Leela's Book (49 page)

‘The legend of Ganesh as the Mahabharata’s scribe,’ Linda began, ‘has not fared well with scholars. Even though Ganesh is a popular god, ubiquitous in folklore, these very words –
popular
,
folklore
– are anathema to Sanskrit scholars.
They
have generally treated Ganesh’s literary credentials with contempt, denouncing him as anachronistic, and editing him out of their editions. Today, I wish to reinstate the god Ganesh at the heart of India’s literary canon.’

And catching her friend Bharati’s eye – she was sitting three rows from the front, next to a man with curly hair, whom Linda guessed was the latest boyfriend – she smiled.

‘The description of Ganesh’s role as scribe frames the epic – and yet it has been in jeopardy ever since the late nineteenth century when the idea that Ganesh was a spurious, later addition to the epic became current. Indeed, the late-twentieth-century Chicago translation of the Mahabharata excised the Ganesh episode altogether.’

Linda knew that Professor Chaturvedi had made this notion – of Ganesh as a late interpolation – the basis for his much-quoted thesis about the god, and that the theory she was to lay before her audience, and his audience too, posed a subtle challenge to his scholarship. This was not an auspicious basis for a future relationship. However, there was nothing to be done. She took a sip of water. She felt very calm.

‘Where did this idea come from? The first person to raise it was one of the fathers of Sanskrit studies in Europe, the famous nineteenth-century scholar Moriz Winternitz. Winternitz noted that there were crucial differences between the various versions of the Mahabharata, which was not surprising given its length and antiquity, and because of the original oral transmission of this text.’

She glanced over at Professor Chaturvedi. He was listening to her words with great attention.

‘The main disparity scholars found when they consulted these different editions was the South Indian text’s “remarkable” omission of the Ganesh legend. Winternitz therefore proposed the formation of a Sanskrit Epic Text Society, the explicit aim of which would be to publish a critical edition of the Mahabharata that reconciled the differences. It was this suggestion that led to the Bhandarkar edition, and, in turn, to the marginalisation of the Ganesh legend.’

Linda was enjoying herself now. She scanned the crowd for the Dictator’s characters with whom she had recently become so familiar. Maybe that was ‘Pablo the Protector’ sitting next to Bharati. And was that anxious-looking boy on her other side ‘Ash the Genealogist’? Had shy and retiring Sunita come to the lecture? Was ‘Urvashi the Truthteller’ here?

‘It is understandable why Winternitz and his followers drew the conclusions they did. Other than in the dictation scene, Ganesh is not mentioned elsewhere in the Mahabharata, nor in the Ramayana nor the Vedas, and given that the first verified textual appearance he makes elsewhere in Sanskrit literature is in the comparatively recent Puranas – around the fifth century
AD
, possibly a millennium after the initial composition of the Mahabharata – scholars have till now had good reason to assume that the dictation legend cannot have existed within the epic before that date.’

Linda saw Professor Chaturvedi nodding in agreement.

‘Furthermore, in the more easily authenticated and historical Puranic cult of Ganesh, there is no mention of the elephant god as
scribe
. As one twentieth-century scholar noted, “No ancient Indian frescoes or sculptures depict him in this role.” Another has reflected that the “late interpolation” probably represented a pragmatic and belated attempt “to get Ganesh into the epic of which it is said that anything which is not included within it does not exist”. And yet, there
are
certain features of the Puranas which may be connected to the dictation legend of the Mahabharata. Indeed, I believe these reveal that the Ganesh legend was present in the Mahabharata from early on, and was there for a specific historical reason.’

Professor Chaturvedi was by now looking distinctly wary. Linda couldn’t help feeling pleased. In the process of transcribing the Dictator’s pages she had at first been infected by the narrator’s derogatory view of the Mahabharata’s Vyasa – which was complicated, given the position she then found herself in vis-à-vis the Professor.

‘In the Puranas,’ she continued, ‘Ganesh is given wives (or attributes), variously known as Buddhi and Siddhi, or Buddhi and Riddhi. Academics have long argued’ – and here, she knew, she was indirectly criticising Professor Chaturvedi himself – ‘that the association of Ganesh with script arose through a confusion of the name of his wife Siddhi (the word siddhi means success) with
siddham
(a term for the Hindu alphabet from ancient times). But scholars have not examined the possibility that the name of Buddhi could actually be taken to refer to the Buddha.’

A woman a few rows back from Bharati looked up sharply at this. Linda had noticed her already, pen in hand, taking notes, and she glanced now between the woman and Bharati. They looked alike. Could she be the famous Leela?

‘I would like to argue that Ganesh’s role in the Mahabharata is a response to the competition Buddhism posed to the oral hegemony of the Vedas, from the sixth century
BC
onwards. Remember that while the Vedic tradition was predicated on
oral
transmission through the “perfect” and elite vehicle of Sanskrit, Buddhism made a merit of disseminating its message in as many dialects, languages and scripts as the faith came into contact with. Also, while the Vedic priests stressed
veda
(to announce or proclaim), the Buddha’s own focus was on
budh
(to understand, to awake) – that is, on actually
understanding
rather than simply
repeating
the scriptures.’

The Leela woman was certainly lovely. She had wavy dark hair like Bharati, and the longest, biggest eyes that Linda had ever seen. Linda thought of the way the Dictator had described Leela in his book – with her ‘cow-lash eyes’ – and thought that on balance the phrase didn’t do her justice. On the whole, she wasn’t sure she’d liked the Dictator’s cast of women. She had doubts about their over-lofty stature, their lustrous skin, their dark, flowing, Ganges-glossy hair. She was dubious about their breasts, those annoyingly perfect rotundas, as big and smooth as supermarket melons.

‘In the Puranas, Ganesh’s marriage to Buddhi stakes Hinduism’s claim of authority over the scriptures. Similarly, one could argue that he was placed in the Mahabharata in an attempt by Hindus to co-opt the new and previously shunned medium of script, which, thanks to the Buddhists, was becoming increasingly popular in India.’

This Leela lady was the only true exception. Though the Dictator was apt to lose himself in his story (as Linda found through the ache in her fingers when she typed up his ramblings), and although she was bemused by his supernatural tales of Leela’s exploits, she couldn’t help feeling admiration. As she listened to the gentle Indian voice enlarging on Leela’s various incarnations, she even felt a pang of envy.
She
wanted to be a woman like that. To have somebody describe
her
as a brave and undaunted firebrand kind of person.

‘We can see this in how the Ganesh dictation episode is described in the North Indian edition of the epic. Here the act of writing protects “divine words in the language of truth”. For the first time in recorded history, script becomes integral to the fabric of Vedic-Hinduism.’

The more she followed Leela’s story – and that of Meera, her playmate, supporter and associate – the more Linda began to wish herself into the book too. She wanted to be one of Leela’s followers. She wanted to sit in those cool clay courtyards, under the shade of those tamarisk trees, by chill mountain rivers. Before long, every Leela-episode the Dictator invented underwent the same metamorphosis in her imagination.

‘But the question still remains,’ Linda said, ‘if Vedic-Hinduism used Ganesh as a means of answering those challenges from Buddhism that were seen as most dangerous – “understanding” and script – then how does one explain the concurrent prominence of Ganesh-worship within Buddhism? Where does Ganesh come from?

‘All the evidence I have looked at points to the simultaneous and independent existence of Ganesh-worship within Buddhism. Emperor Ashoka’s daughter took Ganesh-worship to Nepal. The Buddha himself disclosed a mantra in praise of Ganesh to his companions. There has been a very wide dissemination of Ganesh-worship via Buddhism, beyond the borders of India – to Buddhist Nepal, China and Tibet, as well as to Burma and Indonesia. Indeed, Chinese-Buddhist paintings and sculptures of Ganesh are earlier than any Ganesh image in India. If Buddhism took Ganesh-worship to China as early as this, logically it must have existed in India before that.’

It wasn’t until she was at the end of the Dictator’s tapes, however, that she saw how closely his story was related to Bharati’s. Why had this strange man felt compelled to speak a magical tale about Bharati’s father Vyasa into a dictaphone and given it to her to transcribe? Should she warn Bharati? She was about to ring her mum – who had been so against her doing the Indian man’s typing in the first place – and ask her advice, when she got an email: her paper had been accepted by the Living Sanskrit Akademi. She was on her way to Delhi!

‘Ganesh himself,’ Linda said, ‘probably represents a pan-Indian deity, older even than the Vedas, worshipped by people from pre-Aryan times, and later standing for the overthrow of elite Sanskrit hierarchy and mindless repetition in favour of true understanding through writing.’

And so when she rang her mother, instead of expressing her anxiety about the typing, she was instead full of excitement and talk about the Indian trip and how she would read her paper in front of Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi—

‘Oh, Linda!’ her mother blurted out. ‘If you go to Delhi and give that lecture, you will come face to face with your father!’

‘What are you talking about, Mum?’ Linda asked. And then it all came out: that the man who got her mother pregnant in 1979 was a Sanskrit academic; that though she knew his name,
he
had no way of knowing where she disappeared to or that she had a child; and
this
was why baby Linda was brought up as an English girl, the daughter of the childhood sweetheart her mother had hastily married upon her return from India.

‘Mum! Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I wanted to, Linda,’ her mother said, ‘and after I saw you getting interested in India, I came to London that time to tell you. But I couldn’t. Supposing your father didn’t want to know you, after all these years?’

And mother and daughter wept down the phone to each other, overcome at last.

‘What this suppressed history illustrates,’ Linda said in conclusion, ‘is that Ganesh the scribe was there to pull things together. The Mahabharata – so gargantuan, so all-encompassing – is the work of numerous minds over many hundreds of years. A communally owned text, an expression of countless histories, court chronicles, beliefs, practices and religions, the work of many minds over a long and diverse epoch of Indian history, written over hundreds of years, the epic has such a great diversity of character, place and action, is such a mixture of traditions, orthodox and unorthodox – that it is impossible to fathom in one sitting. Ganesh and his pen make sense of it. By writing the Mahabharata down, Ganesh ushers a new age into existence.’

My aim has been to reunite siblings, to bring together mothers and daughters – to remove from my characters’ lives the obstacles that impinge on their happiness – and to expose Vyasa’s wrongdoing. I couldn’t help congratulating myself as I stood in the fort, looking at my characters gathered together in Indraprastha. I surveyed the scene, with its exquisite torrents of emotion, and recalled, in a pleasurable aside, all those grandiose phrases, which, in his over-weaning pride, Vyasa had forced me to inscribe in the epic about the Pandavas’ palace. (The flowers that rained from heaven; the trees made of gold; the jewels brought here from a mountain north of Kailash to adorn the walls.) I relished how effectively the words of Linda had upstaged Vyasa – how cleverly she had reinstated me, under Vyasa’s unknowing auspices, into the heart of Indian history and tradition. I saw from a distance Bharati introducing Linda to her brother, and then I saw Leela walk towards them. An expression of doubt crossed Bharati’s face, a hint of fear lit up Leela’s – and at last, to my eternal joy and unending satisfaction, Bharati held out her arms to her mother. I would savour that sight for aeons to come. For a moment Pablo, Linda and Ash watched, breathless, as the two women embraced, and then Bharati abruptly freed herself, glanced round at everybody with a defiant expression, and started gesticulating as she untangled from her sister the complicated story of a newly discovered English sibling and a strange Indian author’s dictaphone. And I stood and watched them, safe in the knowledge that the story she was describing was mine.

The last words I spoke into the dictaphone were:
This story is for Leela
. And so, as Linda obediently handed over the typescript to my heroine, I rejoiced in how completely my characters had done what I had planned for them. If there was one anxiety left it was poor Ash, caught between Sunita and Ram, unable to unite these two sides of himself. But I trusted that Leela would befriend him and help him find his way. It was about time he had a mother too. My only task now was the book itself.