About this episode

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh discuss their translation of the erotic plays of Sita's husband from the Ramayana, highlighting its literary significance and unique style.

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guests: Amrita Chowdhury, Ujaan Ghosh

Topics covered

• South Asian literature
• translation
• Ramayana
• erotic sentiment
• poetry
• Odia literature

Keywords

• Baidehisha Bilasa
• translation
• Upendra Bhanja
• Odia poetry
• erotic literature
• Ramayana

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Wide Open Window Books

Books & works: Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband

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