Waking Prithviraj: the subversive poetics of the past in North Indian historical literature Ghent University
Complementing and challenging a dominant historiographical and socio-political mode of textual analysis, this project offers a first and much-needed literary/aesthetic reappraisal of an important Sanskrit historical epic poem, Jayanaka’s long-neglected Pṛthvīrājavijaya “Prithviraj’s Victory” (1192-3). This epic stands at the beginning of a long and ongoing tradition of heroic and unheroic retellings about the (in)famous North Indian king ...