The Nārāyaṇīya is, along with the Bhagavadgītā, one of the most important and influential texts in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Perhaps more than any other part of this great ancient Indian epic, these two texts demonstrate the Mahābhārata’s importance as a document witnessing a crucially transformative period (approximately the first few centuries of the Common Era) in Indian cultural, intellectual, religious and sociopolitical history. However, despite this status and its critical role in the identity-formation of several later Hindu traditions, the Nārāyaṇīya is much the less studied text, both in terms of its place in the Mahābhārata and its subsequent influence.

The present volume, comprising contributions by several of the world’s leading scholars on the Mahābhārata and on early Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva religions, seeks to help redress this imbalance. Consisting of eight articles on the Nārāyaṇīya, studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (philology, computational linguistics, history of religions), as well as a substantial introduction by the editors, this is the first scholarly English-language volume devoted to the study of the Nārāyaṇiya, and the first in any language in nearly 30 years.