Mahabharata Off the Record | Project Showcase@IFA with Srilata Krishnan | February 06, 2025

How does one retell a story heard a thousand times over?

Join us for our next Project Showcase@IFA with Srilata Krishnan, who will share her experience of working on The Mahabharata Off the Record, a project that was a part of the Productions category of our Arts Practice programme. 

Srilata is a poet, writer, translator and academic, and her fascination with the Mahabharata arises not merely from the richness of its stories, but also from their openness to interpretative possibilities and a multitude of retellings – many of which are often at odds with each other. During the course of the project, Srilata wrote about 60 poems exploring the interior lives of the key women characters of the epic, building on the multiple renditions of the mythology available to us, and used revised and altered tales of six women characters—Kunti, Gandhari, Draupadi, Alli, and Hidimbi—to write her poems. She worked with the less authoritative and quicker versions of the Mahabharata, making playful leaps to reimagine and reconstruct the stories of these characters.

Srilata will also be in conversation with poet, translator and non-fiction writer Shobhana Kumar. 

Mahabharata Off the Record
Thursday, February 06, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST onwards

Register on Zoom or join us on Facebook Live

Srilata Krishnan (K Srilata) is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic. Her most recent collection of poems Three Women in a Single-Room House was published by Sahitya Akademi. Her book of poems titled The Mahabharata off the Record is forthcoming from Westland. Her poems have been widely anthologised and featured in collections such as The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Srilata’s novel Table for Four (Penguin, India) was long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize. Srilata is currently Adjunct Professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. 

Shobhana Kumar is a poet, translator and non-fiction writer. Her book of haibun, A Sky Full of Bucket Lists (Red River 2021), won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2021-2022, and the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (HM) 2021, by The Haiku Foundation, USA. She works in the spaces of education and branding, and is founder of Small Differences, an NGO that works with vulnerable communities including elderly homeless, the transgender community and young adolescents. 

This project was made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.