This book is a focused, sympathetic critical study of Padmashri Haldhar Nag’s poetic re-visioning of four often-overlooked women from the Rāmāyana — Urmilā, Tārā, Mandodari and Śabarī — as mediated through the Koshali/Sambalpuri folk idiom. Co-authored by Dr. Balram Panda and Dr. Saroj Kumar Mahananda and published by SLC in 2025, the volume situates Nag’s three long poems within the living oral and performative traditions of western Odisha, showing how mythic materials are reworked into local moral and aesthetic worlds. 
Rather than treating these poems as simple retellings, the authors read them as interventions: Nag recuperates the interiority, sacrifice and agency of women who are marginal in dominant tellings of the epic. For example, the study explores Urmilā’s famous sleep-sacrifice (Urmilā-nidrā) and reads Mahāsatī Urmilā not only as devotion but as a reflexive critique of gendered duty; similarly, Tara and Mandodari are traced across Nag’s vernacular register to reveal alternative ethical logics and female subjectivities. These close readings are combined with attention to form — the rhythms, refrains and imagery that mark Sambalpuri verse — so the book balances literary analysis with folkloric context. 
A valuable strength of the volume is its cultural framing: by foregrounding the Koshali/Sambalpuri matrix (the language, performance practices, and local worldview) the authors argue that Nag’s poems are not provincial curiosities but nationally significant acts of translation — bringing epic myth into dialogue with marginal voices. The book also provides useful bibliographic and contextual material for readers new to Nag, and will appeal to scholars of folklore, regional literatures, gendered readings of myth, and anyone interested in how the Ramayana continues to be creatively reimagined in India’s vernaculars. 
Overall, this study is both an invitation to read Haldhar Nag with closer attention and a reminder that the epic’s periphery often contains the most provocative ethical questions.