What is an epic about?: Nīlakaṇṭha’s Bhāratabhāvadīpa and the Meta-Epic as Mode of Writing and Reflection

This paper considers the status of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara’s Mahābhārata commentary, Bhāratabhāvadīpa (‘Illuminating the Inner Meaning of the Mahābhārata’), as a ‘meta-epic’, following Lena Linne’s articulation of the meta-epic genre as commenting upon the nature of an epic, a ‘medium’ or ‘locus’ of meta-generic reflection. Can such a framework be brought to bear upon attempts to comment holistically on the Sanskrit epic? A variety of works have alleged a meta-narrative of a deeper spiritual, typically (if not exclusively), non-dualist (advaita) core to an epic’s surface form (Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa, Mokṣopāya, Bhārtabhāvadīpa,  the Gītā genre). Many often fall between the cracks of South Asian genre classification. A few significant features seem shared by them: they claim to be about the whole epic, revealing its hidden (gūḍha/rahasya) import, one that is necessarily spiritual (ādhyātmika) and often representative of a non-dualist (advaitic) framework. The following questions are addressed: What are the means and motivations of trying to read Mahābhārata as a mokṣaśāstra? How does this tally with the epic’s own self-understanding and purpose, given its rhetoric of despair and finitude? And what may be the stakes of incorporating an epic into a non-dualist canon?