Karthika Nair's epic poem 'Until the Lions' is conceived as an echo of its great Sanskrit forerunner,the Mahabharata. It is an echo in which women drive the narrative and are its main characters, a vivid and compelling retelling from a female perspective of many of the stories from one of the world's most venerated books.
The title of this book comes from the African proverb - "until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter". In this poetic reimagining, Nair writes, for the first time, the history of the women in the Mahabharata, the longest poem ever written and one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India.
