READING SARALA MAHABHARATA TODAY

 

Composed in the fifteenth century in Odia by Sarala Das, Sarala Mahabharata, as it is popularly known, is a remarkably creative retelling of Vyasa's Mahabharata. It is not a translation of Vyasa’s immortal work. Not only Sarala Mahabharata, but all renderings of the Sanskrit Ramayana and Mahabharata in local (“regional”, in today’s terminology) languages in the medieval period were “retellings”, not translations. Sarala Das is called the “Aadi Kavi” of Odia literature. He was not really the first poet in Odia literature, but the first truly great and impactful poet, which is how the phrase “Aadi Kavi” as applied to him must be understood. With Sarala’s Mahabharata,  the rich tradition of Puranic literature in Odia began, and Sarala’s contribution to this tradition is second to none. Sarala is said to be the first poet to retell all eighteen parvas of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and he is the first non-brahmin poet to do so. He called himself a “shudra”; in our opinion, the best translation of this term in this context would be “non-brahmin. Explaining the logic of this translation is out of place here.

Sarala Das reconceptualised the ancient story of the Kurus (Pandavas and Kauravas, both), and retold it in a way that would embody his understanding of and insights into human nature, the human condition in the world, human relationships, dharma, karma (roughly, action) and its phala (consequences), nature of agency in a pre-determined world, the nature of divine intervention in the affairs of the mortals, the idea of Purna Avatara and much, much else. As he retold the ancient story, he deviated in many ways from the “Received” text, i.e., Vyasa Mahabharata. He deleted episodes, added episodes, modified episodes, among other retelling strategies. He incorporated into his narrative stories and insights from Srimad Bhagavata, Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Shanda Purana and Padma Purana, to name the prominent works, and, very importantly, local tales. In his narration, the local and the classical blended beautifully. His telling was audience-centric, and simplicity was the characteristic feature of his narration. His ideal in this respect is best captured in his own words: kahanara mitha jebe / sunanta loka bujhi ( roughly, the telling is sweet when / the listeners understand it).

A literary work is created in a particular time and place, and if it is a great work, it transcends its spatiotemporal limitations. The reader may belong to another place and another time, which forms his (her / their) view of literature, literary sensibility and taste. The reader may be widely separated from the text in time, as we, the readers of Sarala Mahabharata, are. This situation raises the issue of relevance, and relevance is basically about relatedness – how does the reader relate to the text? So, reading Sarala Mahabharata today is just another way of saying “how relevant is it for the present times?”

Sarala Mahabharata scholarship is about a hundred years old. Generally speaking, this celebrated work has been studied from the perspectives of comparative literature and literary criticism. There is no study of some length and depth as yet, to the best of my knowledge, of the contemporary relevance of this classic of Odia literature. This short article constitutes a humble attempt to initiate the study of the contemporary relevance of this work. It chooses some narratives from the text and analyses them to show their relevance in the present-day context. Incidentally, the episodes that have been chosen are deviations from Vyasa Mahabharata, and these can be viewed as poet Sarala’s innovations.

In Sarala Mahabharata, Krishna is not the last person to try to avoid a conclusive war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is Yudhisthira. This last negotiation did not take place in the Kaurava Court in Hastinapura but on the Kaurava side of the battlefield of Kurukshetra. As the Kaurava and the Pandava armies stood face to face, Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer, asked Arjuna to attack the enemy. Arjuna refused. He would not attack Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Duryodhana and the others, saying that they were his relatives, preceptors and the like. He told Krishna that he would fight with them only if they attacked him. Krishna didn’t say anything to him and went to Yudhisthira and told him that his brother was unwilling to attack Bhishma, Drona and the others because of his sacred bond with them. Bhima told Krishna that he was willing to attack the Kauravas if he wanted him to. Krishna asked him to attack Dussasana, and he was going to do so when Yudhisthira intervened and told Krishna that Arjuna was right and that he wanted to go to Duryodhana to negotiate peace. Incidentally, Duryodhana was the king and not the crown prince of Hastinapura in Sarala’s narrative. Saying this, he went alone and unarmed to the Kaurava side of the battlefield. Sarala’s depiction of this incident is justified - a brother was going to his brother with peace in mind; so, there was no need to go with someone or go armed.

Duryodhana flatly rejected Yudhisthira’s request for even one village, if giving five villages was unacceptable to him. He told him that he would grant him what he wanted only if the Pandavas surrendered to him. The eldest Pandava realised that war was inevitable. He then suggested Duryodhana, the like of which is not to be found, to the best of my knowledge, in the entire Puranic literature. He said that since it was a fight between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, only the five Pandavas and the hundred Kauravas should fight, and everyone else must leave the battlefield. Duryodhana did not agree, but that’s of no interest for our present purposes.

The basic idea was that only those who would directly benefit from the war must fight. For the rest, it wasn’t their war. When they get killed on the battlefield, the innocents’ blood flows. In Sarala Mahabharata, war is sin. There are absolutely no qualifications to this; there is nothing like “just war” or “dharma yuddha”, based on either the cause of it (injustice done to the victim) or the duty of the warrior (kshatriya dharma).

In the world of Sarala Mahabharata, it was believed that the one who starts the war is the one to whom accrue the sins of the war. But self-protection, when attacked, is not unethical (adharma). That was why Arjuna had refused to start the war. He was not unwilling to kill; he had no problems with killing Bhishma, Drona, Duryodhana and the others. But he would do so only in self-protection. Incidentally, in such a narrative, there is obviously no place for Srimad Bhagavad Gita. It is well known that Sarala Mahabharata does not contain Srimad Bhagavad Gita or Gita-like discourse.

Incidentally, this was not Arjuna’s “personal” dharma. On learning that Krishna had been humiliated in the Kaurava court when he went there as his emissary to negotiate peace with the Kauravas, Yudhisthira asked his brothers to get ready to attack the Kauravas. Dhaumya, the priest of the Kuru family advised Yudhisthira not to do that because the sin of a war accrues to the one who starts the war. He asked Yudhisthira to wait till Duryodhana attacked them.

Although Sarala Mahabharata considers war a sin since the blood of the innocents, that is, of those whose war it is not, as mentioned above, flows, it recognizes that war is a fact of life; that is, wars would be used to resolve political problems. There was one kingdom, and there were two claimants to the throne, and this is an issue which could be finally resolved only on the battlefield. Sarala Mahabharata resolves this contradiction by suggesting that if a war has to take place, its effect must be strictly limited. For instance, subjects must not be harmed, and the destructive power of the weapons must be restricted to the battlefield. Warriors like Arjuna, Bhishma and Ashwashthama had divine weapons which could destroy populations over a very large area, far beyond the battlefields and the natural environment as well. But it was required of them that they must never use them.

In today’s context, it would translate into the non-use of chemical and nuclear weapons against the adversary. “No first use” of these weapons must be viewed as an uncompromising moral imperative. This is one instance of how we, the readers of Sarala’s magnum opus, relate to it. We see in it a problem that is ours, namely war, and a way of dealing with it in a humane way.

Russian invasion of Ukraine started on February 22, 2002 and the Israel – Hamas war started on October 7, 2023 and the wars are still on. Technology has enabled us to experience the wars in some measure in our living rooms. We see civilian areas being targeted, educational institutions, hospitals, dams, roads and similar other public facilities destroyed, innocent people taken as hostages, hungry children and on the roads, dead bodies. These remind us of the insights from Sarala’s work with respect to the need to and the way to keep a war humane. We know the world has changed, but we also must know that the problems of the past are the problems of our times as well. We are aware that the solutions to problems of the past cannot be mechanically applied today. But we relate to the past as we re-live it in some sense today. That’s the relevance of a timeless work like Sarala Mahabharata for us, separated from it by more than five hundred years.

To consider another example. It concerns Sahadeva. In Swargarohana Parva, when the youngest Pandava fell to his death, Yudhisthira told Bhima not to grieve for that sinner. Yudhisthira said that he knew what would happen but would keep mum and not say anything about what he knew to those who it would concern. If he had told him what the game of dice would lead to, things would have been different. Thus, Yudhisthira held him responsible for the devastating war. In this episode, Yudhisthira was not just an individual, the eldest Pandava; he was the embodiment of Dharma in the sense of justice. The message of this episode can be said to be the following: one must share knowledge, which one is privileged to have, with others, especially those who would or could benefit from it. This message transcends time and place. It is as relevant today as it was in the world of Mahabharata.

In Udyoga Parva, as they were preparing for the war, Yudhisthira asked Sahadeva whether the Pandavas would win, in view of the fact that the Kauravas had a much larger army than the Pandavas. He said that he would choose to fight only if he was going to win. If he was not, then there would be no point in straining their relationship with their cousins. Besides, he would not like to be the cause of so many from both sides dying on the battlefield.

Incidentally, Queen Sudeshna had already told the Pandavas in the presence of Krishna that they would win the war. She had also told them who they would lose, but discussion of that is outside the scope of this article. Given this, Yudhishthira’s asking Sahadeva about the outcome of the war might look surprising. One might suggest that now since the war was imminent, the man of virtue wanted to be doubly sure for the reasons mentioned above,

Sahadeva said he knew what would happen, but he was not willing to tell. He said in the seven- day long war with Ravana, Lord Rama was not winning every day. It would be no different for Lord Krishna, that is, the Pandavas. Sahadeva told Yudhisthira that brother Bhima would rejoice on the days of the Pandavas’ victory and would be terribly unhappy on the days the Pandavas would lose. His telling the future would be unsafe for him because brother Bhima would take his anger out on him.  He did not want to suffer. Yudhisthira asked him who else could tell him the outcome of the war. Sahadeva named Bharada. We set aside his fascinating story barring just what he told the Pandavas. He said the Pandavas would win and the Kauravas would lose. After uttering this, he took his last breath, looking at Krishna’ face, and attained swarga.

But the question is whether Sahadeva was right in thinking about Bhima as one who could not accept unpleasant truth. Bhima’s action later proved that Sahadeva was right. When the war ended, the victorious Pandavas and the Pandava women – Kunti, Draupadi and Subhadra – claimed full credit for victory in the war – each of them said that it was solely for him or her that the war was won. As the exchanges were getting increasingly unpleasant, Krishna told them that the living severed head of Belalasena (whose equivalent is Barbarik in some Mahabharata traditions) would resolve the issue, as he had witnessed the war by his grace. Belalasena was Bhima’s son. On being asked by Krishna, the severed head told him that he saw only a Chakra (discus) blazing with the light of a myriad suns moving from side to side, killing fighters from one side now and from the other after that, and that he didn’t see anyone killing anyone else. Feeling badly let down by his son, Bhima was enraged in the extreme and slapped the head hard, killing him. Sahadeva was proved right about Bhima. He was an incorrigible egotist and was incapable of accepting the truth which he found unpleasant. We can state Sahadeva’s position on telling the truth as follows:  those who cannot accept unpleasant truth must not be told the truth, since it can be very unsafe for the teller.

Today we relate to Sahadeva’s story when we think of our conscientious dissenters. What Edward Said says of the intellectual actually applies to the dissenters among them. Most intellectuals are subservient to power for one reason or the other. Only a few of them are dissenters. He has famously said that the intellectual, that is, the dissenter, must “speak truth to power”. Noam Chomsky disagrees. He says that there is no point in speaking truth to power because power already knows the truth. According to him, the dissenter must speak truth to the people, who do not know the truth. Expressing dissent is considered today a moral act.

What both Said and Chomsky have not taken into consideration is the following: the dissenter is unsafe. If he tells the truth to power, power will look upon him as one who has figured out its agenda and, for that reason, a dangerous person since he could expose their designs to the people. So, they would find ways to silence him. If, instead of telling them, the dissenter tells people the truth, they would find him a nuisance and would throttle his voice or him. So, either way, the dissenter has a problem. Now and then in one country or the other, in a democracy or a dictatorship, we read news reports about bloggers being shot, protesters being harassed, sometimes imprisoned, and subjected to violence. When that happens, the dissenter finds himself alone. He works for others, but he receives support from none when he is persecuted by power. This was Sahadeva’s situation. Sahadeva chose not to speak the truth.

Today, when the dissenter speaks out the truth, he is condemned by power. When he does not, he stands condemned in the eyes of the people for not telling the truth, which might have helped them.

In sum, the discussion shows how the present connects with the past. The problems of the past, concerning society, cultures, attitudes, human relationships, and the like are, in their essentials, indeed the problems of the present, different only in their manifestations in a much-changed world. Seeing the past in the present brings clarity to our understanding of our own situation. And that is what, to my mind, the idea of relevance is all about.

 

Notes:

 

1 All references to Sarala Mahabharata in this article are to “Sarala Mahabharata”, published by Sarala Sahitya Sansad, Cuttack, in 2007.

2 The definite article is not used before the titles of the texts here. For example, there is no definite article before Ramayana.  The non-use of this article here is deliberate.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………