Myths and modernity

The only complaint one has of this book is that it is so slim

At a poetry reading in New Delhi last winter, Mani Rao read out her interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, translated by her into English. Instead of the soporific sing-song tune most of us are familiar with, she exposed the inter-textual tension in the poem that is less about performing one’s duty and more about a war-mongering god. She broke down the easy tune of the couplets in which the poem is written into something fraught with war cries and the premonition of death. In the volume under review, Rao turns her scalpel-sharp language to myths from a different nation —