which he used as the cover of the first edition of his Bengali work, Swapna (1928). When Hiltebeitel could not find it, I sent him a photograph from the National Library, Kolkata.