Mahabharata
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THE MAHABHARATA AS A RELIGIOUS TEXT
But the Mahabharata is not just a story. It is a religious text, foundational for Hinduism. At moments scattered through the text, the Pandavas’ cousin, the incarnate god Krishna, intervenes, most famously in his counsel to the hero Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, which many Hindus revere as the Bhagavad Gita, “the song of god.” Krishna straddles the line between a human prince and an incarnation of Vishnu. Other gods, however, appear in unambiguous full divinity throughout the epic. Throughout the Mahabharata, we encounter people who say they worship a particular god, the start of sects and therefore of sectarianism. It includes a “Hymn of the Thousand Names of Shiva” and tells a story about the circumstances under which Shiva came to be worshiped. Shiva appears to Arjuna in the form of a naked tribal hunter and occasionally goes in human disguise among mortals. Pilgrimage is described at length, particularly but not only in the “Tour of the Sacred Fords” (3.80–140).
Many chapters are devoted to disquisitions on the nature of spiritual peace (shanti) and liberation (moksha) from the wheel of transmigration (samsara). And the text not only describes several great sacrifices—a triumphal horse sacrifice after the great war near the end of the story, and a grotesque sacrifice of snakes at the beginning—but often describes the battle itself as a great sacrifice, in which the warriors offer themselves as victims. The great battle on the field called Kurukshetra—a name as familiar to Hindus as Armageddon to the Abrahamic religions—is also an eschatological conflict at the moment when the universe is about to self-destruct. For the end of that battle marks the beginning of the Kali age, the fourth of the four degenerating ages, or yugas. Even within this moment of degeneration, Krishna is said to descend to earth (as an avatar of the god Vishnu) to restore dharma (the moral law) when it has declined in the course of the cycle.
Many passages end with the “fruits of hearing” them (“Anyone who hears this story [about snakes] will never die of snakebite,” etc.). And the book as a whole declares, at the very end:
This auspicious story, called a history, is the supreme purifier. Whatever wise man recites this constantly at every lunar fortnight, his evils are shaken off, he wins heaven, and he goes to the state of brahman. Whatever sin one commits by day in the senses or even in the mind-and-heart, he is set free from that at that evening’s twilight by narrating the Mahabharata. This history, called “Victory,” should be heard by anyone who wants power, and also by a king, and by the king’s sons, and by a pregnant woman. A person who desires heaven would get heaven, and one who desires victory would get victory. A pregnant woman gets a son or a well-married daughter. Whoever recites this worthy history that has great meaning and value and is Veda-made, that man becomes free from evil, achieves fame here on earth and will achieve supreme success; I have no doubt about this. If a man of faith studies even a line by means of this worthy study of the Bharatas, he is purified of all his evils, without exception. Whoever recites the story of the Mahabharata, with his mind well collected, achieves supreme success; I have no doubt about this. Whoever thoroughly understands, as it is being spoken, the Bharata that slipped out of the cup of the lips of Vyasa and is immeasurable, worthy, purifying, auspicious, and removes all evils, what use has he for ablutions with the waters of lake Pushkara? (18.5.31–46, 52–54)
Above all, the Mahabharata is an exposition of dharma, the moral and religious law of Hinduism, including the proper conduct of a king, of a warrior, of an individual living in times of calamity, and of a person seeking to attain freedom from rebirth. The text debates the clash between, on the one hand, the growing doctrine of non-violence toward all creatures (ahimsa) and, on the other, both the justice of war and the still dominant tradition of animal sacrifice. It both challenges and justifies the entire class structure.
Many other deep philosophical questions, too, grow out of the human dilemmas that tangle the protagonists in their coils. Dharma continued to denote the sort of human activity that leads to human prosperity, glory, and victory (“Where there is dharma, there is victory,” the text famously proclaims), but now it also had much more to do. For now the text was often forced to acknowledge the impossibility of maintaining any sort of dharma at all in a world where every rule seemed to be canceled out by another. The gods, too, were sometimes tripped up by the subtlety of dharma. Time and again when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrong choice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter, or be told, “Dharma is subtle” (sukshma), thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked. People try again and again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is.
The Mahabharata deconstructs dharma, exposing the inevitable chaos of the moral life. The narrators kept painting themselves into a corner with the brush of dharma. Their backs to the wall, they could only reach for another story. And this is the epic tale that Carole Satyamurti now retells in a new form.
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1. Some portions of this essay are reworked from my book The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 252–76.
2. Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 14–15.
3. Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 75–76.
4. All of the translations are my own, from the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata (Poona, Maharashtra, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933–69).
5. Woody Allen, “Fabulous Tales and Mythical Beasts,” in Without Feathers (New York: Random House, 1976).
Preface
LOVE, LOSS, RAGE, envy, loyalty, heroism, spiritual aspiration, ethical and political dilemmas—the Mahabharata brings to life all these timeless human experiences, and more. I had been familiar with the story in outline for many years, but there came a point, in about 2007, when dissatisfaction with the various translations, abridgments, and versions of it in English prose crystallized into a wish to try to retell it myself—in the form of a poem, as the original is a poem. The sheer scale and grandeur of the epic were both daunting and exhilarating—the literary equivalent of the soaring Himalayan peaks which are a reference point for so many of its characters.
In some ways, it is a strange and distant world the Mahabharata conjures up, a strangeness that can show us something about the variety and breadth of human experience, about thought and behavior that otherwise we might never have imagined. And yet I am repeatedly struck by parallels, both at individual and at societal levels, between that world and our own. Perhaps most striking is the epic’s moral complexity. Although it is clear who is in the right in the violent struggle for possession of the kingdom, each one of the “heroes,” and the divine Krishna himself, engages at some point in morally dubious action, while the main “villain,” Duryodhana, is true to his principles, and is blessed by heaven on his death.
The question of what constitutes right action (dharma) for a particular actor in particular circumstances is the central preoccupation of the poem—and of human beings in every time and place—as is the question of how to reconcile right action with self-interest. Throughout, the Mahabharata wrestles with these problems. Yudhishthira after his victory in the internecine war at the center of the poem is, as it were, the battleground on which incompatible desires, and seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between desire and dharma, are played out.
The concept of dharma focuses mainly on action. This is Krishna’s concern in the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 32), but he is also concerned, in that passage, with the state of mind that gives rise to action. If action is undertaken in a spirit of right understanding, and of devotion to the deity, then the consequences of it are not the responsibility of the actor. There are parallels here with the position of the modern soldier, whose duty (dharma) is to obey, whose training prepares him or
her to hand over responsibility to the commanding officer, and whose devotion, if not to God, is to country and comrades.
The Mahabharata says of itself that it is addressed to women as well as to men, and one of its unusual features, in the context of other ancient epics, is the importance given to women characters. For instance, what Homeric (mortal) women have to say has very little impact on events. In the Odyssey, Penelope is told by her son, Telemachos, that power, including the power of speech, is the business of men, and is sent off to her room! In the Mahabharata, by contrast, women—notably the Pandavas’ wife, Draupadi—often refuse to be silenced. A number of female characters have their own, distinctive points of view and are seen to engage in debate and comment on an equal footing with men, especially, but not only, in matters of war and peace.
The poem is also explicitly addressed to people of all social positions, and although the importance is recurrently asserted of maintaining the distinct identities of the top two ranks in the social order, there are also places where, implicitly or explicitly, we are reminded of the worth, and the suffering, of people at the bottom of the social hierarchy—suffering whose relevance transcends time and place. The story of lowborn Ekalavya (Chapter 4), whose luminous gifts as an archer are destroyed by Arjuna’s jealousy, has been adopted by the Dalit movement in India as an iconic instance of the injustice to which their community continues to be subjected. The burning of the Khandava Forest (Chapter 13), in which snakes and other forest dwellers are slaughtered in huge numbers, could be taken as a symbolic representation of the way that, always and everywhere, the powerful can oppress the weak.
Many retellings give rather scant attention to Bhishma’s teachings to Yudhishthira, centered on the subject of how to be a good ruler (Books 12 and 13). These constitute over twenty-five percent of the whole, and it is true that there are elements in these books that can be omitted as being tangential to the central narrative, and of little interest to the modern reader. But timeless political concerns, and notably questions of how rulers can retain power, feature strongly in the Mahabharata. And like Machiavelli’s The Prince, to which it bears a striking resemblance, what Bhishma has to say about how the ruler should operate, and what mistakes he should avoid, has direct relevance today and should not be treated in a perfunctory way. Nor, in my view, should Bhishma’s teaching on spiritual matters. Although some of the beliefs about life and the afterlife, for example, may seem alien to many readers, when considered with an open mind they may be seen to have parallels with ideas that are commonplace in many religious traditions.
The Mahabharata also gives us plenty to think about from an ontological point of view. Its sense of the enormous scale of the cosmos, for instance, is very different from the depiction featured in the Greek and Roman myths, and prefigures modern understandings. And although one should be wary of drawing facile parallels between ancient Indian cosmology and modern physics, the idea that “every coherent thing tends inherently toward dissolution” (Chapter 53) is reminiscent of the concept of entropy.
Central to the epic is the prolonged account of the great war at Kurukshetra (Books 6–10), where we are invited to imagine the theater of war as a series of set-piece duels and battles, as though we were looking at an unfurling tapestry. The descriptions, and the vast numbers of combatants cited, are clearly not meant to be realistic, but rather to conjure up huge scale and grotesque detail in order to imprint the excesses of war on the imagination. At a time when arrows were the most lethal weapons known, the poets imagine celestial weapons which anticipate the mass-murderous capability of modern warfare—weapons which create pure victims, rather than losers in even-handed combat. As the First World War is commemorated a century on, we know how difficult it is to absorb, from facts alone, what war means for those affected by it. We need images; and we need language.
The Mahabharata gives us these, by piling detail upon detail, story upon story, and often by mobilizing formulaic turns of phrase—stock epithets, vocatives, and descriptions—key features of oral epic poetry which probably was part of the Sanskrit Mahabharata tradition. One of the aspects of the way the poem is narrated is repetition or recurrence, as if to remind us, across its enormous canvas, of what it is important for us to remember.
Indeed, within the epic, the characters do not always remember what they have been told, or what they really know—or else they are unable to take it in and act on it. Dhritarashtra is repeatedly warned that his son will bring catastrophe on the Bharata clan; he believes it and yet he cannot bring himself to take the necessary preventive measures. Yudhishthira knows that gambling can be disastrous, but continues to engage in it anyway. Arjuna appears to have been persuaded by Krishna’s great sermon and revelation on the battlefield (the Bhagavad Gita) that he has no alternative but to fight and kill his cousins and his teachers (Chapter 32). Yet he repeatedly makes only halfhearted efforts. And in fact, later on (Chapter 56) he declares that he does not remember what Krishna told him. It is as if Krishna’s words graze past him and out into the wider world, where generations of Hindus and others have taken them to heart.
Fate, or the gods’ design, is often invoked to explain such paradoxical behavior, and the tension between fate and human effort, free will and determinism, is a recurrent theme—and a continuing preoccupation for us today. How freely do we really choose between one course of action and another?
Much more could be said, but I want to mention a final aspect of the Mahabharata—its psychological plausibility. As just one example, I am interested in the fact that, for different reasons, neither Duryodhana’s parents nor Karna’s birth mother see them as children. Duryodhana’s mother, by choosing to be blindfolded so as to have no advantage over her blind husband, is depriving her son of the affirmation and visible love that a baby would normally find in his/her mother’s eyes. She is putting her husband first. Kunti, by abandoning Karna at birth to the vagaries of the river, is choosing to value respectability over the welfare of her baby. Although Duryodhana and Karna are loved and cherished during their upbringing, as adults they are both characterized by extreme enviousness. It may seem fanciful, but it is as if nothing but the actual experience of the loving maternal gaze can convince them that they possess enough of value, and that the wealth or skill of others is not a diminishment of their own. No wonder they become soul mates!
Despite the availability of various versions of the Mahabharata, on page, screen, and in live performance, I am assuming that it will be less familiar to the average American or European reader than the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance. I have seen my task as one of trying to open the reader’s eyes—as my own were opened—to the richness of a literary masterpiece they may hardly have heard of until now.
I do not read Sanskrit, and have worked from scholarly translations (not other people’s retellings) in order to come as close as possible to the original. Given its size (roughly 5,000 closely packed prose pages in the only complete English translation to date, by K. M. Ganguli,1 published in the late nineteenth century), any version of the Mahabharata intended for the general reader is necessarily an abridgment. When I got to grips with Ganguli’s translation, as well as with other (partial) translations,2 I wanted to try to convey the epic’s extraordinary qualities in as vivid and accessible a way as possible. My guiding principle throughout has been faithfulness to the original, as I have become yet another meta-narrator, though I have included some widely loved stories that do not figure in the Poona Critical Edition, or in Ganguli’s translation. In my version, as in the original, the register is that of a storyteller addressing an audience.
In constructing my abridgment, I was guided by my sense of the outline and architecture of the epic, informed by my reading. My method was to read Ganguli and other translations, section by section, and then to put them aside, and give myself time to digest what I had read, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically. Out of this would come a decision about what to include and what could be excluded; what must be f
oregrounded and what could be mentioned briefly. I then wrote my own version, checking what I had written against the original (translated) source, and doing this repeatedly throughout the entire writing process.
The Sanskrit Mahabharata is mainly composed in shlokas, a verse form with specific metrical requirements and stanzaic arrangement, used in ancient India for a wide variety of texts, some imaginative, some religious, some practical. It is the wide applicability of the form that has led some people to the view that it was, for ancient India, what prose is for us, arguing that prose is the best medium in which to render the epic for a modern readership. But the Mahabharata is composed in patterned language, designed to be recited, or chanted, and I wanted something of that quality to come across in my version. For this reason, I have chosen a flexible form of blank verse, which arguably occupies a place in the English literary tradition analogous to that of the shloka in ancient Sanskrit. It is the meter of Shakespeare’s plays, of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth’s Prelude. In saying this, I am not setting myself up as being on a par with the greats of English literature, but rather saying that the meter of blank verse is laid down in the mind’s ear of anyone even slightly familiar with English poetry. It is a form particularly well suited to narrative verse, and is still widely used. It is also the basic meter of natural English speech. Listen to anyone speaking English, and you will soon pick up the rhythm of iambic pentameter.
Blank verse is an unrhymed form, with ten or eleven syllables, and five beats, or stresses, to the line. Of course no one would adhere rigidly to this description; that would make for a very mechanical and numbing effect. Rather, the rhythm of a five-beat line is laid down in the mind’s ear as a template against which the reader or listener receives the line—which may stretch or contract the number of syllables, and which will not be composed entirely of iambs. For that reason, in this retelling, I would like the reader to imagine the names of at least the main people and places in their approximately correct pronunciation (AR-ju-na, for instance, not Ar-JOO-na). Many of the names may be unfamiliar, and the Glossary at the back of the book provides a guide to pronunciation, showing in each case where the stress or stresses should fall.