THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 (2 page)

In memory of my grandparents.

Foreword
 

A note on Hindu time and the Mahabharata

‘Three hundred and sixty-five human years make one year of the Devas and the Pitrs, the Gods and the ancestors. Four are the ages in the land of Bharata: the krita, treta, dwapara and kali. The krita yuga lasts for 4800 divine years, the treta for 3600, the dwapara for 2400 and the kali for 1200; and, then, another krita begins. The krita or satya yuga is an age of purity; it is sinless. Dharma, righteousness, is perfect and walks on four feet in the krita. However, from the treta yuga, adharma, evil, comes to the world and the very fabric of time begins to decay. Finally, the kali yuga, the fourth age, is almost entirely corrupt, with dharma barely surviving, hobbling on one foot. A chaturyuga, a cycle of four ages, is 12,000 divine years, or 365 x 12,000 human years long. Seventy-one chaturyugas make a manvantara; fourteen manvantaras, a kalpa. A kalpa of a thousand chaturyugas, 12 million divine years, is one day of Brahma, the Creator. 8,000 Brahma years make one Brahma yuga; 1,000 Brahma yugas make a savana and Brahma’s life is 3,003 savanas long. One day of Mahavishnu is the lifetime of Brahma…’

The Great War, the Mahabharata, is fought at the very end of a dwapara yuga, the third age, just before the sinister kali yuga begins. Once, in time out of mind, the Gods created the kshatriyas to establish dharma, justice, in an anarchic world. Most royal kshatriya bloodlines can be traced back to the Devas themselves: in the most ancient days, the Gods came freely to the earth. But in time, generations, the noble race of warrior kings has grown arrogant and greedy. By the end of the dwapara yuga, they have become tyrants and they are still practically invincible.

Krishna, the Avatara and his cousins, the Pandavas, are born to destroy the power of the kshatriyas of Bharatavarsha (India) forever. This is what the Mahabharata yuddha, the war on the crack of the ages, accomplishes; and thus, ushers in the kali yuga, modern times. By the Hindu calender, the Great War was fought some five thousand years ago.

The House of Kuru is one of the oldest and noblest royal houses. It traces its origins to Soma Deva, the Moon God. Timeless Hastinapura, the city of elephants, is the capital of the Kuru kingdom and one great king after another has ruled from here. The legend of the Mahabharata begins with King Shantanu of the Kurus and how a son is born to him. But that prince, Devavrata, will never sit upon his father’s throne. Instead, Shantanu’s blind grandson, Dhritarashtra, will become king.

The main theme of the Mahabharata is the story of Dhritarashtra’s sons, the Kauravas and his brother Pandu’s sons, the Pandavas and the enmity between them. Dhritarashtra’s hundred boys are evil princes, led by the eldest of them: the ruthless Duryodhana, who is a demon. Pandu’s five princes are Devaputras, Devas’ sons, born to fight for dharma in the world.

They are Yudhishtira, Bheema, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva.

Almost every king in Bharatavarsha takes one side or the other in the Great War and ten million kshatriyas are killed. Dharma is established again on earth; but an age has ended and another has begun.

The Maharishi Vyasa, the poet of the Mahabharata, himself wanders in and out of the story. Unearthly beings—Devas, yakshas, gandharvas, nagas and apsaras—find their way into the story, as do demonic ones, asuras and rakshasas. The Mahabharata is set in a pristine and magical time of the earth. Its heroes and villains are all larger than life. The war itself is fought with occult weapons: the astras of the Gods.

Just before the war begins, the third Pandava, Arjuna, the greatest archer in the world, loses his nerve on the field of Kurukshetra. That perfect warrior cannot bear the thought of killing his cousins. Krishna, who is Arjuna’s charioteer, expounds the eternal dharma to him. This exposition is the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God. The Gita is the heart of the Mahabharata, its real treasure. At one level, all the rest of the restless action of the epic is a quest for the precious Gita and its stillness. The Gita is the Hindu’s New Testament.

Senayor ubhayor madhye…
between two immense armies, on the brink of a savage war, the Avatara sings his wisdom. To this day, Kurukshetra is holy ground for the Hindu because it was here that Krishna sang his immortal Gita and here that he revealed his Viswarupa, his Cosmic Form, to Arjuna.

The original Mahabharata in Sankrit is an epic poem of 100,000 couplets: seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. To record his epic for posterity is such a daunting task that Vyasa begs the elephant-headed God, Ganesha, to be his scribe. Ganesha has one stipulation: Vyasa must never keep him waiting, for even a moment, during the narration. The poet agrees and manages to keep ahead of his quicksilver writer, often with long digressions from his main story. Ganesha writes down Vyasa’s legend with a tusk he breaks from his own face.

This is a modern prose version of Vyasa’s timeless epic: the legend of the sons of Pandu.

Acknowledgements
 

The late Kamala Subramaniam’s Mahabharata in English was one of my main sources for this version of the epic. Her devotion was exceptional and my debt to her is great.

After finishing my book, I discovered Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s 12 volume translation. I have added some details from his work, which I found interesting and relevant—as footnotes, to the text of my book and in an Appendix.

I must thank Vasantha Menon, Jayashree Kumar, Saugata Mukherjee and Atreyee Gohain, for their wonderful copyediting and my Indian Publisher, Mr. RK Mehra of Rupa Books, for his personal interest and support.

Preface
 

THE BIRTH OF A POET
 

Once, in more gracious times, when the kshatriyas of the earth were like gods, there was a devout sovereign of Chedi called Uparichara. Indra of the Devas gave him a marvelous vimana, a crystal ship that flew anywhere at his very thought. That king became known as Uparichara Vasu; for like the Vasus, he ranged the sky in his vimana.

Uparichara’s wife was Girika and she bore him five excellent princes. One morning, when she was in her fertile time, queen Girika came to her husband and asked him to make love because she wanted another son. But today he had promised to go into the forest to hunt some meat for a sacrifice to his fathers in heaven. Uparichara set out with his bow in his hand.

Earlier, his queen had come to him wearing the sheerest robe; the king did not realize how much she had aroused him, until he missed two red stags with his arrows. Uparichara came to a lotus-laden pool in the depths of the forest and, with Girika’s lush body before his mind’s eye, ejaculated onto a banyan leaf.

He folded the leaf, chanted a potent mantra over it and called his hunting falcon down from the sky. ‘Fly friend, take this to my queen as swiftly as you can.’

As the falcon sped toward Chedi, a fishing eagle perched in a tree on the banks of the Yamuna saw him. The eagle mistook the banyan leaf for a shred of meat and flew at the falcon. The birds fought briefly in the air and the leaf fell out of the falcon’s beak, down into the river.

Now, a year ago the apsara Adrika had flown down from Devaloka to swim in the Yamuna. It was the twilight hour and when the nymph had been in the water for a while she saw a sage at the river’s edge, at his sandhya vandana, his evening worship. The austere one sat motionless, his eyes shut fast. Adrika saw how radiant he was and lusted after him.

She swam close to where the rishi sat and playfully seized his ankles. Adrika thought that when he saw how beautiful she was and quite naked, he would make love to her. She could not have been more mistaken.

The hermit’s eyes flew open and he cursed Adrika, ‘You dare disturb my dhyana? Be a fish from now!’

At once the apsara had golden scales and a fish’s body. The rishi rose and stalked away. Neither of them realized that fate had a deep purpose to fulfil by their encounter. Adrika stayed in the river, devouring smaller fish when she felt hungry. She grew bigger and bigger. Soon she forgot she was an apsara and thought of herself as just a fish.

When the eagle set on Uparichara’s falcon the banyan leaf plunged down into the midnight-blue Yamuna. Adrika swam lazily in the river. She saw the leaf strike the water and the king’s seed being washed off. As it sank, shimmering, with a flick of her tail the fish darted forward and swallowed that seed. At once she became pregnant.

In ten months she was so big she could hardly swim and only lay on the bed of the river. One day she was snared by a fisherman in his net. He drew her from the water and she lay heaving in his boat. The fisherman cut the golden fish open with his knife. There was a flash of light and he saw the spirit of a nymph fly into the sky.

The man was blinded for a moment. But when he looked into the fish’s belly, he saw two human infants: a boy and a girl lay there and gazed serenely back at him. The next day the fisherman arrived in the king’s palace and told Uparichara Vasu how he had discovered the children. The man begged to keep one of them.

The king guessed how those twins had been conceived and his queen still wanted another son. Uparichara Vasu kept the little boy and allowed the fisherman to take the girl. That prince born from a fish’s belly was named Matsyaraja; in time, he would rule his father’s kingdom as ably as Uparichara had. The fisherman raised the little girl in the wilderness as his daughter. A fortune-teller who read the lines on her palm said that, one day, she would become the queen of a great kingdom. The fisherman lived with that prophecy clasped close to his heart.

That dusky child’s body always smelled of fish and her father called her Matsyagandhi.

Some years later, the celibate Parashara, another immortal rishi on his pilgrimage, arrived on the banks of the Yamuna. It was a crisp winter morning. The sun shone pale and ethereal and the river sparkled as if a million jewels had been strewn across her water. The fisherman in his hut sat at his morning meal of last night’s fish and rice, when the austere figure loomed suddenly in his door.

“Take me across the river, I am in a hurry!” said Parashara ungraciously.

It was not the first time the profound one had passed this way and the fisherman recognized him. He called out to his daughter.

“Matsyagandhi, take our Muni Parashara across.”

She appeared at the corner of the hut, sixteen and bright as a bit of winter sun. Breast buds strained like young lotuses against her green blouse; eyes like saucers set wide in her lean dark face gazed frankly at Parashara. Without a word, Matsyagandhi led the illustrious one to the wooden boat tethered to the riverbank.

As he followed the girl, the smell of her body invaded him: the raw smell of fish with which she was born; but instead of being repulsed, Parashara lost his heart to her. He who had felt no twinge of desire in the company of fawning apsaras in Devaloka, was overcome by the earthy whiff of the fisher-girl.

When she helped him into the boat, he held her hand longer than he needed to. She freed herself quietly and cast off. But he would not be so easily denied. As they moved out Parashara reached for her hand again and clasped it on the oar at which she rowed. She smiled at him, her huge eyes twinkling. She stopped rowing, though they were in midstream and drifting. But she did not withdraw her hand.

Parashara’s presence and his dignity, which now suffered not a little for his visible excitement, attracted her. His hand quivered on hers. He leant forward awkwardly to try to kiss her. She smiled, dazzling him and stroked his gnarled hand without inhibition.

In her husky voice she said, “Holy one, why do you want to do this? You a lofty brahmana descended from Brahma and I the daughter of a nishada: between us, this isn’t proper.”

Then she trembled, remembering—suppose he cursed her! At that moment her father hailed them faintly from the bank. He stood washing his hands outside the hut and wanted to know why they had stopped. Parashara released the girl’s hand. She rowed again while the rishi kept a watch on the fisherman, who stood staring after them, his eyes shaded. Again, the sage took Matsyagandhi’s hand.

She said, “Brahmana, aren’t you repelled by my smell? Muni, don’t you know the Vedas say one should never have sexual intercourse during the day? And besides, my father can see us.”

When Parashara was near enough to kiss her, she was reminded sharply of his great age and both excited and dismayed by it. But he waved a slender arm over his head, his hand curled in an occult mudra. Instantly they were shrouded in mist and the fisherman could not see them any more. Then it began to snow!

It was dark on the boat on the river.

“Is that night enough?”

Little Matsyagandhi gave a cry of wonder. But being a virgin and still afraid, she said, “Yogin, you will enjoy me and go your way, but I will become pregnant. I will be ruined, the laughing stock of the world. And whatever will I tell my father?”

He cried hoarsely, “Give me your love and you will be famous forever among Devas and rishis. You will be known as Satyavati in heaven. Look.”

Again a wizardly mudra from him and she saw her body glow with a new beauty. Her limbs were lambent, her features finer and the smell of her transformed so now she smelt of wild jasmine, lotus and other unearthly fragrances. In a moment they spread from her for a yojana. Her original, fishy musk had not vanished either; it became a sublimely erotic perfume, which fuelled his ardor!

Still, she hesitated. She restrained his wandering hand, so he cried, “Say whatever you want and it shall be yours. Quickly, you are driving me mad!”

After a moment’s thought, she said, “If neither my father nor anyone else comes to know of this, if my virginity is not broken, if the son born of our love is a magician like you and if I always smell as sweetly as I do now, then take me O Rishi and gladly!”

Parashara, famed across the three worlds, laughed aloud. He said, “This is God’s will, Satyavati. All your conditions will be fulfilled and
your son shall be the greatest poet the world has ever known.”

He took her in his arms in that boat rocking softly on the Yamuna, while his magical snowstorm held up its opaque curtain around them. Impatient for him now that her fears had been allayed, she rowed to an island in the stream and moored there. And they lay together, unlikeliest lovers, heating the pale sand dry.

At last, after he drank deeply of her youth and she of his age, Parashara rose to bathe in the Yamuna. With a last kiss on top of her head, he walked upon the water and out of her life.

And in the mystic dimension, no sooner had she conceived than she was in labor.

Her delivery was miraculous and quite painless. As soon as he was born, her lustrous boy, as handsome as Kamadeva, became a full-grown rishi, with a kamandalu in one hand, a smooth staff in the other and his matted, tawny hair lit in a halo. That newborn and exceptional hermit said to his mother, “We must go our separate ways. But if you ever want to see me, just think of me and I will appear before you.” And he also walked away from her.

Since he was born on the dwipa in the Yamuna, Satyavati’s son was called Dwaipayana. But later, he was to divide the holy Veda and to compose the sacred Puranas from ancient revelations. He was to become renowned as Veda Vyasa.

Vyasa composed the immortal Mahabharata and his disciple Vaisampayana narrated the epic to King Janamejaya of the Kurus, during his sarpa yagna, his snake sacrifice.1

1. See Appendix.