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Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata retells the Sanskrit epic through nineteen voices pushed to its edges: soldiers, outcast warriors, handmaidens, abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god. Rather than offer a neutral summary, the poetry collection asks what changes when people usually left in the background speak for themselves.
What is Until the Lions?
Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata is a poetry collection and retelling by Karthika Naïr. Penguin Random House describes it as a poetic reworking of the epic through nineteen peripheral voices, including nameless soldiers, outcast warriors, handmaidens, abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god. The focus is not to replace the familiar story with a single alternative account, but to make room for lives that its most familiar tellings leave obscure. Penguin Random House’s listing identifies the Archipelago Books paperback and ebook as published November 12, 2019; the paperback is 290 pages, ISBN 9781939810366.
How did Naïr come to the Mahabharata?
In a 2019 BOMB interview, Naïr recalls first encountering the epic through extended-family storytelling, before meeting it again in children’s comics, films and later reading. It was not new material she approached from a distance: it had been part of her childhood cultural landscape.
That familiarity did not mean the writing began with easy answers. Naïr says that of the five years she spent writing the book, the first two were devoted to absorbing material on the Mahabharata. The distinction matters: the poems are not presented as a quick retelling assembled from a single source, but as a work shaped by sustained engagement with the epic.
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Why put peripheral figures at the center?
The book’s choice of speakers changes the scale of attention. Familiar accounts tend to organize the Mahabharata around its central heroes, rulers and conflicts; Naïr’s collection turns toward those whose labor, losses and perspectives are easier to overlook. A handmaiden or soldier does not simply provide a new camera angle on the same scene. Their position can alter what counts as the story—whose suffering is visible, whose history survives, and what the grand narrative leaves out.
The title’s lion image is tied to a proverb about the danger of allowing the hunter alone to tell the hunted’s story. A 2019 report from Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute connects that framing to a discussion of whose histories are heard. It reports Naïr saying, “Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian.” The remark belongs to that Harvard discussion, not to the BOMB interview. The sources connect the proverb with Chinua Achebe, but do not establish an original author for its wording. Harvard’s event report provides the context.
How do voice and poetic form work together?
Naïr’s method involves more than changing narrators. Arc Publications describes the collection as dramatic monologues in varied forms; its list includes the Spanish glosa, Malay pantoum, Provençal sestina and Pashtun landay, alongside shaped stanzas and newly made forms. The forms have different literary histories and patterns, giving the book distinct poetic architectures as it moves between voices. Arc Publications’ series page describes the collection’s formal range.
That formal variety suits a work attentive to difference: one voice need not sound or move like another. Naïr’s explanation of poetry’s purpose is similarly specific. In a 2017 Scroll interview, she describes poetry as “a place of truth: not factual, descriptive or narrative truth, but truth of expression and emotion, pared to its essence.” She is describing expressive and emotional truth, not claiming that the poems are factual reporting or a definitive account of the epic.
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Until the Lions is a way to encounter the Mahabharata through the people and beings whose accounts often remain at the margins. Its combination of dramatic monologue and varied poetic forms makes perspective part of the book’s craft, not just its subject. Readers looking for a plot summary or a final authority on the epic should approach it differently: this is a poetic work that listens for voices a dominant version may not preserve.
Scroll’s 2017 profile says the Indian edition won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award for fiction. That is the profile’s wording for the Indian edition; the work itself is poetry. Scroll’s interview is the source for the award detail.
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Rank #4
- Book Format: Hardcover with Jacket
- Publication Date: August 18, 2020
- ISBN Number: 9781683839200
- Page Count: 984
- Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 1.9 inches
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