Professor Satya Chaitanya at his residence. Picture by Srinivas

Jamshedpur, Jan. 29: Characters like Draupadi and Kunti played a bigger role than Arjun and Yudhishtir and the war of Kurukshetra continued for a few days only.

Statements like these might sound bizarre to many, but it is a part of a detailed research by city scholar Satya Chaitanya.

A faculty at XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur, Chaitanya has been invited to present a paper on “Text and variations of Mahabharata: contextual, regional and performative traditions”, to be held in Delhi on February 5.

Organised by the National Manuscript Mission under the Union ministry of culture, the three-day long event would see research scholars from across the country and abroad presenting an interpretation of the world’s greatest epic, in various languages and cultures.

“The seminar aims to find out how the epic has been interpreted by various communities. But my study delves into the details of Mahabharata, as interpreted by the tribals,” said Chaitanya.

Prepared after a thorough research of two years, Chaitanya has studied the Bheel Mahabharata, a tribal folklore on the epic written by the Bheel community residing in the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

“Bheel Bharat is different from the Sanskrit Mahabharata where women and sexuality plays vital roles,” added Chaitanya.

The scholar has also identified a few folk songs from the different tribal communities of the state and would do a detailed survey of the famous Chhau dances, which are highly inspired by the epic tales.

“As enough material is not available on the Chhau dances, therefore the study of how tribals explored the epic and the dance would be interesting,” said Chaitanya.

The scholar also plans to create a unique Mahabharata library with the assistance of Mahabharata Study Group, an online group of scholars from across the world, specialising in the epic. “We also plan to make an online library with these works soon,” added Chaitanya.