Mahabharata
Page 80
FORM AND GENRE
The Mahabharata derives one kind of structural integrity from its scaffolding of framed narratives, but its poetic qualities depend as much on what it communicates as on its mode or manner of communication. What, then, is the text’s shaping principle with respect to its raw material, and what kind of poem does it become in the process of representing its content? In the past two centuries, Euro-American scholars have often found it difficult to respond to the Sanskrit work as an aesthetic object; as a consequence, they generally have ignored its structural integrity, and have focused instead on its uses as a religious text and its usefulness as a cultural document for outsiders, especially as a source of information about ancient Indian society, religion, politics, law, and morality. For a much longer time, Indian audiences have also turned to the Mahabharata primarily for its content, and perhaps secondarily for its aesthetic qualities—but this is so because, in the practice of Hinduism, the Sanskrit text has the status of scripture or quasi-scripture, next in spiritual authority only to the four Vedas. As a “fifth Veda” or body of authoritative knowledge and discourse, it is valued for its guidance on duty and ethics, its teachings about right and wrong, its arguments about the human self and the ends of life, its analysis of war and justice, and its vision of a good ruler and a good society. At the same time, however, the subcontinent’s artists have long affirmed the epic’s power as a work of beauty and imagination—not apart from, but in addition to, its power as a text linked to scripture revealed in “the language of the gods.”9
Nevertheless, just as the Mahabharata provides a picture of its author, its authorship, and its transmission, it also offers commentary on its form and genre. One of its classifications of itself is as an akhyana, which identifies its mode of presentation and its poetic function. This label means that the poem sees itself as a telling, a narration, or an informative communication; that what it relates is specifically an old tale or a legend; and that its preferred mode of delivery is speech or oral performance rather than writing. The Sanskrit text also describes itself as an upakhyana which, as a nuance of akhyana, means that it is a retelling, rather than an original narration, of a tale heard earlier from others.
When the Mahabharata uses a different self-descriptive label, samvada, it characterizes its own form as dialogue. This is a precise specification because, in recitation and on the printed page, the Sanskrit text presents itself, from beginning to end, as a vast dialogue involving primary and secondary (and sometimes also tertiary) characters, nested inside and outside its numerous narrative frames. The poem, in fact, is fundamentally dialogic, not only in the sense of being cast in the form of a verbal exchange, but in the more robust sense of belonging to “the dialogic mode.”10 In Bakhtin’s theory, this is the mode in which individuals exist in human society in constant interaction with others, so that any one person’s thought and speech on any given occasion are always already “in dialogue with” some other—or someone else’s—prior thought and speech. The poets of the Mahabharata explicitly understand and acknowledge dialogism as the shaping principle of their poetry, and they systematically flesh out the entire poem as a vast, multivoiced, ongoing samvada about everything on earth and in the universe, inside as well as outside the borders of human experience, so that, as they claim, “Whatever is found here may be found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found nowhere else.” As a dialogic poem that goes well beyond the surface form of verbal exchange, the Mahabharata is an active response to the states of affairs it depicts, and its narrative therefore is always a multifarious modification of plain mimetic representation.
Finally, the Sanskrit poem also describes its genre in terms of its theme or content. Almost two millennia ago, the poets who finalized its text cast it as an epic, but they did not have a label for their enterprise. Itihasa was the everyday word they adopted to name the genre with which they could represent the absolute past of the people and the land of which they were the imaginative inheritors. At least two thousand years old, the word itihasa literally means “thus it was” or “so it happened,” and is the exact Sanskrit precursor of the German phrase wie es eigentlich gewesn ist, “as it has been actually.” By claiming to be an itihasa, the Mahabharata seems to assert its function as a mimetic representation of events past. Following this implication, Indian as well as Euro-American scholars since the nineteenth century have tried to interpret the Mahabharata as history—often too literally, and usually with absurd outcomes. Any encounter with the Mahabharata’s narrative, however, indicates immediately that the poem does not define itself as a history in the modern sense. Its poets are under no illusion that they somehow are composing a factual, empirically verifiable, or documentary account of the past, and they do not wish to impose any such illusion on their audience. Instead, they seem to focus on events that are long over, even for them, to which they themselves no longer have any real access (through direct experience or personal memory or reliable eyewitness reports), and which they know they can memorialize only poetically—events that can be “recovered” solely by imagining and reimagining, narrating and renarrating what Goethe, with a fellow poet’s acuteness, called “the absolute past.”
Bakhtin, again, explains what this means in a way that fits the Mahabharata with surprising precision. The genre that is designed to represent the absolute past is the genre that we now designate as the epic which, for the Russian theorist, has “three constitutive features”: it seeks to represent the “epic past” of a nation; it draws on “national tradition” for its narrative, and not on its author’s “personal experience and the free thought that grows out of it”; and, in “Goethe’s and Schiller’s terminology,” it establishes and works across “an absolute epic distance” between “the time in which the singer . . . lives”—or the worlds in which the author and his audience exist—and “the epic world” that it depicts. These three features, Bakhtin argues in his emphatic style, are interrelated:
The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of “beginnings” and “peak times” in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of “firsts” and “bests” . . . The epic was never a poem about the present, about its own time . . . [It] has been from the beginning a poem about the past, and the authorial position immanent in . . . and constitutive for it . . . is [that] . . . of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant . . . Both the singer and the listener, immanent in the epic as a genre, are located in the same time and on the same evaluative (hierarchical) plane, but the represented world of the heroes stands on an utterly different and inaccessible time-and-value plane, separated by epic distance. The space between them is filled with national tradition. To portray an event on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries . . . is . . . to step out of the world of epic into the world of the novel.11
The Mahabharata displays all the characteristics that Bakhtin attributes to an epic. It combines the epic mode with myth and romance, allegory and high mimeticism; and it perfects the method of narrative framing, using it to contain multiple plotlines and divergent points of view, as each of its main characters pursues his or her own quest. It is at once a telling and a retelling, a dialogue and a history—but it is especially a poem on a grand scale about a clan divided by hatred, a queen molested and avenged, a just war against an unjust disinheritance, a victory that is indistinguishable from defeat, and the death of an old order and the birth of a new one.
RETELLING THE Mahabharata
Satyamurti, an established British poet with a connection to India, approaches the Mahabharata as a modern poet responding poetically to an ancient poem. In its most direct form, her objective is to understand the Sanskrit work, to capture her understanding of it in a poem of her own, and to place her text before contemporary readers in English—for whom it then becomes a means to experience the poetry of the Mahabharata, though necessarily at a remove.
Her concern is with poetry at every stage in an idealized circuit: as an object of understanding, as a mode of understanding, as a medium of expression, as a vehicle of communication, and as an outcome of the process as a whole. Poetry thus becomes a seamless continuum enveloping her enterprise, an analogue of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s “hermetic egg,” which needs nothing outside itself in order to give birth to new life.
There is, however, one practical rupture in this continuum. Whenever a modern work sets out to represent an older work, it can only do so in a genre that shades off into other genres performing similar functions but in other ways. A text that represents another text may be a translation (“faithful”), an adaptation (somewhat “loose”), a retelling (relatively “free”), or even a reworking (“creative”). In the past two decades, literary theorists have argued persuasively that all these categories can be placed on a single conceptual gradient called “translation” in the broadest sense, which moves from the most literal rendering of a text at one end to the most approximate at the other. In the late seventeenth century, John Dryden suggested brilliantly that the three defining positions on this spectrum be labeled “metaphrase,” which is a word-for-word or interlinear version; “paraphrase,” which deviates from the letter of a text, but not its spirit; and “imitation,” which ignores the letter, and also merely “strives after” its spirit. In general, translators may pursue any of these shades of rendering legitimately, provided they identify the genre of their output without ambiguity—that is, as a translation, a paraphrase, an adaptation, an imitation, and so on. For whichever genre they practice, translators can choose one of two overall methods: the direct method, where the translator adequately knows and uses both the languages involved, the one from and the one into which she is translating; and the indirect method, where she knows only the language into which she is translating, and has access to the original text solely through preexisting intermediary renderings and other resources.
In Satyamurti’s project, the break appears at the link of genre of representation and choice of method. On the general spectrum of translation, her retelling can be seen as a paraphrase. Her method, however, is the indirect method, because she is not a scholar of the Sanskrit language, and has access to the original text of the Mahabharata only through intermediary English translations and commentaries. Since her poetics of retelling rests on the assumption that her English poem is a reliable representation of the Sanskrit poem, she has to ensure that her intermediary resources are as trustworthy as possible. Her version of the epic therefore is based on the most literal and scholarly renderings available in English, together with the most dependable and informative commentaries, selections, and condensations.
In its practical application, Satyamurti’s indirect method is as elaborate and systematic as it is fine-tuned. Her retelling is not a mere versification of an existing prose translation or someone else’s gloss or crib. Depending on the material and her selection, she chooses to narrate some parts in detail, some in a condensed form, and some only in brisk summary. The Sanskrit original and its prose metaphrases in English may handle a given episode in uniform depth, but Satyamurti omits some parts altogether and treats other parts differentially, guided by her sense of their poetic value and meaning, their significance in the larger narrative, and their potential imaginative impact on her readers. Even as she goes by the emotional flow of sounds, rhythms, images, characters, and events in her own verse, however, she works strictly within the limits of her intermediary resources, which determine the reliability of her rendering. Given the meticulousness of her craft and her strong sense of balance and proportion, restraint and understatement, her retelling emerges as a neatly scaled “miniature representation” of a gargantuan whole.
The proportionality that Satyamurti is able to maintain follows largely from her strategies and decisions at the level of craft. For one, she pays close attention to the poetic organization of the Mahabharata. She keeps all 18 major books in her version, but she treats them astutely as “accordion structures” that can be expanded and compressed to fit narrative exigencies; she represents the minor books as “chapters,” and reduces their number to 60. Each of her chapters corresponds to one or more minor books and, within its framework, she carefully selects the characters, episodes, stories, and themes that will advance the narrative effectively. For whatever she chooses to highlight in a chapter, she usually combines detailed narration with condensation and précis to keep up the proportionality between retelling and original. Her poem is only one-twelfth the size of the Mahabharata, but it still gives us a detailed and balanced picture of the whole.
For another input at the level of craft, Satyamurti brings extraordinary discipline and inventiveness to her versification. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of which is composed uniformly in a single meter, the Mahabharata is a composite poem in Sanskrit. In its critical edition, the text contains 73,821 numbered units; almost 99.5 percent of these are in verse, while 385 of them are prose passages, the latter being distributed over 12 “cantos” in 6 minor books. Of the 73,436 units in verse, 4,426 are composed in meters belonging to the trishtubh class, whereas 68,858 verses are in meters of the anushtubh class. The common form of this last category is the shloka, which consists of 32 syllables arranged in two equal “lines,” each divided at its midpoint by a caesura; structurally, we can view the shloka as either a couplet (with 16 syllables per line) or a quatrain (with 8 syllables per line). In Sanskrit, a “verse” is syntactically closed, so it ends in a period; the end of a “line” coincides with a syntactic break, and hence coincides with the end either of a clause or of a sentence; and a caesura within a line, whether in a symmetrical or an asymmetrical position, coincides with the end either of a phrase or of a clause but not of a sentence. The short and long pauses around the middle and at the end of a line, and the long pause at the end of a verse, reinforce the rhythm arising from the metrical pattern, which gives the verse an incantatory or lyrical quality. One consequence is that, whenever a Sanskrit text composed in verse is delivered orally, it is not merely recited or read aloud, it is either chanted or sung. The conceptions involved here, especially of lyricism, differ from those in a language such as English, because Sanskrit verse forms do not require end rhyme or internal rhyme. The convention of chanting and singing applies as much to a short poem, a ritual mantra, and a philosophical treatise, as to an epic. Given the general prosodic features of Sanskrit, and given that the bulk of its text (about 75 percent) is composed in the shloka verse form, the Mahabharata appears to graft a “lyrical” texture onto a metrically variable narrative of massive size.
Satyamurti makes no attempt to reproduce or even approximate this system of versification, which is impossible in any case because of fundamental differences in phonology, syllabification, and prosody. Instead, she chooses boldly to invigorate English blank verse, developing a flexible line of nine to eleven syllables, with an average of five stresses. She brings it forward into the twenty-first century, not only by reducing its mechanical quality, but specifically by blending its metrical pattern with the syntax and vocabulary of contemporary “middle diction.” Satyamurti’s blank verse avoids poeticisms as well as archaisms, syntactic inversions as well as semantic simplifications, without becoming prosy or prosaic. Her sentences flow smoothly through enjambments and shifting caesuras, providing a medium for the narrative that is both transparent and dynamic—as amenable to the conversation of the gods and the fury of battle, as to philosophical disquisition, theological debate, deathbed speech, domestic vignette, emotional outburst, and evocation of landscape. A light and elastic surface of this kind stands in contrast to the Mahabharata’s verbal texture, but it is the ideal vehicle in English for a multiplex narrative that stretches out to 27,000 lines. It transports us back to a past that is cut off from us, as in an epic, but it also brings that past alive, here and now, as though it were a novel in finely crafted verse.
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1. Rob
ert Lowell, Imitations (1961; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 68
2. Detailed information on the epic’s textual history, print publication, and critical edition appears in the general introduction to The Mahabharata, vol. 1: The Book of the Beginning, translated and edited by J. A. B. van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. xiii–xliv; see especially pp. xxiii–xxxix.
3. J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: An Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 58–59 and 85.
4. On classical arguments and his own position, see Ramanujan’s “Repetition in the Mahabharata,” in The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 161–83, especially p. 163.
5. V. S. Sukthankar et al., Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, 21 vols. (Poona, Maharashtra, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1919–69). The edition includes 18 volumes for the 18 parvans, 2 volumes for the Harivamsha, and 1 volume for the critical apparatus. The editors consulted 1,259 manuscripts, and processed over 89,000 verses attributed to the epic.
6. The case for multiple authors of the Mahabharata is made in van Buitenen, op. cit., “Introduction.”
7. Aristotle, Poetics, edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47–55.
8. Manomohan Ghosh, trans., The Natyashastra, vol. 1: chaps. 1–27 (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950). Plot and emplotment are covered in Chapter 21, pp. 380–400. Ghosh’s translation is unfortunately opaque on this topic; my overview uses the Sanskrit text.