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

This paper considers the nature and status of Nīlakaṇṭha’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 (adhyātma), typically, non-dualist (advaita) core to an epic’s surface form (Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa, Mokṣopāya, Bhārtabhāvadīpa, Bhagavadgītā etc.). Many often fall between the cracks of South Asian genre classification. A few significant features are shared by them: they claim to be about the whole epic, revealing its hidden (gūḍha) import, an import that is a necessarily spiritual and, lastly, typically representative of a non-dualist (advaitic) framework. The paper pays particular attention to the themes and tropes of the Bhāratabhāvadīpa.