Metaphor for our times
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
January 16, 2005

The Mahabharata is what you make of it ...

IN my previous column (January 2, 2005, The Hindu-Sunday Magazine), I mused about the contemporary resonance of the Mahabharata. Prof P. Lal had even suggested that "the essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the 20th Century". What should we seek from it at the start of the 21st?

Lal himself has an intriguing answer. Vyasa, he says, "posits an intricate dharma, where right and wrong are bewilderingly mixed .... [His] epic is a mirror in which the Indian sees himself undeceived." The Mahabharata is a tale of the real world, one whose heroes have feet of clay. "The anguished intensity of the Indian's involvement with the Mahabharata can be seen in the way reference is made to the epic in public life. The Ramayana is cited generally when ethical ideals are expected; the Mahabharata is referred to when compromises are made, shady deals struck, promises dishonoured, battles fought, disasters lamented." And indeed, which Indian, perusing the incessant political reports that dominate our national newspapers, has not come across references to great conflicts as "Kurukshetras", heroes as "Arjuns", villains as "Kauravas"? The Mahabharata is an unending source of metaphor for the rhetoric of our public debate.

Indian politicians are ever ready to portray themselves as Yudhishtira, to warn overbold rivals that they are Abhimanyus trapped in padmavyuhams (lotus-rings) of their own making, or to depict misguided senior statesmen as Bhishmas (men who provide, as Mrs. Gandhi said of Morarji Desai's stand on the abolition of privy purses, "a moral facade to an indefensible case".)

`Our Doomsday Epic'

But Lal's argument is not merely at the metaphorical level, though he dwells with great relish on these and similar examples. The Mahabharata, he says, "is our Doomsday Epic", depicting a period of "moral collapse" comparable to that of our times: "the Mahabharata is recommended reading for an age that breeds dry thoughts in a Waste Land, speculates fascinatedly on the paradoxical Black Holes of interstellar space, and cannot be sure if there will indeed be a 2001 for mankind beyond the Holocaust."

Lal finds interesting support for this view in the French dramatist who wrote Peter Brook's "international" version of the epic, Jean-Claude Carrière. "This immense poem," Carrière wrote in 1985, "which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historical or psychological analysis .... Layers of ramifications, sometimes contradictory, follow up on one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. That theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction — everything points in the same direction."

Carrière may well have been thinking of the Cold War still raging at the time, but his point is fair enough even today: in an India of erupting caste and communal conflict, terrorist and secessionist strife, police "encounters" and an alarming daily toll of human lives in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid or the near-pogroms in Gujarat, any work that speaks of a "time of destruction" cannot but be considered relevant. No wonder that so many contemporary poets, dramatists and novelists, writing in every Indian language, have found inspiration in episodes of the Mahabharata, which they have retold in a variety of ways. But the message is not a purely negative one. In the face of destruction, the Mahabharata offers a valid response, in the Bhagavad Gita's affirmation of disinterested action. Lal, indeed, argues that "the Mahabharata is an epic of action" and that its "core moral ... is to show the primacy of action".

The events of the epic, as they unfold, offer other straws for drowning modern optimists to clutch. Rajaji saw the epic as pointing to "the vanity of ambition and the evil and futility of anger and hatred". The late C.V. Narasimhan, then a senior United Nations official, went further, identifying a "theme of peace and reconciliation" in the Mahabharata which had "a special application" in the days of the Cold War (and perhaps even more so in an era in which a hot peace, littered with little wars, has broken out at the end of the Cold War). Professor Barbara Stoler Miller, Peter Brook's scholarly consultant on the play, declared that "the purpose of the Mahabharata is to teach that good ultimately triumphs, even in a time of cosmic destructiveness." Lal himself, after focusing on the didacticism of the Bhagavad Gita, added to his analysis the point that "the end of the Mahabharata underlines the futility of revengeful warfare and restores the validity of Arjuna's compassion".

What do these contradictory exegeses suggest about the message of the Mahabharata in today's India? They reflect, certainly, the undeniable fact that the great epic, like many great epics, has the capacity to be all things to all men. The hubristic claim for the epic, in its own words — "What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere" — was thus quite literally true, at least over the thousand years the epic took to arrive at its settled shape in around 500 A.D. Whereas the classical Indian sastras were treatises on artha (wealth), dharma (faith), kama (pleasure) or moksha (salvation), the Mahabharata, uniquely, is simultaneously arthasastra, dharmasastra, kamasastra and mokshasastra — a "fifth Veda", as it has been called, of material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical, life, but unlike the other four, a secular rather than religious work, a Veda of the Indian masses.

Eclectic

Some scholars consider the eclecticism of the epic valuable: Father Robert Antoine, that remarkable Jesuit Sanskritist, saw in the Mahabharata "a mirror of Indian life throughout several centuries, a mirror in which popular beliefs, social customs, religious practice and speculation, folklore, civil and criminal law are reflected." Others, like R.C. Dutt, were less charmed, seeing the congeries of elements as an unattractive jumble. Either way, to distil a single absolute message from the epic as a whole seems to me a disingenuous exercise. The Mahabharata offers enough textual evidence for practically any conclusion you wish to derive from it.

Look at some of the issues the epic has been cited on in recent years. The great climax of Kurukshetra and its aftermath have given the Mahabharata its standing as the great tale of war and destruction, an urgent reminder of the perils of the nuclear age. The discussion between Krishna and Arjun in the Bhagavad Gita has been seen variously as upholding righteous war, rejecting pacifism, underlining compassion, articulating an ethic of Action and stressing the importance of duty, including caste duty.

Draupadi's challenge to the male elders when she is "lost" by Yudhishtira in the game of dice has been hailed as a spirited battle-cry for women's rights; but others have recalled that the epic, at least in its Southern recension, demeans and belittles women (in Deshpande's words, the Mahabharata claims that "if a man has one thousand tongues, lives for a hundred years and does nothing except describing the faults of woman, he will die without finishing the job.") Many of the values and mores of the epic would be seen as illegal, immoral or impractical today. Controversy still rages in the popular press over whether Draupadi "really" had five husbands; the text can be read to mean that she was married to all of them, but also to support the conservative view that she was only married to the eldest, Yudhishtira (the only one whose freedom she asked for when Dhritarashtra offered her a boon). Before any inferences are drawn from that for contemporary society, there is the fact that polydandry is still practised in the Jaunsar Babar region of Uttar Pradesh. On the grander questions, the Mahabharata offers a variety of thoughts on the meaning of life and death: episodes like Bhishma's death and Yudhishtira's vision of hell offer rich material, not all of it internally consistent.

Which brings me to my point: the Mahabharata is what you make of it. Its relevance to today's India is the relevance that today's Indians want to see in it. After all, the epic has, throughout the ages, been the object of adaptation, interpolation, reinterpretation and expurgation by a number of retellers, each seeking to reflect what he saw as relevant to his time. Its contemporary retellings — whether B.R. Chopra's soap operatic version on television or mine in satirical fiction — merely confirm the Mahabharata's traditional status as the repository of the national myth.

This includes the stories, the ideas, the social and political customs and practices, the prescriptions and values which the reteller considers significant to his retelling.

In this sense, to retell the Mahabharata is simply to recall the kind of stories Indian society tells about itself. In many cultures, myths and epics both contribute to and reflect the national consciousness. India's has inevitably changed in the 2,000 years since the original Mahabharata was composed. In my The Great Indian Novel I asked myself what a 20th Century Ved Vyas would tell about his India, about the great events of his times. There have been enough triumphs and disappointments in the 15 years since my novel was published for someone else to do a new retelling. There will always be new material to mine in the great epic.