Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)

About this episode

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh discuss their translation of the erotic plays of Sita's husband from a long-inaccessible South Asian literary masterpiece.

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/language

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guests: Amrita Chowdhury, Ujaan Ghosh

Topics covered

• South Asian literature
• translation
• erotic sentiment
• Ramayana
• poetry
• cultural history

Keywords

• Baidehisha Bilasa
• translation
• Odia literature
• Upendra Bhanja
• shringara
• Rama
• Sita
• poetic structure
• 17th century

Mentioned in this episode

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

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