THE Mahabharata is a text of about 75,000 verses—sometimes rounded off to 100,000—or three million words, some fifteen times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and a hundred times more interesting. More interesting both because its attitude to war is more conflicted and complex than that of the Greek epics and because its attitude to divinity is more conflicted and complex than that of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It resembles the Homeric epics in many ways (such as the theme of the great war, the style of its poetry, and its heroic characters, several of them fathered by gods), but unlike the Homeric gods, many of the Mahabharata gods were then, and still are, worshipped and revered in holy texts, including parts of the Mahabharata itself. It has remained central to Hindu culture since it was first composed. It is thus “great” (Maha), as its name claims, not only in size but in scope. Hindus from the time of the composition of the Mahabharata to the present moment know the characters in the texts just as Christians and Jews and Muslims, even if they are not religious, know Adam and Eve. To this day, India is called the land of Bharata, and the Mahabharata functions much like a national epic.
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 Mahabharatas, 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,” a literature that “does not belong in a book.” The Mahabharata (1.1.23) 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. 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).
~~Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling -by- Carole Satyamurti
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