Texts

Five pages, arranged roughly by age. The Vedas and Upanishads are the oldest and the least read; the epics are the most read and the least agreed upon; the Sangam corpus is the one most people outside Tamil Nadu have never heard of, and shouldn’t be.

• Vedas & Upanishads

  The oldest layer, and the transmission scheme that carried it across a hundred generations without a manuscript.

• Ramayana

  There is no single Ramayana. There are hundreds, and they don’t agree — sometimes not on anything you’d think was essential.

• Mahabharata

  Not a text that illustrates dharma. A text about dharma’s insufficiency — and it knows exactly what it’s doing.

• Bhagavad Gita

  An essay on the strangest reception history of any book, followed by the complete text — all seven hundred verses, on one page.

• Sangam & the Tirukkural

  Two thousand years of secular Tamil poetry that the standard account of Indian literature leaves out — and the reason it does.