Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (3 page)

The story may have been told in some form as early as 900 BCE; its resemblance to Persian, Scandinavian, Greek, and other Indo-European epic traditions suggests that the core of the tale may reach back to the time when these cultures had not yet dispersed, well before 2000 BCE. But the
Mahabharata
did not reach its present form until the period from about 300 BCE to 300 CE—or half a millennium; it takes a long time to compose three million words.

The
Mahabharata
marks the transition from the corpus of Sanskrit texts known as
shruti
, the unalterable Vedic canon of texts (dated to perhaps 1500 BCE) that the seers “heard” from divine sources, to those known as
smriti
, the human tradition, constantly revised, the “remembered texts” of human authorship, texts that could be altered. It calls itself “the fifth Veda” (though so do several other texts) and dresses its story in Vedic trappings (such as ostentatious Vedic sacrifices). It looks back to the Vedic age, and may well preserve many memories of that period, and that place, up in the Punjab. The Painted Gray Ware artifacts discovered at sites identified with locations in the
Mahabharata
may be evidence of the reality of the great
Mahabharata
war, which is usually supposed to have occurred around 950 BCE. But the text is very much the product of its times, the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium.

The
Mahabharata
was retold very differently by all of its many authors in the long line of literary descent. It is so extremely fluid that there is no single
Mahabharata
; there are hundreds of
Mahabharata
s, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions (one reason why it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses). The
Mahabharata
is not
confined to
a text; the story is there to be picked up and found, salvaged as anonymous treasure from the ocean of story. It has been called “a work in progress,”
²
a literature that “does not belong in a book.”
³
The
Mahabharata
(1.1.23)
⁴
describes itself as unlimited in both time and space—eternal and infinite: “Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell it again. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is
not
here is found nowhere else.” And in case you missed that, it is repeated elsewhere and then said yet again in slightly different words toward the end of the epic: “Whatever is here about dharma, profit, pleasure, and release [from the cycle of death and rebirth] is also found elsewhere, but what is
not
here is found nowhere else . . .” (18.5.38).

The
Mahabharata
grew and changed in numerous parallel traditions spread over the entire subcontinent of India, constantly retold and rewritten, both in Sanskrit and in vernacular dialects. It grows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic, constantly reinterpreting it. The loose construction of the text gives it a quasi-novelistic quality, open to new forms as well as new ideas, inviting different ideas to contest one another, to come to blows, in the pages of the text. It seems to me highly unlikely that any single author could have lived long enough to put it all together, but that does not mean that it is a miscellaneous mess with no unified point of view, let alone “the most monstrous chaos,” “the huge and motley pile,” or “gargantuan hodge-podge” and “literary pile-up” that some scholars have accused it of being. European approaches to the
Mahabharata
often assumed that collators did not know what they were doing and, blindly cutting and pasting, accidentally created a monstrosity.

But the
Mahabharata
is not the head of a brahmin philosophy accidentally stuck onto a body of non-brahmin folklore, like the heads and bodies of people in several Indian myths, or the mythical beast invoked by Woody Allen, which has the body of a lion and the head of a lion, but not the same lion.
⁵
True, it was somewhat like an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit, or who knew someone who knew Sanskrit, could add a bit here, a bit there. But the powerful intertextuality of Hinduism ensured that anyone who added anything to the
Mahabharata
was well aware of the whole textual tradition behind it and fitted his or her own insight, or story, thoughtfully into the ongoing conversation. However diverse its sources, for several thousand years the tradition has regarded it as a conversation among people who know one another’s views and argue with silent partners. It is a contested text, a brilliantly orchestrated hybrid narrative with no single party line on any subject. It was contested not only within the Hindu tradition, where concepts of dharma were much debated, but also by the rising rival traditions of Buddhism and Jainism. These challenges to the brahmin narrators are reflected in the text at such places as Bhishma’s teachings in Books 12 and 13. But the text has an integrity that the culture supports (in part by attributing it to a single author) and that it is our duty to acknowledge. The contradictions at its heart are not the mistakes of a sloppy editor but enduring cultural dilemmas that no author could ever have resolved.

The great scholar and poet A. K. Ramanujan used to say that no Indian ever hears the
Mahabharata
for the first time. For centuries Indians heard it in the form of public recitations, or performances of dramatized episodes, or in the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples. More recently, they read it in India’s version of Classic Comics (the
Amar Chitra Katha
series) or saw it in the hugely successful televised version, based largely on the comic book; the streets of India were empty (or as empty as any street ever is in India) during the broadcast hours on Sunday mornings, from 1988 to 1990. Or they saw various Bollywood versions, or the six-hour film version (1989) of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical adaptation (1985).

In 1989, Shashi Tharoor (Indian Minister of State for External Affairs) retold the
Mahabharata
as
The Great Indian Novel
, in which the heroes are recast as thinly veiled forms of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and others. (The hero Karna, who, in the Sanskrit version, slices off the armor that grows on his body and fights against his brothers, appears as Mohammed Ali Karna, who, when he goes over from the Hindu to the Muslim side, seizes a knife and circumcises himself.) Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, in her 2009 novel
The Palace of Illusions
, retells the
Mahabharata
from the standpoint of the heroine, Draupadi, who is, in this telling, in love with Karna and close to the transsexual heroine Shikhandin/Shikhandini, who is, in the Sanskrit text, too, Draupadi’s brother/sister but never meets her. And now there is Chindu Sreedharan’s “Epicretold,” posted on Twitter, so that we can read the
Mahabharata
one 140-character tweet at a time (www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1917882,00.html). Reintepretations of this sort have been going on from the moment the
Mahabharata
began to be composed. Whenever the
Mahabharata
is told or retold, the ethical and religious questions it raises are given new, contemporary meanings.

And this new verse retelling by Carole Satyamurti takes its place in this honorable lineage. It is not, technically, a new translation, since Satyamurti worked not from the Sanskrit original but from other translations, particularly the Ganguli and van Buitenen/Fitzgerald translations. Nor is it a freely rendered retelling, since she sticks very close to the content, if not the wording, of the translations she used. Her abridgment, too, is different from that of the many other available versions, including that of John Smith; Satyamurti has made her own choices, and has included several episodes that Ganguli, van Buitenen/Fitzgerald, and Smith leave out, popular stories such as the episode in which Vyasa dictates the text to Ganesha. And most significantly, she has told the story not in prose but in blank verse.

THE STORY OF THE HEROES,
AND THE STORIES OF WOMEN

The bare bones of the central story (and there are hundreds of peripheral stories, too) could be summarized like this, for our purposes:

The five sons of King Pandu, called the Pandavas, were fathered by gods: Yudhishthira by Dharma (the moral law incarnate), Bhima by the Wind, Arjuna by Indra (king of the gods), and the twins by the Ashvins. All five of them married Draupadi. When Yudhishthira lost the kingdom to his cousins in a game of dice, the Pandavas and Draupadi went into exile for twelve years, at the end of which—with the help of their cousin, the incarnate god Krishna, who befriended the Pandavas and whose counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield is the
Bhagavad Gita
—they regained their kingdom through a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides was killed. They all went to heaven and died happily ever after.

But the story of the Pyrrhic victory of the Pandava princes constitutes just a fifth of the epic, its skeleton. Many episodes, including some about women, are hooked on fairly securely to the fabric of the plot: a question about the ancestors of the Pandavas inspires the narrator to tell the story of the birth of their ancestor Bharata, from Shakuntala, the innocent maiden whom King Dushyanta seduced and abandoned (a story that captivated Goethe); Yudhishthira is consoled, after his own gambling disaster, by the tale of Nala, whose compulsive gambling lost him his kingdom and his wife Damayanti, until she managed to reunite them. Other stories are told as moral lessons to the human heroes and heroines, such as the tale of King Shibi, who chopped off his own flesh to save a dove fleeing from a hawk (both birds turned out to be gods disguised to test him); and Savitri, whose steadfastness persuaded the god of death to spare her doomed husband. Philosophical and legal questions also arise out of the aporias of the plot and are answered in discourses that sometimes go on for hundreds of verses. Hindu tradition attributes the work to a single author, named Vyasa, but Vyasa is also the author (that is, the father) of the two fathers of the warring heroes, Pandu and his brother Dhritarashtra. Thus Vyasa, the author, is himself a character in his own story.

The text depicts women with powers and privileges they would seldom have again in Hindu literature. Women with multiple sexual partners appear with surprising frequency in the
Mahabharata
; the text offers us, in four consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners (sometimes premarital) seriatim. Satyavati has two sexual partners (her legitimate husband Shantanu and the sage who fathers Vyasa on the island). Ambika and Ambalika have two legitimate partners (the king who dies and Vyasa, through the Levirate). Kunti has one husband (Pandu, legitimate but unconsummated) and four sexual partners (gods, quasi-legitimate). Madri has three partners (Pandu, legitimate and fatally consummated, and two quasi-legitimate gods). The prize goes to Draupadi, who has five legitimate husbands, simultaneously—the five Pandavas. Her pentad is truly extraordinary, for though men could have several spouses throughout most of Hindu history (and a number of men in the
Mahabharata
do have several wives, most famously the Pandava hero Arjuna and the incarnate god Krishna), women most decidedly could not. It is always possible that the
Mahabharata
was recording a time when polyandry (multiple husbands) was the custom (as it is nowadays in parts of the Himalaya), but there is no evidence to support this contention. Since there is no other evidence that women at this time actually had multiple sexual partners, these stories can only be suggestive, evidence either of women’s greater sexual freedom or, perhaps, of men’s fears of what might happen were women to have that freedom, of the male redactors’ nightmare vision of where all that autonomy might lead. Draupadi’s hypersexuality may simply have validated an ideal that was understood to be out of reach for ordinary women—imagined precisely in order to be disqualified as a viable option. King Pandu tells his wife Kunti a story explicitly remarking upon an archaic promiscuity that is no longer in effect, pointedly reminding her, and any women who may have heard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available to them, even though he tells her this story in order to persuade her to have sex with someone other than himself—admittedly, a god.

The lineage of the heroines is therefore a remarkably positive fantasy of female equality. True, Draupadi doesn’t choose to have five husbands, and though she has a sharp tongue at times, she generally exerts her power through subtlety and manipulation—as subservient women always have—not exactly a model of equality. But many of the
Mahabharata
women are a feminist’s dream (or a sexist’s nightmare): smart, aggressive, steadfast, eloquent, tough as nails, and resilient. Other women in the
Mahabharata
show remarkable courage and intelligence, too, but their courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs, Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, keeps her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order to share his blindness. Pandu’s two widows vie for the privilege of dying on his pyre.

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).