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.
This book is a companion piece to a new production of the same name by the choreographer Akram Khan and his dance company in the Roundhouse in London in January 2016. The Akram Khan dance company have worked with Nair before, and performed on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 2014.
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.”