Mahabharata

by Carole Satyamurti

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, Indian and Euro-American scholars came to generally agree that, given the complexity and importance of the Mahabharata, it was essential to establish a definitive text in its original Sanskrit form. After some delay, a team of Indian Sanskritists, led mainly by V. S. Sukthankar, took up the task independently at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute at Poona (now Pune). They collated and calibrated 1,259 surviving manuscripts, from different parts of the subcontinent, and rigorously evaluated every word and every line in more than 89,000 verses attributed to the poem, before publishing its critical edition in 21 volumes between 1919 and 1969.5 In the course of the past eight decades, the international community of Sanskrit scholars has arrived at a clear consensus that the Poona critical edition gives us the best version of the Mahabharata as a poem that possibly can be reconstructed in modern times.

  AUTHORSHIP

  All the information we can gather and all the inferences and assessments we can make indicate that the poem reconstructed in the critical edition was composed collectively in a preclassical variety of Sanskrit by successive generations of poets between about 400 BCE and 400 CE, on the Gangetic plains in north India, mostly under imperial regimes.6 However, in view of the astonishing connectedness, consistency, and cogency the poem achieves on such a temporal and textual scale, it is conceivable that, at the end of the compositional cycle, the text may well have been assembled, edited, and integrated by a single group of poets, possibly working under one master editor, on the eve of India’s classical age (which runs roughly from 400 to 1200 CE). Given our bias as modern readers—that a poem is “never finished, only abandoned”—it is plausible that the canonical Sanskrit form of the Mahabharata that we have today is the form in which that final editor or group of poets “abandoned” it to the future accidents of history some sixteen hundred years ago.

  The text itself says that it is the work of a rishi, or visionary sage, of brahmin patrilineal descent named Krishna Dvaipayana, whose extraordinary life span stretches across several generations of principal characters in the poem, and who is an eyewitness to its events as well as a seminal participant in them. Krishna Dvaipayana—not to be confused with Lord Krishna, the very different divine-human character—is also addressed as “Vyasa” (literally, redactor or editor), and appears forty-four times in the poem’s action. Once he has completed his great poem, Vyasa teaches it to others, including his preeminent pupil, Vaishampayana, who becomes its principal transmitter. Vyasa’s text is broadcast for the first time in his presence and under his supervision, when he authorizes Vaishampayana to recite it in its entirety to King Janamejaya, at a “snake sacrifice,” a Vedic ritual of cosmomoral significance, which the latter sponsors in order to set the world in order early in his reign.

  Among those attending this public event is a bard named Ugrashravas, whose father, Lomaharshana (literally, “the teller of hair-raising tales”), is the most famous bard of the times. Ugrashravas carries the vast narrative Vaishampayana delivers at King Janamejaya’s sacrifice to another notable event, a conference of all the hermits who live in Naimisha Forest—a region that, famously, is as much a spiritual and ecological retreat from worldly human society as a sequestered celestial zone of magic and fabulation. At the invitation of the hospitable hermits, who are eager to hear his “tales of wonder,” Ugrashravas recites the text he had heard from Vaishampayana; and, as the Mahabharata’s opening chapter informs us, Ugrashravas’s renarration in the enchanted forest—at two removes from Vyasa—is the version that reaches the rest of humanity as the canonical form of the poem. Thus, unlike the Homeric epics, which offer barely a glimpse of the supposedly blind poet of Greek antiquity, the Sanskrit poem provides us with a full meta-narrative about its origins and transmission.

  A BASIC POETICS

  What makes the Mahabharata a poem, and how is it put together? If we were to answer this question as fully as possible, we would arrive at an account of the Sanskrit work that would serve a purpose similar to that of Aristotle’s Poetics,7 which is concerned with poetry in the ancient Greek world, especially in the genre of drama and the subgenre of tragedy. In order to explain—theoretically and practically, descriptively and prescriptively—how tragic drama is composed and how it works in the theater, Aristotle breaks it down into six constituents and their mutual relations and functions in an artistic whole. These six components are muthos, plot, narrative; ethos, character and its environment; dianoia, thought, theme, meaning; lexis, language, diction; opsis, spectacle onstage; and melopoeia, melodic composition, lyric set to musical accompaniment. For the Mahabharata, we have no such formula or ready-made analytical framework for a comprehensive explanation. However, keeping Aristotle’s paradigm in mind, along with a range of premodern Indian and modern Euro-American literary scholarship, we can formulate a basic poetics of the Sanskrit poem, by focusing on four of its aesthetic elements: its handling of characters and characterization; its method of emplotment, of plotting its multiple storylines; its treatment of narrators, narration, and narratives; and its conceptualization of its own form and genre.

  CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERIZATION

  The Mahabharata probably has more than five hundred human characters who appear as distinct, active figures in its narrative. The majority of them have names and play well-defined roles in the action, even if they appear only briefly; scores of them are one-dimensional and unnamed, and serve mainly as functional devices to get the story told. This rough estimate does not include the unspecified members of groups, assemblies, entourages, communities of slaves and servants, and gathered armies described or invoked in the text; nor does it include the numerous personages who are mentioned by characters and narrators in passing, but who do not participate in the action. The estimate also excludes all non-human characters or participants; if we count the many gods, celestial beings, mythological figures, anti-gods, demons, subhuman creatures, supernatural animals, and creatures belonging to other categories and to mixtures of categories, who have names and play specific roles in the narrative, then the final number would be much higher. As the foregoing catalog indicates, the Mahabharata is a cosmic poetic tale in which almost everything in the human and natural orders is interconnected (and also transmuted in various ways), and both are intimately related to the underworld as well as the world of the gods. The size and spread of this elaborate cast of characters have several consequences for the poem, for its architecture as well as its meanings.

  Perhaps the most striking consequence of such a large, variegated roster of characters is that, unlike other epics from the ancient world, the Mahabharata is not centered on a singular hero. It is fundamentally a narrative poem with a disorientingly large group of protagonists and antagonists—twenty-four to be exact—none of whom can be omitted without altering the tale significantly.

  PLOT AND EMPLOTMENT

  The reason the Mahabharata has two dozen leading characters at its core lies in the magnitude of its action, and in the fact that its action is manifold. From the verbal surface as well as the organization of the Sanskrit poem, it is evident that it seeks to develop a comprehensive account of all the events in its narrative, making them plausible and explicable at one level and emotionally and imaginatively resonant at another. The events it represents span the space, time, and causal structure of the cosmos. It uses this enormous scaffolding to narrate the history of the race of its heroes (the Bharatas), together with the history of their land (Bharata-varsha). For its poetic potential and explanatory power, the war of succession to the throne of Hastinapura is the defining moment in both these histories, and it also becomes the master-node upon which the diverse quests and destinies of all the protagonists and antagonists converge.

  In the case of an Athenian tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics conceives of muthos or plot as a single, continuous, and plausible order of events, with secondary episodes integrated with the main developments, and the whole adjusted in scale for representation on the stage. In
this conception, the plot is a concrete sequence of events as a spectator perceives it in the course of a performance, from a vantage point “outside” the depicted characters. Simply because of its scope, the action of the Mahabharata cannot be treated on a par with action represented in an amphitheater: if chanted by a relay of reciters at a steady rate of two verses per minute for about eight hours a day, the text of the critical edition would take nearly seventy-five days to deliver in full. But the Indian poem also does not fit into Aristotle’s prescription for the epic—which is supposed to offset the magnitude of its action (“unlimited in time span”) with an “unchanging meter”—because its Sanskrit text does not use prosodic uniformity to contain thematic diversity. To explain how the Mahabharata actually manages its narratives, it therefore may be more productive to turn to the Natyashastra, the earliest work on poetics in the Sanskrit tradition, which began to circulate in India around 300 CE and provides an alternative account of plot.8 In one of the Natyashastra’s perspectives, every character in a narrative is motivated by a desire to attain a specific goal or set of goals; and the character’s actions in pursuit of those goals, at particular times and in particular places and situations, constitute his or her distinctive plotline, which has the shape of a quest. In a work’s overall narrative, each significant character has a specific plotline with a beginning, a middle, and an end determined by the origin, evolution, and conclusion of a quest, and especially by his or her point of view on the quest’s stages and progress. The reader or spectator views this quest empathetically from the character’s point of view, and not from some disembodied or impersonal vantage point “outside” the action. The aggregate plot of a poem, then, is the intertexture of the individual plotlines that unfold in the fictional lives of its principal characters—however many they may be—with each evolving plotline viewed from the “inside,” as it were. The Natyashastra complicates this picture by arguing that a character’s quest and motivation emerge from an initial situation, a bija (seed or germ) that serves as an origin, and whose offshoots comprise the primary and secondary strands in a plotline; and that the offshoots spreading out from the germ are brought into line by a bindu, a “centering principle” that ensures structural as well as discursive cohesion. Moreover, a narrative germ produces a plotline in which a thesis gives way to an anti-thesis, and both yield to a synthesis; the synthesis then bundles the various offshoots of the initial situation into a decisive moment of crisis and a subsequent resolution.

  In the case of the Mahabharata, the large roster of protagonists and antagonists means that the poem’s overall emplotment has some two dozen distinct plotlines, each centered on a particular character pursuing a distinctive set of goals in interaction with other characters. Readers and listeners who grow up with the Mahabharata in their inherited cultural environment learn, from others around them, to imaginatively traverse the poem’s aggregate plot many times over, and to grasp the totality of the represented action from the different points of view of different principal characters. Thus, on one occasion, one may follow Kunti’s plotline from beginning to end, and grasp the epic as a whole from her point of view as Pandu’s wife and widow, as the biological mother of Yudhishthira, Bhima, and Arjuna and of Karna (each fathered on her by a different god), as the foster mother of Nakula and Sahadeva, as Draupadi’s mother-in-law, and as Duryodhana’s, as well as Lord Krishna’s, aunt; and on another occasion, one may view everything afresh through the eyes of, say, Karna or Duryodhana or Arjuna, and discover how different that character, as well as the whole epic, looks. Many Indians, perhaps the majority of those familiar with the Mahabharata, internalize this (non-Aristotelian) process of shifting interpretation over a lifetime, and hence entertain multiple perspectives on the characters, events, and meanings of the epic. Given the range of characters and the number of protagonists and antagonists, as well as the scope of the represented action, no one character’s quest, point of view, or plotline defines a true or complete interpretation. That is, the absence of an omniscient narrator and of an absolute frame of reference in the Mahabharata implies that the coexistence of multiple perspectives in a multiplex plot is fundamental to its poetics. At the same time, the protagonists’ and antagonists’ divergent quests and points of view are held together by the bija, or germ, from which all of them spring (who should inherit the kingdom, under what conditions and why), by the progression from thesis to anti-thesis to synthesis in this central emplotment (from dishonorable disinheritance to failed diplomacy to inescapable war), and by the establishment of a just society and kingdom in the war’s aftermath.

  NARRATION AND NARRATIVE

  If the action represented in the Mahabharata is inherently manifold, and its emplotment in the poem is necessarily multiplex, then the technical challenge facing the poets who finalized the Sanskrit text had to be the same that still faces every storyteller in modern times: since no story is ever one story only, and the telling of one story always spills over into the telling of other stories, what is the most efficient and effective way to tell multiple stories together? Historically speaking, even though the Ramayana had experimented earlier with an answer on a moderate scale, and the Buddhist Jataka moral tales and the Hindu Panchatantra animal fables had developed basic strategies for short narratives, the Mahabharata was the first work in world literature to confront this technical problem head-on, and to invent a solution that remains the most comprehensive one to this day.

  The Mahabharata’s strategy for multiple narratives and narrations is to maximize the possibilities opened up by the device of narrative framing. At its simplest, a narrative frame is defined by a narrator and his or her narration and narrative; whenever a narrator is explicitly identified in a poem, and relates a particular emplotted sequence of events, the resulting narrative defines the extent of his or her narrative frame. If a narrator stops narrating events, and a different narrator takes up the narrative (or starts a different one), then the poem changes its narrative frame, and we, the audience, adjust our expectations and interpretive procedures accordingly. A poem with multiple framed narratives has to employ devices that inform its audience about who the narrator is at any given moment, what his or her ethos or character and setting are, and what we may expect from him or her; about the junctures at which a particular narrator’s narrative begins and ends, or various narrative frames open and close; and exactly what the structural relationships are between one frame and another, and among all the frames and narrators that may be housed inside an aggregate plot.

  The Mahabharata exploits the potential of the last of these devices fully, by employing all the vital relationships among narrative frames, and all their variations and combinations. One closed frame may be fully contained inside a larger one; one frame may be contiguous with another, so that the latter opens as soon as the former closes; one larger frame may contain two or more closed frames that are not contiguous with each other; and in the most complex interrelation, two frames may significantly overlap, so that a new frame opens well before—and continues well after—the previous one closes. Moreover, the epic does not hesitate to superpose these structures of containment, contiguity, discrete serialization, and intersection upon each other, or to use them in tandem. The variety of frames and framings produces the thick interweave that constitutes the actual text of the Sanskrit poem.

  The Mahabharata as a whole is solidly encased in three outer narrative frames, nested successively inside one another, that are never dislodged over its entire length. For us, as an audience, the outermost frame always belongs to the “voice” that tells us the story, in a recitation or on the page, here and now; inside this anonymous frame is Ugrashravas’s frame, retelling the epic to the sages gathered in the Naimisha Forest; and inside that frame is Vaishampayana’s frame, in which the latter recites the entire Mahabharata at Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice. All the events we read about or hear being narrated in the epic are always inside Vaishampyana’s frame—except for the meta-events that reach us
from Ugrashravas’s outer frame. My rough estimate is that, inside the three outermost frames, we encounter some four hundred distinct narrative frames that fall along a spectrum, one end of which is marked by narrators who appear many times, and the other end by narrators who appear only once each, to convey a single fable, explanation, vignette, or thumbnail sketch.

  This vast structure of emboxed narrative frames—conceptually resembling a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, fitting snugly one inside another—allows the Mahabharata to create the most compact configuration for the integrated narration of multiple stories, in which both the causal interrelations among events and the mimetic force of their representation in the poem are articulated clearly. The tightness of this structure in each recension, as in the critical edition of the poem, cannot be overemphasized. In the various Sanskrit recensions we have inherited, each narrative frame is duly opened and closed, and the poem stands consistently as a well-crafted whole, its great diversity of themes held together by the underlying grid of narrative frames.