Jaḍa Bharata Goes to Dubrovnik

This last August I attended the once-every-three-years Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas (DICSEP—see https://dicsep.org for the list of presentations). This was the fourth time I’ve attended and presented in this venue, and this time my topic was the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s story of King Bharata’s adventures through three lives, titled “The Rhetoric of Reversals: Bharata’s Forest Wisdom in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.” In some ways this was a follow-up to a presentation I gave at the same conference back in 2008, focusing on rhetorical aspects of a passage in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, “Precept, Practice, and Persuasion: Truth and Heresy in the Viṣṇupurāṇa.” After I presented this latter work (sketching some of the rhetorical complexities of a passage narrating how nāstika—non-Vedic—traditions arose by Viṣṇu’s tricks), Prof. Greg Bailey from Australia, a specialist in Puranic studies, encouraged me to continue what he said was an original approach to the study of the Purāṇas. Only (!) 18 years later came my follow-up (which I have yet to write up for publication). Why pay attention to rhetorical aspects of the Purāṇas? Rhetoric is, broadly speaking, the study of how language and speech persuades. The Purāṇas have endured through centuries largely because of their persuasive force, and just how they accomplish this can be quite fascinating.