# Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-south-asian-studies-313341/amrita-chowdhury-and-ujaan-ghosh-trans-baidehisha-bilasa-the-amorous-plays-of-sita-s-husband-wide-open-window-books-2025
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-south-asian-studies-313341/amrita-chowdhury-and-ujaan-ghosh-trans-baidehisha-bilasa-the-amorous-plays-of-sita-s-husband-wide-open-window-books-2025.md
Podcast: [New Books in South Asian Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-south-asian-studies-313341)
Published: 2026-06-04T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2382093859.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2382093859.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3275

## Resource

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

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