As is often the case with conference papers, many of the sixteen papers included here represent ongoing research. All, however, stand on their own even if are parts of larger projects that have been published in the intervening years. Of these sixteen papers, eleve n address the Mahābhārata (including the Harivaṃśa), three address the Rāmāyaṇa, and two deal with overlapping issues. This distribution is characteristic of modern studies of the Sanskrit epics, in which the Mahābhārata's wealth of thematic issues, moral and identity ambiguities, sociopolitical concerns, diverse mythology, lineage questions, and uncertainties of resolution, are much more attractive to the scholarly mind than are the more consistent certainties, themes, and symmetries of the Rāmāyana.
Horst Brinkhaus begins with speculations that the Pitṛkalpa, within the Harivaṃśa, has parallels in some of the Purāṇas and confers on the archetypal ancestor Manu Vaivasvata the designation śrāddhadeva, “the...