sions in the time of the epic were, however, far from clear-cut. See ‘Drona,’ volume I, note to 7.1.

101.19The curving desert: though maru/dhanvan translates simply as “desert,” as a compound it rather perfectly expresses the wilderness of bows through which Arjuna and Krishna have passed.

102.11Though you did him no wrong: Krishna addresses Arjuna with the epithet an/agha, an honorific literally meaning “sinless one.” It is often thought that the position of such words and their choice is purely metrical. But this is simplistic. Krishna chooses the term quite carefully here and twists it to his rhetorical advantage. For another example see 72.47, where Arjuna’s use of the word Kuru/nandana takes on a savage irony.

102.13That have corrupted his noble blood: Krishna calls Duryodhana an/aryam, literally a “non-Aryan,” stripping him of his genealogy and placing him among the aboriginals outside the hallowed ground of the Vedic society.

108.24For his murder: Alambusha is the brother of a marauding demon slain by Bhima for his crimes against the brahmins in the first book of the epic.

109.35Like fruit from a fruittree’s branch: an alambusa is a kind of fruitbearing plant whose true identity is now lost to us. It is this meaning on which the text of the demon’s epitaph plays.