1.1 Where Do You Begin With 18,000 Verses? | Bhagavata Podcast with Shaunaka Rishi Das

What do you do when a text of 18,000 verses refuses to be read as a simple rulebook, and instead keeps turning your assumptions upside down?In the very first episode of the Bhagavata Podcast, host Bhrigupada Dasa (Dr. Måns Broo) sits down with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, who first encountered the Bhagavatam as an 18-year-old Irishman walking into an ashram in 1979. What drew him in then, and what still holds him after decades, opens up one of the most important questions the text raises in its very first verses: what kind of religion is this, and what is it actually asking of us?Together they explore the remarkable opening of Canto 1, Chapter 1 of the Srimad Bhagavatam: its rejection of materially motivated religion, its lineage from Vishnu to Brahma to Narada to Vyasa to Shukadeva Goswami, and the six deceptively simple questions posed by the sages at Naimisharanya. They also discuss why Parikshit's death (which frames the entire text) makes every question in it feel urgent rather than academic, how the Bhagavatam quietly subverts social hierarchy through its choice of storyteller, and what it means that the text begins and ends with the same recommendation: chant the Name.Send us Fan MailThe Bhagavata Podcast is produced by the Gaudiya Studies Research Programme at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Each episode brings together scholar-practitioners, trained in both Indology and lived Vaishnava devotion, to read this text closely and seriously.