By the mid-1970s, the novelist’s genius for detail—the smell of sandalwood soap on a lover’s body, the toothache that distracts the hero, the tiger’s skin against which the scholar rests to study the Vedas—and his ability to create memorable voices, especially for his women, were strengthened by a new interest in formal experimentation. In 1979, after having won the Sahitya Akademi award for Daatu, his novel about caste, Bhyrappa published the work that defines him for many readers: Parva. On the surface. an anthropological retelling of the Mahabharata, in which the Kurukshetra war is freed from mythology and magic and presented as an actual historical event, the novel is really a study of human character under extreme stress. Innovative in structure, Parva is built around long interior monologues that are like arias; one by one, Bhyrappa enters into the minds of the major players, Pandava and Kaurava alike, to create complex, almost Cubist, character portraits. First we see Karna being stupid and lustful, goading the Kauravas on to rape Draupadi; then, we see him about to bathe in the Ganga, thoughtful and insecure, having just discovered that he is the illegitimate son of Kunti; now we see him in battle, a cold-blooded killer; and finally, as a man torn between his loyalties, who lets himself be killed rather than betray either side. Melancholic in tone—the world of the Mahabharata is coming to an end in every page—Parva reads like a Hindu Gotterdammerung. Though Bhyrappa’s characteristic failings are present here—repetitiousness and occasional verbosity—it is one of the most breathtaking of 20th-century Indian novels.