This project examines five retellings of the old Indian epic Mahābhārata. The heroes of this epic have been significant role models for rulers in South Asia and beyond, up to the present day. The composition of one of the five retellings under scrutiny, the Pāṇḍavcarit, in old Hindi, at the court of Rajput Gwalior (15th c.), has been considered proof of a growing Hindu cultural awareness in opposition to Islam. The other four Mahābhārata retellings, composed in exactly the same environment and period, but by Jains, members of a minority religious community close to Buddhism, in a late middle Indic literary idiom, have so far been largely been disregarded in this discourse. By comparing and assessing these five contemporary retellings in their historical and sociocultural contexts, focusing in particular on the emotional regimes at work in each of these texts, this project aims to nuance the assumption of Hindu-Muslim antagonism in Mahābhārata retellings and to disclose the far greater complexity to the interreligious in premodern South Asia.