http://mintonsunday.livemint.com/news/the-mahabharata-seen-in-the-clear-light-of-reason/2.4.2877621148.html
Sun, 13 Dec 2015
The epic tale lends itself to an infinite number of interpretations, but Irawati Karve's Yuganta could be the most thought-provoking
Sandipan Deb
Over the past few years, there has been a seemingly never-ending cloudburst of novels based on the Mahabharata. There is a series on the epic as seen from Duryodhana’s point of view, we have the tale written from Bhima’s perspective (I was a guest speaker at the Delhi launch of the book), and even a bestseller describing the events through the eyes of Karna’s wife. Of course, there are several versions as recounted by Draupadi.
The alarmingly prolific Ashok Banker is threatening an 18-part retelling, the first volume of which should be out any time now. And I am sure I have missed many other works that have already been published or are en route right now.
Good lord, even I wrote a novel, reimagining the Mahabharata in modern India, in the Mumbai underworld.
We are all, well, perpetrators. But that is also the incomparable greatness of the Mahabharata. It lends itself to an infinite number of interpretations, unlike any saga ever written—a civilizational singularity that will never cease to simultaneously fascinate and trouble us.
It was an idle discussion some days ago with a friend about the epic that brought me to Yuganta: The End of an Epoch. I had often heard of the book from my Maharashtrian friends, but now I decided to buy and read it. My friends had always assured me that it was a uniquely rational analysis of the Mahabharata and the society it describes, through studying some of its principal characters and their actions.
They were absolutely correct.
The late Irawati Karve (1905-70) was a sociologist, anthropologist, teacher and writer—and as an early feminist, apparently the first woman in Pune to ride a scooter. She approaches India’s—and perhaps the world’s—greatest epic in a spirit of rare scientific inquiry, that is respectful of the literary legacy of the Mahabharata, but shorn of the veneration that the epic and its protagonists usually inspire.
Karve published Yuganta in Marathi in 1967 and then translated it into English herself. Her Mahabharata is a tale of human beings who love, hate, plot, celebrate, grieve, win, lose, fight and die.
One may not agree with many of her conclusions (and many Mahabharata scholars, in fact, have publicly been at odds with them), but one cannot help but admire her scholarship and the clear light of reason that shines through the book. The gods are noticeable by their absence. No miracles happen. Even Krishna is fully a human being, though of exceptional intelligence and foresight. He performs no miracles, like dialling up a solar eclipse so Arjuna can keep his vow to kill Jayadratha before sunset.
Though Karve based her work on the critical edition of the Mahabharata complied by the Bhandarkar Institute, she also used original research and pure logic to figure out which parts of the epic were later interpolations and could not have been there in the original text.
For instance, she notes that the Mahabharata tells us nothing of Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan and Mathura—those stories come from the later Puranas, the Harivamsa and the Bhagavata. In the epic, Krishna, when he appears for the first time, at Draupadi’s swayamvara, is a powerful Yadava Kshatriya leader from Dwarka, the city where his clan had settled after being routed from Mathura by Magadha monarch Jarasandha.
In fact, of the 18 chapters of the Bhagvad Gita, Karve believes that only the first six are from the original version, and the others additions made in later centuries after Krishna had been raised to godhood.
Karve points out that the tone of the dialogue changes dramatically from the seventh chapter onwards. In the first six, it is a man advising and motivating a friend. Then it all suddenly changes to a guru with superhuman abilities preaching to a devotee. The relationship between Krishna and Arjuna, Karve says, citing numerous episodes, was that of intimate friendship and never of messiah and disciple.
Conversely, Karve shatters the myth of the Duryodhana-Karna friendship and proves that the relationship remained that of benefactor and retainer. She also develops a highly interesting theory, which may shock puritans, that Yudhishthira was the son of Vidura and not the god Dharma or Yama. She provides enough evidence from the story and Kshatriya social mores of the time to make the theory plausible.
The supernatural has no place in Karve’s interpretation of the Mahabharata. The only time a god makes an appearance is when the fire god Agni requests Krishna and Arjuna to burn down the Khandava forest with all its inhabitants because he is ravenously hungry. The two friends do so, in an act of wanton brutality that seems radically alien to the characters of the two heroes.
Karve’s explanation is again logical and scientific. There was no Agni involved. Dhritarashtra had just given the Pandavas a tract of land called Indraprastha on the outskirts of Hastinapura to live in. Most settlements (or kingdoms) of that time consisted of a town surrounded by some villages and agricultural land, and separated from other kingdoms by dense forests, which covered most of the Indian landmass.
Indraprastha was a small town and a clutch of villages and little ploughable land. (Obviously, Dhritarashtra had gifted the Pandavas the least valuable part of his kingdom.)
To grow the economy and improve the lot of their subjects, the Pandavas desperately needed to expand the amount of arable land under their control. To do that, they needed to obliterate the Khandava forest, and clinically dispassionate statecraft demanded that the people living in the forest be butchered too, to prevent future rebellions and social unrest.
The Agni excuse was invented to provide a socio-spiritually acceptable explanation of the genocide. Any secular reading of the Mahabharata would probably see the whole episode (as interpreted by Karve) as a typical idea of Krishna’s.
To Karve, Krishna “remains an elusive personality”, even in his death, which he almost willed upon himself, because of “what he would have called yoga, this calm, this non-involvement. This is why Krishna remains a figure for thought and search, but never touches one emotionally as do the other figures of this great epic”.
Who can argue with that?
She continues, “It might have been for this reason that when at last he was made into a god,” Karve continues, “he became a god with the warmest human qualities: the naughty child, the playmate of simple cowherds, and the eternal lover of all the young women of India.”
Karve makes a very important contrast between the two elders whom Arjuna did not want to kill—Bhishma and Drona. He did not kill them in spite of relentless pressure from Krishna; he merely wounded Bhishma severely enough for him to retire from the war, and Drona was beheaded by Dhrishtadyumna, even though Arjuna had several opportunities to kill him.
Karve has this to say. “Bhishma had fought a mock battle for 10 days (as the Kauravas’ general) in a last effort to dissuade both sides from pursuing the war. The three days of Drona’s generalship, however, were days of fierce fighting.” These three days “were days of great slaughter. Important people on both sides died. Chief among these (was) Abhimanyu... Drona showed no mercy in killing him. One cannot help thinking that Bhishma would not have killed Arjuna’s son—his own great-grandson—so ruthlessly.”
As long as Bhishma was the general, Drona echoed everything he said enthusiastically, because he was after all Bhishma’s employee. But once Bhishma had gone, Karve posits, Drona “felt it was now his duty to show his loyalty to his new master (Duryodhana)… and must have felt anxious to prove he was worthy of the position”.
Karve’s sketches of almost all the characters she writes about are almost completely devoid of any sentimentality. Even Karna, who, for millennia, has been the ultimate star-crossed tragic hero for millions of Indians, is dissected with cold surgical precision.
Perhaps the two most brilliant essays in the book are one that compares the lives of Draupadi and Sita, and the final one, which explains why Karve considers the Mahabharata the end of an epoch—yuganta. This involves the rise of the bhakti tradition, romantic deification and a penchant for a happily-ever-after ending.
“The word used for the period spent in the forest is the same in the case of Draupadi and Sita—vanavasa—but there the comparison ends. Draupadi was driven to the forest by her husband’s addiction to gambling and the consequent loss of his kingdom. Sita’s forest life, on the other hand, was the result of her husband’s idealism and sense of duty... Just as Draupadi had earlier had the right to share in the greatness and splendour of her husbands, now she had the responsibility of sharing their suffering and disgrace... Fortunately, however, Draupadi was not free to brood on the past. Even in the forest, she could not escape the responsibility of being a daughter, daughter-in-law and wife of great kings. From morning to night, she was busy.
“But Sita’s exile was unshadowed by hatred and suffering. For more than 12 years, she lived in a continual honeymoon. As the wife of the crown prince of Ayodhya, she had been surrounded by the bustle of servants, by her father-in-law and three mothers-in-law. There had been no chance to give herself completely to love. Now she was free. Her forest was like the forest in the romantic dreams of young city girls... To Sita herself, the memory of her exile was so idyllic that during her pregnancy, she craved for only one thing—to go back to the forest.”
Karve calls the whole story of the Ramayana “fantastic, romantic and other-worldly. Rama was an ideal man, Sita an ideal woman... To show he was brave, there had to be a war. The heroine had to get into difficulties from which the hero could save her. A courageous hero, a virtuous heroine—all the stuff of the Sanskrit kavya (literary, especially poetry) tradition.”
But Draupadi’s troubles were utterly human, with all her traumatic experiences described realistically, with no flowery embellishments.
“In almost every episode, insult is piled upon insult, constantly adding fuel to the hatred in her heart. Two words keep recurring in reference to Draupadi—nathavati anathavat (having husbands, but like an widow). She was the wife of five, but bereft… she had brave allies but was alone.”
Other than Bhima, none of her husbands were interested in avenging her humiliations; they were primarily concerned with getting a share of the kingdom.
The war in the Mahabharata happened in a real world, not one fought far away from the hero’s kingdom between armies of demons and monkeys. Kurukshetra was a ghastly carnage, fought between kith and kin, with entire clans wiped out.
There were only seven warriors left alive at the end of the war on the Pandava side—the five brothers, Krishna and Satyaki. There were only three survivors from the Kauravas—Kripacharya, Kritavarma and Ashwattama. Draupadi had lost her brother, all her children and almost everyone else in her family. The dying Duryodhana told her and Yudhishthira that they would rule over a kingdom of widows.
The Ramayana was written to portray an ideal man, and its scope is pitifully narrow compared with the scale of the Mahabharata, where each of its characters are prone to human weaknesses and follies. The passing of Sita, entirely due to Rama choosing to give public pressure precedence over his selfish love has been debated for ages, and will continue to be. Couldn’t Rama have given up his kingdom instead?
“In short,” says Karve, “that one event is a blot on the ideal portrait of Rama; but in that very event Sita was transformed from being a shadow of her husband to a person in her own right, with her own sorrows, her own humiliation, and the opportunity to face them entirely on her own.”
Draupadi had no such honour even in her death. When she fell, dying, high up in the Himalayas, during the Padavas’ mahaprasthana, none of her husbands, other than Bhima, turned back, and Yudhishthira told her curtly that she was being punished for loving Arjuna more than her other four husbands.
Yes, she had, but had she ever given even a hint of that in her actions? Karve mentions that there are only two stanzas in the entire Mahabharata where Draupadi expresses her special adoration of Arjuna.
And had Arjuna ever loved her? He had married several times—Subhadra, Ulupi, Chitrangada—but was he even capable of loving a woman truly? His first love and the most constant one had always been Krishna.
Draupadi’s last words were to Bhima who had stayed back with her as she passed her last breath and she understood, too late, who among her husbands had loved her with all his heart and soul: “In our next birth be the eldest, Bhima; under your shelter we can all live in safety and joy.”
The Mahabharata, according to Karve, marks the end of an epoch, because Indic society began changing gradually soon afterwards—socially, economically and spiritually. Vaishyas and Shudras are hardly mentioned in the epic, which is almost wholly concerned with Kshatriyas and Brahmans. Vaishyas, when referred to at all in the epic, are farmers, and the Shudras are servants and slaves.
But over time, the Vaishyas turned to trade and commerce and became the mainstay of the new religion of Jainism. The structure of the economy changed. Many Shudras became peasants and artisans.
The gods of the Mahabharata were classical, Vedic and Puranic. Here is an astonishing fact: while many yajnas are performed in the Mahabharata, temples are mentioned only four times in this vast epic, and these mentions too, Karve believes, are later interpolations.
Another astonishing fact: the Abhiras, who massacred Krishna’s Yadava clan after his death and captured Dwarka, were the ones who first deified Krishna and built temples to him. Was this down to politics, statecraft or appeasement?
One cannot know for sure, but this officially flagged off an entirely new movement. Men were made gods and their actions were not be questioned. Mystical ecstasy gained ground, denying the reality of the sword-semen-treachery-driven world that the Mahabharata describes in pitiless detail.
There were several other important disruptions—or inflexion points—too. We have no evidence at all that the Mahabharatic people knew how to write. All communication, even to distant kingdoms, were sent through emissaries who memorized the messages to be conveyed.
This made it easy to make later additions and interpolations that were politically or socially suited to various times and ages. The story of a fratricidal war over property—a grand tragedy that reveals human nature in all its glory and folly—became an immense treatise serving the purposes of all latecomers to the treasure trove, to be manipulated and given an official stamp from a mile-high spiritual plateau.
This has led to far more questions than any clear answers or enlightenment (whatever that means). For instance, the concept of a woman’s chastity.
Mahabharatic Kshatriyas whose wives had been kidnapped by enemies and raped would take them back after defeating their captors and rescuing them, and reinstate them with full honour. This was seen as valour, and not a lack of masculinity in any way. The corollary, of course, is that the wife was considered the husband’s property and to regain lost property was a test of the Kshatriya credo.
As for dharma, that concept which has troubled and inspired the argumentative Indian for millennia, Karve has this to say: “There are many discussions in the Mahabharata on dharma and non-dharma, on Atman, and the world. In spite of these arguments, a clear definition or description, or the inner meaning of the word dharma does not emerge. This attitude of intellectual inquiry was later lost. Bhaktimarga (the way of devotion) blunted all search.
“Apart from the later faiths like Vishnavism, Shaivism, Buddhism, etc., the main stream of religious thought remained nameless, elastic, fluid and individual... Even today, no thinking Hindu would be able to give a clear-cut definition of his religion. All he would say is: ‘This is my interpretation.’ ... In the Mahabharata, there are questions, answers and doubts regarding the nature of religion and human destiny. That is the reason the story comes so close to us.”
Karve points out that as the Bhakti cult grew in power and influence, many original episodes of the Mahabharata were quietly reworked by poets and playwrights who believed that all stories should have a happy ending.
The story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, as narrated in the Mahabharata is absolutely different from Kalidas’s Shakuntalam (though Karve is absolutely fulsome in her praise of Kalidas’s poetic brilliance). In the original telling, Shakuntala was hardly the innocent victim and Dushyanta never had amnesia.
The same is true for the tale of that godly king Harishchandra—the story we are most commonly told about him is utterly incongruent with what we are told in the Mahabharata. Even Sita has been given a happily-ever-after ending by many playwrights—the gods could never be so cruel.
n the ur-Mahabharata, gods were neither cruel nor charitable. This is in sharp contrast to, say, the Iliad, where the gods and goddesses are directly involved in the Trojan war, have their own favourites, quarrel among themselves and try to fix the match continuously.
The Mahabharata, if one treats it—as Karve does—as a record of a series of historical events that would shape the Indic mind forever, is then a story that encompasses all human experience and all human predicaments and emotions. There is no ideal here; there are only duties, attachments, ambitions, imperfections, fallibility, with no happy ending. Victory in Kurukshetra is also a defeat for the Pandavas, as Yudhishthira freely acknowledges.
The gains are ephemeral, the grief and guilt permanent.
When all else has been discussed to death, the Mahabharata is about doubt. No character, other than perhaps Krishna, Draupadi and Duryodhana, is immune to it. Every principal character is flawed and faces existential miseries.
The probabilistic pathways are, quite simply, innumerable. If Bhishma had not been stuck in his personal arrogance relating to his vow of celibacy, maybe the Kurukshetra war would never happened. If Kunti had revealed Karna’s true identity earlier—rather than go and plead with him on the eve of the war—the Kuru clan may have been saved.
One Jain Purana places the blame squarely on Draupadi for the apocalyptic bloodbath. Could not Gandhari, perhaps the purest and most ethical character in the epic, have made more efforts to influence her manic-depressive husband and megalomaniacal eldest son?
Could Krishna have played a less devious game, and been more neutral and saved the northern part of India from becoming a wasteland? And what precisely was dharma when every important Kaurava warrior was killed through subterfuge and treachery?
The questions remain and will remain without clear credible answers perhaps forever. Why did Duryodhana go straight to heaven (certainly a later interpolation), while everyone else had to get a small or large taste of hell before they ascended?
Irawati Karve’s Yuganta, a deeply researched, idiosyncratic and captivating analysis of the epic as just a story of human beings trapped in their insecurities and insufficiencies, in their rages and vengefulness, but also transcendent in their valour and sense of honour, is an astonishing work.
To end, I must quote the last two sentences from her preface to the book: “These essays are in a way an attempt to make the younger generation understand my point of view. I shall consider it a victory if they think my interpretation is wrong and read the Mahabharata merely to prove me wrong.”
This is possibly the best definition of scientific temper that I have ever read, and we all know that we need more and more of that when we look at our magnificent Indic heritage, and the terrible and self-destructive bitterness that has taken hold of our current national discourse.
Sandipan Deb is editorial director of Swarajyamag.com.
Sun, 13 Dec 2015
The epic tale lends itself to an infinite number of interpretations, but Irawati Karve's Yuganta could be the most thought-provoking
Sandipan Deb
Over the past few years, there has been a seemingly never-ending cloudburst of novels based on the Mahabharata. There is a series on the epic as seen from Duryodhana’s point of view, we have the tale written from Bhima’s perspective (I was a guest speaker at the Delhi launch of the book), and even a bestseller describing the events through the eyes of Karna’s wife. Of course, there are several versions as recounted by Draupadi.
The alarmingly prolific Ashok Banker is threatening an 18-part retelling, the first volume of which should be out any time now. And I am sure I have missed many other works that have already been published or are en route right now.
Good lord, even I wrote a novel, reimagining the Mahabharata in modern India, in the Mumbai underworld.
We are all, well, perpetrators. But that is also the incomparable greatness of the Mahabharata. It lends itself to an infinite number of interpretations, unlike any saga ever written—a civilizational singularity that will never cease to simultaneously fascinate and trouble us.
It was an idle discussion some days ago with a friend about the epic that brought me to Yuganta: The End of an Epoch. I had often heard of the book from my Maharashtrian friends, but now I decided to buy and read it. My friends had always assured me that it was a uniquely rational analysis of the Mahabharata and the society it describes, through studying some of its principal characters and their actions.
They were absolutely correct.
The late Irawati Karve (1905-70) was a sociologist, anthropologist, teacher and writer—and as an early feminist, apparently the first woman in Pune to ride a scooter. She approaches India’s—and perhaps the world’s—greatest epic in a spirit of rare scientific inquiry, that is respectful of the literary legacy of the Mahabharata, but shorn of the veneration that the epic and its protagonists usually inspire.
Karve published Yuganta in Marathi in 1967 and then translated it into English herself. Her Mahabharata is a tale of human beings who love, hate, plot, celebrate, grieve, win, lose, fight and die.
One may not agree with many of her conclusions (and many Mahabharata scholars, in fact, have publicly been at odds with them), but one cannot help but admire her scholarship and the clear light of reason that shines through the book. The gods are noticeable by their absence. No miracles happen. Even Krishna is fully a human being, though of exceptional intelligence and foresight. He performs no miracles, like dialling up a solar eclipse so Arjuna can keep his vow to kill Jayadratha before sunset.
Though Karve based her work on the critical edition of the Mahabharata complied by the Bhandarkar Institute, she also used original research and pure logic to figure out which parts of the epic were later interpolations and could not have been there in the original text.
For instance, she notes that the Mahabharata tells us nothing of Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan and Mathura—those stories come from the later Puranas, the Harivamsa and the Bhagavata. In the epic, Krishna, when he appears for the first time, at Draupadi’s swayamvara, is a powerful Yadava Kshatriya leader from Dwarka, the city where his clan had settled after being routed from Mathura by Magadha monarch Jarasandha.
In fact, of the 18 chapters of the Bhagvad Gita, Karve believes that only the first six are from the original version, and the others additions made in later centuries after Krishna had been raised to godhood.
Karve points out that the tone of the dialogue changes dramatically from the seventh chapter onwards. In the first six, it is a man advising and motivating a friend. Then it all suddenly changes to a guru with superhuman abilities preaching to a devotee. The relationship between Krishna and Arjuna, Karve says, citing numerous episodes, was that of intimate friendship and never of messiah and disciple.
Conversely, Karve shatters the myth of the Duryodhana-Karna friendship and proves that the relationship remained that of benefactor and retainer. She also develops a highly interesting theory, which may shock puritans, that Yudhishthira was the son of Vidura and not the god Dharma or Yama. She provides enough evidence from the story and Kshatriya social mores of the time to make the theory plausible.
The supernatural has no place in Karve’s interpretation of the Mahabharata. The only time a god makes an appearance is when the fire god Agni requests Krishna and Arjuna to burn down the Khandava forest with all its inhabitants because he is ravenously hungry. The two friends do so, in an act of wanton brutality that seems radically alien to the characters of the two heroes.
Karve’s explanation is again logical and scientific. There was no Agni involved. Dhritarashtra had just given the Pandavas a tract of land called Indraprastha on the outskirts of Hastinapura to live in. Most settlements (or kingdoms) of that time consisted of a town surrounded by some villages and agricultural land, and separated from other kingdoms by dense forests, which covered most of the Indian landmass.
Indraprastha was a small town and a clutch of villages and little ploughable land. (Obviously, Dhritarashtra had gifted the Pandavas the least valuable part of his kingdom.)
To grow the economy and improve the lot of their subjects, the Pandavas desperately needed to expand the amount of arable land under their control. To do that, they needed to obliterate the Khandava forest, and clinically dispassionate statecraft demanded that the people living in the forest be butchered too, to prevent future rebellions and social unrest.
The Agni excuse was invented to provide a socio-spiritually acceptable explanation of the genocide. Any secular reading of the Mahabharata would probably see the whole episode (as interpreted by Karve) as a typical idea of Krishna’s.
To Karve, Krishna “remains an elusive personality”, even in his death, which he almost willed upon himself, because of “what he would have called yoga, this calm, this non-involvement. This is why Krishna remains a figure for thought and search, but never touches one emotionally as do the other figures of this great epic”.
Who can argue with that?
She continues, “It might have been for this reason that when at last he was made into a god,” Karve continues, “he became a god with the warmest human qualities: the naughty child, the playmate of simple cowherds, and the eternal lover of all the young women of India.”
Karve makes a very important contrast between the two elders whom Arjuna did not want to kill—Bhishma and Drona. He did not kill them in spite of relentless pressure from Krishna; he merely wounded Bhishma severely enough for him to retire from the war, and Drona was beheaded by Dhrishtadyumna, even though Arjuna had several opportunities to kill him.
Karve has this to say. “Bhishma had fought a mock battle for 10 days (as the Kauravas’ general) in a last effort to dissuade both sides from pursuing the war. The three days of Drona’s generalship, however, were days of fierce fighting.” These three days “were days of great slaughter. Important people on both sides died. Chief among these (was) Abhimanyu... Drona showed no mercy in killing him. One cannot help thinking that Bhishma would not have killed Arjuna’s son—his own great-grandson—so ruthlessly.”
As long as Bhishma was the general, Drona echoed everything he said enthusiastically, because he was after all Bhishma’s employee. But once Bhishma had gone, Karve posits, Drona “felt it was now his duty to show his loyalty to his new master (Duryodhana)… and must have felt anxious to prove he was worthy of the position”.
Karve’s sketches of almost all the characters she writes about are almost completely devoid of any sentimentality. Even Karna, who, for millennia, has been the ultimate star-crossed tragic hero for millions of Indians, is dissected with cold surgical precision.
Perhaps the two most brilliant essays in the book are one that compares the lives of Draupadi and Sita, and the final one, which explains why Karve considers the Mahabharata the end of an epoch—yuganta. This involves the rise of the bhakti tradition, romantic deification and a penchant for a happily-ever-after ending.
“The word used for the period spent in the forest is the same in the case of Draupadi and Sita—vanavasa—but there the comparison ends. Draupadi was driven to the forest by her husband’s addiction to gambling and the consequent loss of his kingdom. Sita’s forest life, on the other hand, was the result of her husband’s idealism and sense of duty... Just as Draupadi had earlier had the right to share in the greatness and splendour of her husbands, now she had the responsibility of sharing their suffering and disgrace... Fortunately, however, Draupadi was not free to brood on the past. Even in the forest, she could not escape the responsibility of being a daughter, daughter-in-law and wife of great kings. From morning to night, she was busy.
“But Sita’s exile was unshadowed by hatred and suffering. For more than 12 years, she lived in a continual honeymoon. As the wife of the crown prince of Ayodhya, she had been surrounded by the bustle of servants, by her father-in-law and three mothers-in-law. There had been no chance to give herself completely to love. Now she was free. Her forest was like the forest in the romantic dreams of young city girls... To Sita herself, the memory of her exile was so idyllic that during her pregnancy, she craved for only one thing—to go back to the forest.”
Karve calls the whole story of the Ramayana “fantastic, romantic and other-worldly. Rama was an ideal man, Sita an ideal woman... To show he was brave, there had to be a war. The heroine had to get into difficulties from which the hero could save her. A courageous hero, a virtuous heroine—all the stuff of the Sanskrit kavya (literary, especially poetry) tradition.”
But Draupadi’s troubles were utterly human, with all her traumatic experiences described realistically, with no flowery embellishments.
“In almost every episode, insult is piled upon insult, constantly adding fuel to the hatred in her heart. Two words keep recurring in reference to Draupadi—nathavati anathavat (having husbands, but like an widow). She was the wife of five, but bereft… she had brave allies but was alone.”
Other than Bhima, none of her husbands were interested in avenging her humiliations; they were primarily concerned with getting a share of the kingdom.
The war in the Mahabharata happened in a real world, not one fought far away from the hero’s kingdom between armies of demons and monkeys. Kurukshetra was a ghastly carnage, fought between kith and kin, with entire clans wiped out.
There were only seven warriors left alive at the end of the war on the Pandava side—the five brothers, Krishna and Satyaki. There were only three survivors from the Kauravas—Kripacharya, Kritavarma and Ashwattama. Draupadi had lost her brother, all her children and almost everyone else in her family. The dying Duryodhana told her and Yudhishthira that they would rule over a kingdom of widows.
The Ramayana was written to portray an ideal man, and its scope is pitifully narrow compared with the scale of the Mahabharata, where each of its characters are prone to human weaknesses and follies. The passing of Sita, entirely due to Rama choosing to give public pressure precedence over his selfish love has been debated for ages, and will continue to be. Couldn’t Rama have given up his kingdom instead?
“In short,” says Karve, “that one event is a blot on the ideal portrait of Rama; but in that very event Sita was transformed from being a shadow of her husband to a person in her own right, with her own sorrows, her own humiliation, and the opportunity to face them entirely on her own.”
Draupadi had no such honour even in her death. When she fell, dying, high up in the Himalayas, during the Padavas’ mahaprasthana, none of her husbands, other than Bhima, turned back, and Yudhishthira told her curtly that she was being punished for loving Arjuna more than her other four husbands.
Yes, she had, but had she ever given even a hint of that in her actions? Karve mentions that there are only two stanzas in the entire Mahabharata where Draupadi expresses her special adoration of Arjuna.
And had Arjuna ever loved her? He had married several times—Subhadra, Ulupi, Chitrangada—but was he even capable of loving a woman truly? His first love and the most constant one had always been Krishna.
Draupadi’s last words were to Bhima who had stayed back with her as she passed her last breath and she understood, too late, who among her husbands had loved her with all his heart and soul: “In our next birth be the eldest, Bhima; under your shelter we can all live in safety and joy.”
The Mahabharata, according to Karve, marks the end of an epoch, because Indic society began changing gradually soon afterwards—socially, economically and spiritually. Vaishyas and Shudras are hardly mentioned in the epic, which is almost wholly concerned with Kshatriyas and Brahmans. Vaishyas, when referred to at all in the epic, are farmers, and the Shudras are servants and slaves.
But over time, the Vaishyas turned to trade and commerce and became the mainstay of the new religion of Jainism. The structure of the economy changed. Many Shudras became peasants and artisans.
The gods of the Mahabharata were classical, Vedic and Puranic. Here is an astonishing fact: while many yajnas are performed in the Mahabharata, temples are mentioned only four times in this vast epic, and these mentions too, Karve believes, are later interpolations.
Another astonishing fact: the Abhiras, who massacred Krishna’s Yadava clan after his death and captured Dwarka, were the ones who first deified Krishna and built temples to him. Was this down to politics, statecraft or appeasement?
One cannot know for sure, but this officially flagged off an entirely new movement. Men were made gods and their actions were not be questioned. Mystical ecstasy gained ground, denying the reality of the sword-semen-treachery-driven world that the Mahabharata describes in pitiless detail.
There were several other important disruptions—or inflexion points—too. We have no evidence at all that the Mahabharatic people knew how to write. All communication, even to distant kingdoms, were sent through emissaries who memorized the messages to be conveyed.
This made it easy to make later additions and interpolations that were politically or socially suited to various times and ages. The story of a fratricidal war over property—a grand tragedy that reveals human nature in all its glory and folly—became an immense treatise serving the purposes of all latecomers to the treasure trove, to be manipulated and given an official stamp from a mile-high spiritual plateau.
This has led to far more questions than any clear answers or enlightenment (whatever that means). For instance, the concept of a woman’s chastity.
Mahabharatic Kshatriyas whose wives had been kidnapped by enemies and raped would take them back after defeating their captors and rescuing them, and reinstate them with full honour. This was seen as valour, and not a lack of masculinity in any way. The corollary, of course, is that the wife was considered the husband’s property and to regain lost property was a test of the Kshatriya credo.
As for dharma, that concept which has troubled and inspired the argumentative Indian for millennia, Karve has this to say: “There are many discussions in the Mahabharata on dharma and non-dharma, on Atman, and the world. In spite of these arguments, a clear definition or description, or the inner meaning of the word dharma does not emerge. This attitude of intellectual inquiry was later lost. Bhaktimarga (the way of devotion) blunted all search.
“Apart from the later faiths like Vishnavism, Shaivism, Buddhism, etc., the main stream of religious thought remained nameless, elastic, fluid and individual... Even today, no thinking Hindu would be able to give a clear-cut definition of his religion. All he would say is: ‘This is my interpretation.’ ... In the Mahabharata, there are questions, answers and doubts regarding the nature of religion and human destiny. That is the reason the story comes so close to us.”
Karve points out that as the Bhakti cult grew in power and influence, many original episodes of the Mahabharata were quietly reworked by poets and playwrights who believed that all stories should have a happy ending.
The story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, as narrated in the Mahabharata is absolutely different from Kalidas’s Shakuntalam (though Karve is absolutely fulsome in her praise of Kalidas’s poetic brilliance). In the original telling, Shakuntala was hardly the innocent victim and Dushyanta never had amnesia.
The same is true for the tale of that godly king Harishchandra—the story we are most commonly told about him is utterly incongruent with what we are told in the Mahabharata. Even Sita has been given a happily-ever-after ending by many playwrights—the gods could never be so cruel.
n the ur-Mahabharata, gods were neither cruel nor charitable. This is in sharp contrast to, say, the Iliad, where the gods and goddesses are directly involved in the Trojan war, have their own favourites, quarrel among themselves and try to fix the match continuously.
The Mahabharata, if one treats it—as Karve does—as a record of a series of historical events that would shape the Indic mind forever, is then a story that encompasses all human experience and all human predicaments and emotions. There is no ideal here; there are only duties, attachments, ambitions, imperfections, fallibility, with no happy ending. Victory in Kurukshetra is also a defeat for the Pandavas, as Yudhishthira freely acknowledges.
The gains are ephemeral, the grief and guilt permanent.
When all else has been discussed to death, the Mahabharata is about doubt. No character, other than perhaps Krishna, Draupadi and Duryodhana, is immune to it. Every principal character is flawed and faces existential miseries.
The probabilistic pathways are, quite simply, innumerable. If Bhishma had not been stuck in his personal arrogance relating to his vow of celibacy, maybe the Kurukshetra war would never happened. If Kunti had revealed Karna’s true identity earlier—rather than go and plead with him on the eve of the war—the Kuru clan may have been saved.
One Jain Purana places the blame squarely on Draupadi for the apocalyptic bloodbath. Could not Gandhari, perhaps the purest and most ethical character in the epic, have made more efforts to influence her manic-depressive husband and megalomaniacal eldest son?
Could Krishna have played a less devious game, and been more neutral and saved the northern part of India from becoming a wasteland? And what precisely was dharma when every important Kaurava warrior was killed through subterfuge and treachery?
The questions remain and will remain without clear credible answers perhaps forever. Why did Duryodhana go straight to heaven (certainly a later interpolation), while everyone else had to get a small or large taste of hell before they ascended?
Irawati Karve’s Yuganta, a deeply researched, idiosyncratic and captivating analysis of the epic as just a story of human beings trapped in their insecurities and insufficiencies, in their rages and vengefulness, but also transcendent in their valour and sense of honour, is an astonishing work.
To end, I must quote the last two sentences from her preface to the book: “These essays are in a way an attempt to make the younger generation understand my point of view. I shall consider it a victory if they think my interpretation is wrong and read the Mahabharata merely to prove me wrong.”
This is possibly the best definition of scientific temper that I have ever read, and we all know that we need more and more of that when we look at our magnificent Indic heritage, and the terrible and self-destructive bitterness that has taken hold of our current national discourse.
Sandipan Deb is editorial director of Swarajyamag.com.
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