ZUZANA ŠPICOVÁ
Charles University, Prague zuzana.spicova@gmail.com
VADHA AS A GENRE IN THE WAR BOOKS OF THE MAHĀBHĀRATA
The Mahābhārata is a multi-genre text that contains various genres and sub-genres. Recognising a genre serves a prominent communicative function between the author(s) and the reader(s), as well as between the narrator(s) and the narratee(s), and profoundly influences how audiences perceive the story. This paper examines the typical schemata of the vadha genre—namely the narratives dealing with the killing of a prominent hero—in the War Books: the compulsory events and their sequence, the narrative strategies employed in it, including poetic imagery, and the expected and actual responses, both of the characters inside the fictional world of the Mahābhārata, and of the various audiences. It argues that the vadha narratives follow a recognisable structural pattern that is systematically reshaped to produce specific aesthetic and emotional effects. The paper thus establishes general rules of the genre, and then deals with concrete examples of it (e.g. Abhimanyu, Bhīṣma, Droṇa, Karṇa) to observe in which cases variation occur in the genre, which textual phenomena are used to produce these variations, and what effects they have. Using the tools of rhetorical narratology, this paper aims to propose a more nuanced, genre-based reading of different portions of the text, thereby demonstrating how genre conventions actively shape narrative meaning and audience engagement in the Mahābhārata.