Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (4 page)

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.

___________

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

L
OVE, 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!