Abstract

This paper is concerned with the use of “bad language,” in Sarala Das’s Mahabharata, popularly known as Sarala Mahabharata, which is a highly creative retelling of Vyasa Mahabharata in Odia. It was composed in the fifteenth century. Incidentally, Sarala Das is the first poet who retold all the eighteen parvas (cantos) of the canonical text in a local language (“regional language” in contemporary terminology), and he is also the first non-Brahmin to retell this highly celebrated ancient text. In the dark world of the text, there are numerous verbal engagements among the characters where bad language is almost aggressively used. The existing scholarship on Sarala Mahabharata contains no study of the use of bad language in this text, to the best of our knowledge. To that extent, this paper tries to fill a gap in Sarala scholarship.