Tales from Mahābhārata, the first volume of the Love Tales Trilogy, authored by Dr. Tirthendu Ganguly (Tirtha) and published by BluOne Ink, brings together fifty interconnected stories drawn from the expansive narrative universe of the Mahābhārata. At the heart of each story stands a female protagonist, reimagined variously as a lover, thinker, aspirant, wife, queen, rebel, or seeker.
The collection moves beyond conventional notions of romance. Instead, it examines love through the prisms of intellectual companionship, moral conflict, spiritual longing, political alliance, sacrifice, and self-realization. Grounded in classical sources yet shaped through original fictional retellings, the stories restore women to the centre of narratives in which their voices, choices, desires, and dilemmas have often remained obscured by the epic’s brevity.
Over eight years of research and writing, Tirtha has sought to build a bridge between the wisdom of the ancient world and the sensibilities of the contemporary reader. The result is a layered retelling that revisits familiar epic figures while inviting readers to see their emotional and intellectual lives from a fresh perspective.
In an exclusive conversation with The Interview World, Tirtha discusses what prompted him to explore the Mahābhārata through the love stories of its female protagonists and place their experiences at the centre of the narrative. He explains how contemporary social dynamics inform his retelling of these stories and why he deliberately moves beyond simplistic binaries of good and evil when portraying women.
He also examines the intimate relationship between women and structures of power, showing how private relationships often intersect with, and are shaped by, the political and social worlds of those who wield authority. Finally, he reflects on the enduring lessons the book offers younger readers and on the ways in which an ancient epic can speak to contemporary questions of love, agency, identity, and choice.
Here are the key insights from his compelling conversation.
Q: You have spent eight years researching and writing Tales from Mahābhārata. What initially led you to explore the epic through the seemingly unconventional lens of love, and how did that central idea evolve during those eight years?
A: I have always been drawn to classical literature, particularly the great epics of the Greek, Roman, and Hindu traditions. Yet my sustained engagement with the Tales from Mahābhārata began only in 2017, when I undertook the formidable task of reading its vast corpus of nearly 100,000 ślokas under the guidance of my father, a Sanskrit scholar.
The first spark, however, came from Sri Aurobindo’s Sāvitrī. A fragment of the epic was prescribed in my master’s syllabus, but I became so absorbed in it that I soon immersed myself in the complete work. I was fascinated by how Sri Aurobindo took the brief episode of Sāvitrī from the Mahābhārata and transformed it into a meditative epic of forty-eight cantos, rich in philosophical depth and poetic splendour. That transformation stirred my curiosity and led me back to the original epic.
I approached the Mahābhārata expecting philosophy, warfare, duty, and politics. Instead, I encountered something far more expansive: countless stories of love and longing, populated by women who desired and waited, loved and lost, consummated and sacrificed. Inevitably, I found myself returning to these women, and to the emotional worlds their stories revealed.
Q: All fifty stories are titled after their female protagonists. What motivated you to place these women at the centre of the narrative, and what did you discover about the Mahābhārata when you began reading its world primarily through their experiences?
A: Well, women are fascinating by nature, aren’t they? But why, then, female protagonists? When we think of epic protagonists, we instinctively summon the great male heroes: Achilles and Arjuna, Agamemnon and Yudhiṣṭhira, Ajax and Bhīma, Hector and Karṇa, Ulysses and Rāma, Aeneas and Abhimanyu. Yet beyond these celebrated warriors lies another, equally compelling world, the world of women.
The Greek and Roman epics, however, offer relatively few sustained portraits of women as protagonists. The Mahābhārata stands apart. Perhaps its vast narrative architecture, with hundreds of intricate plots and subplots, creates the space to explore women, their lives, their agency, their relationships, and the affairs of the household alongside the great political and martial conflicts.
Both Tales from Mahābhārata: Stories of Love, Passion, and Becoming and Tales from Mahābhārata: Stories of Love, Loss, and Destiny function as sieves, filtering these intimate stories from the epic’s immense narrative expanse. So, when we shift the “narrative gaze” from men to women, we do more than introduce a different set of protagonists. We enter the epic’s interior world. We encounter emotions, relationships, choices, and forms of agency that often remain obscured when the epic is viewed primarily through the battlefield. In doing so, we uncover an entire dimension of the Mahābhārata that ordinary readings can easily overlook.
Q: Several of your stories appear to challenge contemporary assumptions about women in ancient Indian society: for example, Suvarcalā’s intellectual svayaṁvara, Sāvitrī’s agency in choosing a husband, and Hiḍimbī’s relationship with Bhīma. How did you distinguish between recovering possibilities present in the classical tradition and projecting modern ideas onto it?
A: Yes. Many of these stories challenge conventional assumptions about contemporary society. Suvarcalā’s intellectual svayaṁvara, for instance, highlights not only women’s right to education but also their capacity to engage in profound theological inquiry. Likewise, Sāvitrī’s decision to choose her own husband affirms the importance of female will and consent. More significantly, it portrays a woman exercising agency in determining her own life: an idea that gained wider recognition in the Western world only much later. Similarly, Bhīma, a powerful, fair-complexioned prince, falls in love with Hiḍimbī, a dark-skinned, chubby woman. Their relationship challenges our modern obsession with fair skin and narrowly defined beauty. These narratives, therefore, invite a provocative question: how different are we from them in our ideas of humanity and social liberalism?
Q: The women in these stories are deliberately neither idealized as goddesses nor demonized as villains. How important was psychological complexity to your project, and were there particular female characters who surprised you as you developed their inner worlds?
A: This is something I frequently encounter whenever people discuss women, whether in the present or the past. They reduce women to binaries: goddesses or doormats, as Picasso famously put it; virtuous ladies or vicious witches; shy virgins or bawdy sluts. But are women really so easily divided? Surely, their lives, choices, desires, and contradictions reveal far greater complexity. Tales from Mahābhārata embraces that complexity. It offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of women in all their varied colours and dimensions. Therefore, I cannot cherry-pick one or two female characters. Each embodies a distinct self, carries a unique voice, and unfolds a story entirely her own.
Q: Your stories frequently connect intimate relationships with larger structures of power: royalty, politics, social hierarchy, asceticism and warfare. Was your intention to show that what we call ‘private’ love in the epic is often inseparable from its political and civilizational consequences?
A: Love, as a private bond between two souls born purely of affection, should have been the norm. Yet history, and the present, tell us otherwise. Love almost invariably intersects with political structures and social dynamics. After all, it does not bloom in thin air; it takes root in the soil of society and draws sustenance from its waters. Consequently, it inevitably encounters the forces that shape our world. At times, the politics of love remain confined to the lovers themselves; at others, they engulf and endanger entire societies. For example, the legendary romance between Helena and Paris.
Q: Mythological retellings are experiencing renewed interest among Indian readers, particularly younger audiences. What do you hope a young reader takes away from Tales from Mahābhārata, not simply about the epic itself, but about love, choice, duty, identity and the complexity of human relationships?
A: Yes, mythological retellings are certainly in vogue today. Yet I have never written to follow a trend, something I consciously resist in every sphere of my life. Therefore, Tales from Mahābhārata is not another exercise in pop mythology. I neither dilute the epic’s classical gravity nor present its stories as distant historical anecdotes. Instead, I bring a measured touch of modernity to these timeless narratives, teasing their familiar contours without compromising the sanctity and discipline of the classical tradition.
Ultimately, I hope young readers take away a simple but profound idea from both books: love and human relationships are neither puzzles to solve nor problems to fix. They are experiences to inhabit, accept, and cherish, even when they fall short of what we desire. If a young reader encounters Tales from Mahābhārata, I want the book to affirm that they are already on the right path. After all, love is not a subject that self-help manuals can teach or nonfiction can adequately explain; it must be lived.
