Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the multiple versions of the Arjuna-Subhadra courtship that circulated and contributed to discourses about love and marriage in the late nineteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning with the premise that the epics are not texts per se, but entire literatures, this paper examines the multiple registers of the Arjuna-Subhadra story in circulation during the 19th century. This story was fundamental to the way companionate marriage was framed in the last two decades of the 19th century, especially after it was staged as a five-act comedy, replete with over 100 musical numbers in 1883. At the same time, its sources were not epic, at least not directly. They appear in many epic poems, ballads, and even one dramatic monologue in which Subhadra narrates her own betrothal and lack of fraternal support. These many texts—performed epic poetry as well as drama—complimented the discourse in newspapers and journals of the 1880s to round out the popular understanding of the issue of companionate marriage.

Far from the dry, mundane, and vacuous platitudes of reform in print media, the multiple inter-related textual field of performance was significant for at least one important reason: even though there were relatively few social institutions where men and women could interact in order for "companionate" marriage to become a reality, the plays themselves were instrumental in bringing about new emotional horizons, and existed in tandem with print media. My paper seeks to understand the place of drama and performance in communicating ideas to a broad, popular public; companionate marriage is the focus, but the general argument will be relevant for other topics as well.