THE TESTIMONY OF THE SEVERED HEAD IN SARALA MAHABHARATA (THE STORY OF BELALASENA)

 

Note: This is a revised version of the article “The Tale of Belalasena: A Unique Perspective in Sarala Mahabharata” published in Samachar Just Click on March 28, 2024.

 

Key words: Sarala Mahabharata, Krishna, Bhima, Belalasena, maya

 

 

The story of Belalasena occurs in Sarala Mahabharata. In Vyasa Mahabharata, there is no Belalasena story or an equivalent of it. Belalasena was Bhima’s son. Let us set aside details about his meeting Krishna on his way to the battlefield and about why he not just happily, but with great devotion too, gave his head to Krishna, when he asked for it (for some details, see “The Story of Belalsen” posted on August 15, 2017 in the blog: saralamahabharat.blogpost.com). Granting his request to witness the war, Krishna allowed the severed head to remain alive and witness it. His head was placed in a vantage position, from where he could see the war. He saw the happenings in the war from the beginning to the end.

 

In Vyasa Mahabharata, Sanjaya, the minister of the Kaurava king Dhritarashtra, was witnessing the war, sitting with the king and narrating to him what was happening on the battlefields of Kurukshetra, where his army was fighting with the army of the Pandavas. Sage Vyasa had given him the special vision because of which he could see the actions taking place at a distance. That was how the blind old king, without participating in the war physically, was experiencing it.

 

In Sarala Mahabharata, Sanjaya informed the blind, old father, who was no longer the king, having given the kingdom of Hastinapura to his eldest son Duryodhana, about the happenings in the war and he also commented on them. But he did not do so because of any special vision given to him by Vyasa or anyone else. He himself fought in the battlefield for the Kauravas and also obtained information about what had happened in different parts of the war field from others and used his experience, intelligence and insight to comment on the important events in the war and even make predictions about what was going to happen in the battlefield on the following day. In sum, there is no Belalasena in Vyasa’s version and there is no Sanjaya with special vision in Sarala’s version. It is certainly an interesting asymmetry between the source text in Sanskrit and its retold version in Odia.

 

The war ended and it was time for the Pandavas to claim credit for the victory. Present with the Pandava brothers at that time were Draupadi, Subhadra, Kunti and Krishna. Bhima said that the war was won solely because of him since he had killed all the Kaurava brothers (barring Durdaksha, who had changed sides and fought for the Pandavas). Arjuna said the war would never have been won but for him. Outraged, Nakula claimed credit for himself. Sahadeva said that he had told the death secrets of formidable warriors; so it was because of him that the Pandavas won the war. Yudhisthira said he was steadfast in dharma and it was indeed this that brought victory to them.

 

Draupadi said that she was an exceptionally virtuous woman (mahasati); it was this power of her that destroyed the Kauravas. Subhadra, Arjuna’s wife, told them that all of them were dead wrong. She was indeed the cause. The Kauravas killed Abhimanyu, her son, and her brother, Krishna, avenged his killing by having them wiped out. Finally Kunti spoke. She said that she had undergone great hardship for years and as she suffered, she prayed to Dharma (god of justice). The Pandavas’ victory was the god’s answer to her prayer. Soon they started fighting over the issue of credit.   

 

To settle the issue, Krishna brought them to the severed head and asked him what he had seen and who could be justly credited for the victory. The severed head told him what he had seen: no human or demon had killed anyone. A chakra (discuss), dazzling with the glare and the brilliance of a myriad suns, unceasingly moved to and fro - from one part of the war field to the other, killing the fighters.

 

This can be viewed as an embodiment of a very important idea in the eleventh chapter of Srimad Bhagavad Gita, namely that the Supreme Lord had already killed all those who were to fall in the war. The warriors would only act as the killer; such is His leela (play) and such is how the cosmic and the laukika (mundane / the level of sense experience) levels connect in the text. What is real, the truth, at the laukika level is not the truth at the cosmic level; in fact, at that transcendental level, the laukika-level reality does not exist. Under the power of maya (cosmic illusion), humans can perceive things only at the laukika level and therefore take illusion as real. This is the limitation humans have to live with and this could be why they consider themselves to be kartas (doers), agents, rather than instruments of the happenings. In Sarala Mahabharata, there is no Srimad Bhagavad Gita, but the above shows how it had unobtrusively entered Sarala’s narrative, where the Gita idea under reference here had taken the form of a story. Because of the grace of Krishna, Belalasena had seen the reality. The ability to see the reality is not the outcome of one’s karma. Arjuna witnessed the Vishvarupa (Universal Form) of Krishna because of Krishna’s grace. Belalasena saw his leela in the battlefields of Kurukshetra for the same reason. Freed from the bondage of maya by Krishna’s grace, he had not seen what Sanjaya had seen, namely things at the laukika level, where someone killed someone and someone else, some other. Krishna had granted him his wish to be able to witness the war. Only the one who is chosen by Him to see the transcendental reality, sees it.

 

To end the story of Belalasena. His story is short as was his life in the world. He came into Sarala’s narrative to be the witness of a catastrophic, yet transformative Event, and give a testimony, which would be the final word on the happenings in that Event. The testimony given to the Avatara in the presence of those who claimed credit for the victory in the Great War of Kurukshetra, he left the narrative. But his going was not ordinary; it was truly exceptional.

 

Listening to him, Bhima was agitated in the extreme. Here was his son betraying him, instead of supporting him. He condemned him as a thoroughly unworthy and disgraceful son; one, who did not take the side of his father in a situation of conflict and belittled him in front of others. Wild with anger, he hit the head of his son with all his might. From the top of the tree-trunk, which served as a pillar and from where the head had witnessed the war, it fell on the ground and died. The father killed the son, but not in the performance of a sacrifice.

 

Belalasena’s story ended when Krishna absorbed his soul into him. Merged into the Supreme god Narayana, he was no longer subject to the karmic cycle. No one in Sarala Mahabharata received moksha in this sense. This can be viewed as the Avatara’s “pratidana” (return dana) for the “dana” he had received from him.

 

30 March 2024

 

 

ON INCONSISTENCIES IN SARALA MAHABHARATA

There are at least two kinds of inconsistency in “Sarala Mahabharata”. The narrative operates at two levels; at one level, sage Agasti (Agastya) narrates the Mahabharata story to Vaibasuta Manu, the lord of the aeon. At another, sudramuni Sarala Das narrates that story to his audience. The second enters into the first when the poet Sarala makes observations about himself or on some matter in the narration, or offers prayers, etc. When there are inconsistencies in the sage Agasti’s narration, Vaibasuta Manu interrupts the sage and seeks clarification, which the sage offers. This is how inconsistencies are resolved in that narrative. We say nothing about this kind of inconsistency here. Now, there are inconsistencies in Sarala’s narrative, which the audience, distanced from him in time, notes. Obviously such inconsistencies cannot be resolved through the poet’s intervention. Let us call the former inconsistency “narrative-internal inconsistency” and the latter kind of inconsistency the “external inconsistency”.

In the Kaurava court, where he had gone as Yudhisthira’s emissary of peace, Krishna told King Duryodhana that since the Pandavas were his brothers, they had a share in the Kuru kingdom (pandave sodara tohara jugate bhaga lagun). But all they wanted was just five villages. He was pleading with him to give them five villages and he said that the sages in the court were his witness: munimananta sakshakari grama ambhe magun. Duryodhana upbraided him for supporting a wrong claim. He said that the Pandava brothers, every one of them, whether Kunti’s sons or Madri’s, were outsiders to the Kuru family, being born of those who did not belong to the family. Dharma, Pavana, Indra, Ashwini Kumar were the fathers of Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna and Nakula respectively and as for Sahadeva, he Kumara’s (Ashwini Kumara’s) son. He told Krishna that none of them was Pandu’s son and only Pandu’s son had a right on the kingdom of the Kurus: jugate pandu virjye huante jebe jata/ nichaye bhaga tanku laganta jagannatha – If they were born from the seeds of Pandu / right of share would have accrued to them) (Udyoga Parva, couplets 21-26, p. 1990).

In the Draupadi vasta harana (disrobing of Draupadi) episode, Dussasana told Bhima, in the court of King Duryodhana that Sahadeva apart, they all were born illegitimate and that only he was their brother: yeka matra sahadeva ate ambha bhrata. They would give him half the kingdom and make him the King: ardha rajya dei taku karibu nrupasain. (Sabha Parva II, couplets129-130, p. 1287). It is true that he was not entitled to make such an observation, he was not the king, Duryodhana was. But Duryodhana did not contradict him nor did he show any displeasure with respect to what his brother had said. Therefore it would not be unreasonable to infer that he agreed with his brother.

This is one instance of the inconsistencies in “Sarala Mahabharata”. Consider another.

The Avatara had given up his mortal body and after sometime, Dwaraka was submerged in water. A devastated Arjuna was returning to Indrapratha and with him were the sixteen thousand women of Krishna. On the way, they ran into some cowherds who were grazing their cattle. They grabbed the women. They were theirs, they told Arjuna. He attacked them with arrows. They were unafraid and they stopped those arrows with which the great Pandava had won many battles with their umbrellas. They mocked at him and told him that they were not like Bhishma and Drona. Arjuna felt weak and helpless and couldn’t even lift his bow, Gandiva. He could not protect Krishna’s women and returned to Indraprastha utterly dejected and defeated (Mushali Parva, couplets 20-42, pp.  2624-2625).

In Swargarohana Parva, there is the story of Yudhisthira marrying an Odia girl named Suhani. After handing over his kingdom to Parikshita, Yudhisthira, along with his brothers and Draupadi, left Indraprastha on vanaprastha. They were on the last pilgrimage of their life. They came to Jajpur on the bank of the sacred river Baitarani. Several people came to pay their respects to them and one day came Hari Sahu, a vaishya by caste, with his fifteen year old daughter Suhani. Yudhisthira told him that it was not right that he hadn’t yet given his daughter in marriage. Hari Sahu said that the girl was destined to die during the wedding and he did not want to see that happen. Then he pleaded with the eldest Pandava to marry her. He told him that that relationship would bring glory to his entire community and for that, he was willing to sacrifice his daughter. Yudhithira was shocked and tried to convince Hari Sahu about the unreasonableness of his proposal. But his brothers advised him that it would not be an act of dharma to reject the proposal. And Arjuna assured him that the girl would not die. He said he had pleased god Yama on an earlier occasion and would pray to him to save the girl. He was confident that the god would grant his prayer.

As the family priest Dhaumya was conducting the wedding in the presence of the venerable sage Vyasa and many sages who had come with him, Kala and Vikala, the messengers of the god of death, approached the girl. With one arrow, Arjuna tied them up. Chitragupta, who is god Yama’s associate, fled in fear and reported the matter to Yama. The god of death came himself. Arjuna prayed to him to spare the girl but the angry god refused. So with two arrows he tied him up and dispatched him to the distant Sumeru Mountains. Later, at Hari Sahu’s behest, he set the god free.

It is the same Arjuna, who had lost his fight against the cowherds and unable to hold it in his hand, had carried his bow, Gandiva, on his shoulders, all the way to Indraprastha.

Now the question is how to resolve the inconsistencies mentioned above.  To deal with the first, we have to consider the facts about Sahadeva’s birth, which were known to everyone in the world of “Sarala Mahabharata”. He was the biological son of Pandu and Madri. As the curse on Pandu materialized, he died and with him died his wife, Madrii, after giving birth to the baby who came to be known as Sahadeva. Soon after his birth, the baby died for lack of nourishment. The god Ashwini Kumara was directed by god Surya to look after the newly born. When Ashwini Kumara found the child dead, he shared his life with him and the baby breathed again: apana tanuru se kadhile ardha atma // se mruta pandare prabesha karaile jiba/ ( Adi Parva, couplets 59-60, p. 102). So, “sharing” meant that he extracted part of the “livingness” (“life energy”) from himself and placed it in the dead body (of the baby). In “Sarala Mahabharata”, Sahadeva was not the only one who was restored to life (Parikshita was, for one example) but in no case, there was this kind of “sharing”. When Dussasana said Sahadeva belonged to the Kuru family, his assertion was not without logic. Similarly, when Duryodhana said that he did not belong to the family, he wasn’t wrong, either. But the argument against Dussasana’s assertion is that the Sahadeva who was Pandu’s son, had died and the argument against Duryodhana’s was that the body in which god Ashwini Kumara placed part of his life energy was of Pandu’s son. So both Dussasana and Duryodhana were right and wrong. It was the circumstance of utterance that mattered. The sharing of the kingdom was the issue when Duryodhana made his assertion. It was not, when Dussasana did. This in our view is a reasonable resolution of the inconsistency.

To turn to the other inconsistency. In order to resolve it, it may be said that Arjuna was utterly devastated when he had to fight the cowherds. He had hardly been able to come to terms with Krishna’ passing away. His loss of strength was a reflection of the state of his mind, in fact, of his entire being. He had recovered when he dealt with the god of death. Other interpretations of Arjuna’s defeat are not ruled out but the one given is sufficiently persuasive in our opinion. So we leave the matter at that.

One might raise the question as to why such inconsistencies are worth resolving at all. Hundreds of years after, the way an editor compiles an acceptable text - from his point of view - from a host of manuscripts, all copies and re- and re-copies of the original, which can never be found (at least in the present case), such contradictions, interpolations, minor modifications, etc., which do not affect the narrative in any significant way, are only to be expected. They are part of the process of the making of such texts. Viewed thus, resolving contradictions turns out to be a pseudo issue.

The merit of this position is undeniable. But at the same time, we wish to suggest that looking for coherence when confronted with the unexpected, the unintelligible and the contradictory is part of human nature. That is why we look for underlying meanings when the literal meaning of an utterance is incoherent, as in “The stick is coming.” As for scientific work, where “science” means “rational”, Noam Chomsky observes, as do some philosophers of science, that it aims to offer intelligible theories of the universe. One could observe that the same is true, in other ways, of the poetry of the Vedas, the spiritual contemplations of the Upanishads and the philosophical explorations in various cultures about human nature and the world we live in.  

(published in margAsia: Summer 2022. pp. 7-9. 

THE STORY OF TWO MOTHERS

In Sarala Mahabharata, Kunti and Gandhari never had an easy relationship. It was bound to be so. Kunti wanted her eldest son, Yudhisthira, to inherit the throne of Hastinapura whereas her elder sister-in-law, Gandhari, wanted her eldest son, Duryodhana, to be the king. But neither encouraged her children to be hostile to their cousins; in fact, on occasions, Gandhari harshly scolded Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas, as Kunti did Bhima, equally harshly. After the wax palace fire happened, in which the Pandavas and Kunti were believed to have perished, Duryodhana was enthroned as the king of Hastinapura. Kunti seemed to have more or less resigned to that situation. But after her daughter-in-law Draupadi’s humiliation in the Kaurava court and her sons’ (Madri’s sons were her sons too. She never differentiated between her sons, Yudhisthira, Bhima and Arjuna and Madri’s sons, Nakula and Sahadeva) exile in the forest for twelve years and their one year and thirteen days’ humiliating stay, incognito, in the kingdom of Matsya in the service of king Virata, Kunti bayed for revenge. She wanted complete extermination of the Kaurava brothers. Before Krishna went to Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary of peace, he met her and she asked him to give her his solemn word that he would work for war, instead of peace, and she told him to ensure that war took place between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. When the Great War was going on, she often reproached her sons for not being able to kill the Kauravas, even after so many days of the fight. Once she went to the extent of abusing even Krishna on this account! Her language was so venomous and insulting that Bhima got infuriated and was almost going to hit her but Krishna saved the situation for both. When the war was over, like the Pandavas, Draupadi and Subhadra, she too claimed that the victory was solely due to her.

She was there when the issue was resolved. The severed head of Belalasena told them what he had witnessed with regard to the killings during the Great War.

After the Belalasena episode, she virtually disappeared from the narrative. She returned to it when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were going to leave the palace for their vanaprastha. In between terrible things had happened:  Gandhari had tried to destroy the unsuspecting Yudhisthira with her yogic power and Dhritarashtra had tried to kill the unsuspecting Bhima with his physical power. Both had failed because of Krishna’s intervention. Instead of reducing Yudhisthira to ashes, she had reduced her only surviving son Durdaksha to ashes. In profound grief and frustration, Gandhari had cursed Krishna for the killing of her sons. She had held him responsible for the war. He could have stopped it had he so wished, she had told him. She had cursed him that his entire family would be destroyed thirty-six years from then. The Avatara had accepted the curse of the bereaved and helpless mother. The narrative does not say anything about Kunti’s reactions to any of these.

Neither does it say anything about her response to the killing of Abhimanyu’s son in his mother Uttara’s womb, the subsequent restoration to life of the unborn dead by the Avatara and Uttara’s death. Incidentally, this killing, which deeply pained the Pandava family, was not directly related to the doings of Kauravas’ family.

Despite the uneasy relationship that she had with Gandhari, when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari left for their vanaprastha, Kunti surprised everyone by saying that she too would go on vanaprastha with them. Her reasons in Sarala’s retelling are different from the same in Vyasa’s Mahabharata. In Sarala Mahabharata, when Yudhisthira asked her why she was deserting them, she said that she would not be happy in the palace when Gandhari would live in hardship and sorrow in the forest. Yudhisthira asked her whether Gandhari was living in sorrow when she was living in misery in the forest. Kunti told her son that it would not be right to think in such terms about her, the unfortunate mother, who had given birth to a hundred sons and had lost them all. Yudhisthira told her that throughout her life she had undergone great suffering in order to bring the five of them up all alone and now by leaving for the forest, she was depriving them of the opportunity to serve her and was thereby leaving them with a huge burden of debt towards her. Kunti took him aside and told him that she had to go to the forest; it was absolutely imperative on her part. Both blind, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari would, in the forest, face all kinds of difficulties and each time they would, they would curse him. She told Yudhisthira that she would serve them well and by doing so, would protect him.

Earlier, when Gandhari had come to know that Kunti was joining them, she had asked her with concern and affection, why she was leaving her sons in the time of prosperity and opting for a life of deprivation. What she told her sister-in-law shocked Yudhisthira. She said that she had been living in great sorrow in the palace. She had sleepless nights thinking of her son Karna, who, she knew, had suffered humiliation on her account throughout his life. He was a celebrated warrior and a very virtuous person. She condemned Arjuna as a sinner – “papistha ”– for taking advantage of his unfortunate situation in the battlefield and killing him (Ashramika Parva: 2544). She told Gandhari that she had lost Ghatotkacha, Abhimanyu and many others who were her own and she had had no peace.  None in the family knew about her suffering; she hadn’t shared her grief with anyone – she had alienated herself from her own. Deeply upset, Yudhisthira told her how she had been responsible for the war: how she had desperately wanted war and how she had made Krishna promise her that the war took place. Kunti cut him short and told him that it was pointless to think of those things at that moment. She also told him that parents could not live with their children for ever.

What Kunti did can be viewed as an exemplary moral act. She voluntarily chose a life of privation and suffering over a life of comfort and that too at her old age.  And she chose to do so to serve her elder brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who did not ask for her help and did not expect her to help them. Kunti knew that she could be extremely useful to them. It is true that Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were not going to be alone in the forest and that Vidura and Sanjaya would be with them, who had served him well for years. One might surmise that she might have thought that despite that, she would be of service to them, in other ways than Vidura’s and Sanjaya’s. The text does not say anything explicitly in this regard but isn’t suggestiveness a basic feature of poetic expression?

There is no reason to suspect that she was not sincere about what she told Gandhari by way of explaining to her why she had opted for being with them. The devastating war had levelled both the victors and the vanquished – they had all become losers. The war had ended their life-long uneasy relationship.

As Kunti had told Yudhisthira, there were three of them in the Kuru family: Gandhari, Madri and she herself. With Madri gone in the service of her husband (se swami karjya kala se punyamani – literally, she did her husband’s work; she was a virtuous person. “Her husband’s work” can be understood as “she did what pleased her husband”) (Ashramika Parva: 2544), only they two were left, suggesting that she did not want to be separated from her from then on. Besides, with Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Vidura and Sanjaya leaving Hastinapura, there would be no one from her generation in Hastinapura. For years, she had looked after her children (she had never treated Madri’s children differently from her on, as already mentioned) but had not shared her hurts and feelings with any of them. If she did with anyone, it was Krishna. And the Avatara had left the mortal world. In view of all these, it is not implausible to think that she wanted to spend her last days with those of her generation.

Viewed thus, it would appear that her decision to serve Dhritarashtra and Gandhari was not entirely altruistic, not entirely out of her sense of duty. What Kunti had told Yudhisthira in confidence reinforces this perspective, namely that the real reason for her to be with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari during their vanaprastha was to protect him from their curses. The quintessential mother, she had felt that she had still to take care of her children, who needed that care from her and she could do so by not staying with them. In sum, was her act of self-sacrifice truly virtuous, untainted by self-interest?

 Think again, if you have a doubt. Hers was a “self-centric selfless” – the oxymoron best expresses it-  act in the sense that she did not do it for glory or fame or anything to do with the satisfaction of her ego or of the hope for a blessed life in the abode of the immortals after her death or a happier life in her next birth. When the mother acts to protect her children, this natural act is virtuous by definition. Hers was a moral act and a truly impeccable one at that.

In this sad story of two mothers, one mother could not protect her children and was a helpless spectator to their destruction. But if she could not save her children, she had tried to avenge their killing. It was a motherly act, however heinous, disgusting and despicable – and that’s because she had resorted to mean treachery. The other mother chose to live a life of deprivation and suffering in the forest, trying to protect her children from possible curses from the mother who had lost her children because of her children. Just imagine the life she must have lived in the forest, in fear and anxiety, dreading the possible utterance of a curse from the mother she had gone to serve.

To end the story, the war had not ended in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. It took place, later, in the palace in Hastinapura, where Gandhari and Dhritarashtra had tried to kill Yudhisthira and Bhima. It was there in the forest as well in the form of fear and anxiety for her sons in Kunti’s mind. The closure came when the forest fire consumed them both.

FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION, FRIENDS

This is to say that my book “Life’s Little Tales” has been published. It was published in April this year. It is published by Sikshasandhan, ND – 7, VIP Area, IRC Village, Bhubaneswar – 751015. Tel: 074- 2556109, Fax: 0674- 751015.Email: sikshasandhan@gmail.com Website: www.sikshasandhan.org.in

Price: Rs 195/

 

This book is a collection of twenty one short essays. Written in a casual and narrative mode, these personal and reflective essays are about an Odia village boy’s growing up: his negotiating with his world, relishing its beauty and facing its challenges, and trying to make sense of his world and himself. These are about the people he met, the stories he heard in his childhood, the books he read and re-read, not once but many times, the thoughts and the ideas that opened his eyes and also about the varied experiences he gathered in various real-life situations that impacted his thinking and understanding. As he responded in intellectual and emotional terms to what he had come across and internalized, he almost lived them.

These pieces explore themes ranging from foods and football to the way we use language and think and talk about it, to the predicament of the day-to-day life to some puranic tales and that fascinatingly many-layered epic – Sarala Mahabharata.

Covid -19- induced stay at home for more than a year and a half has been for me the time to live with memories and reflections.  And talking to self and listening to him, of which these pieces are an expression.

POET SARALA DAS AND HIS MAHABHARATA

 

Sudramuni Sarala Das, who belongs to the fifteenth century, is celebrated as the first major poet, the aadi kavi, of Odia literature. To him can be traced the origin of the puranic literature in Odia and no one’s contribution to this genre is richer and more impactful than his. He composed three puranas (some say he composed only “Mahabharata”) and decidedly the best and the most renowned of these is “Mahabharata”, popularly known as “Sarala Mahabharata”. A truly remarkable work, it is a re-conceptualization of the ancient story of “Mahabharata” and is a creative re-telling of it in Odia language. It is the first complete rendering (i.e., of all the eighteen Parvas) of “Vyasa Mahabharata” in any language.  And this is the first retelling of this great work in any language by a person who did not belong to a privileged caste.

 In his magnum opus, Sarala asserted that he was born to expatiate on the lila (divine play) of the Supreme god, Narayana. Thus, he used the story of the Kuru clan to celebrate the doings of Krishna, the purna avatara (complete manifestation) of Narayana, and he called his Mahabharata “Vishnu Purana”. Quite appropriately, his narrative does not start with the sarpa yajna (snake sacrifice) of King Janmejaya. The yajna was the Kuru King’s act of revenge for the killing of his father, King Parikshita, by the snake Takshaka. He was performing the sacrifice to get, not just Takshaka, but all the snakes destroyed in the sacrificial fire.

But Sarala’s retelling is situated in a different context.   Vaibasuta Manu, the lord of the aeon, pleads with the venerable sage Agastya (better known as Agasti) to tell him the way to attain moksha. And the sage tells him the story of Mahabharata. The story of the Kuru clan cannot be a moksha kavya– the lila of Krishna is. And shravana (listening with complete devotion) is a form of bhakti and it constitutes a way to attain the Ultimate State. Agastya’s response to Vaibasuta Manu’s pleading reminds us of the great sage Suka in Srimad Bhagavatav recounting the lila of Krishna to King Parikshita in his last days. Parikshita had attained the Ultimate State before Takshaka bit him. The snake bit the body. By making his sage Agatya tell Vaibastuta Manu the story of Mahabharata, Sarala was telling his audience – immediate and the future – that Mahabharata is a moksha-giving story because it is the story of the doings of the Purna Avatara Krishna. In his retelling, Sarala used episodes from Srimad Bhagavad, Skanda Purana, among others. And although Sarala Mahabharata does not contain the Bhagavad Gita, insights from it are there in many places in this remarkable composition.

So, did Sarala know Sanskrit?  It’s a question that has always been asked. Now, all one knows about him is from his own compositions. And he said in his Mahabharata that he was uneducated and dull and had no knowledge of the shastras, and that he had spent his time among the unlettered and the untutored. One could dismiss the poet’s declarations about himself by saying that during those days, such lowering of the self was the riti (style) of poetic compositions. But then where did he learn Sanskrit? How did he acquire the knowledge of at least some puranas and maybe even some shastras? One can assume that being a non- brahmin, he surely did not have the opportunity to learn Sanskrit at some place of learning - whatever formal system of education existed in his time. Did he have the opportunity of listening regularly to the learned brahmins’ explications of the puranas? What was the forum for such explications? How often were these given? Now such exposure to works in Sanskrit can just not account for the range and the depth of his knowledge of the relevant literature that his Mahabharata demonstrates. So, what can one say by way of answering the question above? One could only speculate and one speculative answer is as good as any other.

This is what Sarala said: he merely wrote what goddess Sarala, his divine mother, inspired him to write. The words were hers; he was merely the scribe. One is reminded of the composition of Vyasa Mahabharata. Sage Vyasa composed the verses and god Ganesha was the scribe. In both cases, the poet was different from the scribe. In one, the human was the poet, the divine, the scribe. In the other, the divine was the poet, the human was the scribe – isn’t that bhakti?

There is a view that Sarala’s crediting the goddess for his Mahabharata was only a strategy to escape censor and possible persecution by the brahminical elite. After all, he was a non-brahmin, who had dared to retell Vyasa Mahabharata. But I am not persuaded. By saying what he did, wasn’t he saying that he enjoyed the special blessings of goddess Sarala? By saying that he was her child, wasn’t he asserting a very close relationship with the goddess? Were these claims more acceptable for the brahminical elite?

His retelling expressed his perspective on the ancient story. As is the case of the other celebrated re-tellers of the great classics in Sanskrit language. Deviations from the original wasn’t frowned upon in the retelling tradition in our country. The basic story remains unchanged but much is added and much is set aside in the retelling. Ramayanam does not tell exactly the same story as in Valmiki Ramayana, neither does Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. Sarala’s Mahabharata deviates from Vyasa Mahabharata in many ways. In Sarala’s retelling, both Duryodhana and Sakuni, died, not in disgrace but with dignity. Duryodhana died, not as the Crown Prince of Hastinapura but as its King. Before he died, he had condemned Ashwasthama for killing Draupadi’s children and he breathed his last embracing the severed heads of the children. Sakuni was doomed to avenge his father’s and relatives’ murder by Duryodhana through treachery. His father had asked him to avenge their brutal killing. Sahadeva knew this, as did Krishna. Knowing that only Duryodhana was alive and that he could fall anytime, he could have returned to his kingdom to rule. In the battlefield, Sahadeva told him this in so many words. But he chose to die as he held himself responsible for the war and the killing of his nephews, and of the innocent soldiers from both sides, whose war it was not.

Everyone in Sarala Mahabharata knew that Karna was Kunti’s eldest-born and on the Kurukshetra battlefield itself, before the war started, Yudhisthira had pleaded with him to join them and become the king after the war was won. Karna had never said or done anything to humiliate Draupadi. He maintained the dignity of his relationship with her as the wife of his younger brothers. Neither had Draupadi done anything that had humiliated Karna, even before her wedding. She hadn’t forbidden Karna to participate in the archery test; Karna had tried and failed. He wanted to win the test because he wanted Draupadi for Duryodhana, not for himself.

No one invited Yudhisthira to play a game of dice. Yudhisthira wanted to play the game he loved and heexpressed his desire to Sakuni, who obliged. It was then that Sakuni thought that he could use that opportunity to create hostility between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It was the Sun god’s divine spouses, who clothed Draupadi, not Krishna; the god paid her for what he had taken from her in an earlier existence of her. Thus it was her karma that protected her. The Avatara was only the facilitator; he had reminded Draupadi and the Sun god about their respective karma. These are just a few of the numerous differences between Sarala Mahabharata and Vyasa Mahabharata.

Keeping the basic story intact, Sarala introduced innovations into the narrative. He re-imagined the characters and their interactions and the situations in which they were involved and produced the masterpiece of a narrative that was as convincing and coherent as the original. The innovations reflected the poet’s understanding of the human condition, the nature of agency in a pre-determined world, karma and the inevitability of experiencing the fruits of it, the role of grace in the karmic framework, the nature of dharma, inner and external obstacles for living a life of dharma, divine intervention in the affairs of the mortals and the nature of Purna Avatara, among much else. The poet reflected on the place of war in a society, given its inherent sinfulness as blood of the innocents flowed in the battlefield and he explored the possibility of alternatives to it.

As I close, I wish to say that despite the poet’s designating his work as “Vishnu Purana”, it has never got the status of a sacred text in the belief system of the Odias. People have the same attitude to this work as they have to Vyasa Mahabharata. It is banished from home. There is no Mahabharata parayana – be it Vyasa’s Mahabharata or Sarala Mahabharata. It is not recited to the dying. But there is one difference: in the temple of goddess Sarala in Jhankad, the goddess who Sarala called his mother, is Sarala Mahabharata ritually recited – ever day, as far as I know. One would love to think that the fond Mother happily listens to what her son had written. Did he write what she had told him to write? Or did he forget things here and there and fill the gaps with whatever occurred to him? Quite understandable is her interest. After all, she had told him the words in his dream, not sitting in front of him, as sage Vyasa had done. His divine scribe was sitting with him, as he was composing the slokas.

This truly remarkable work has not yet been translated fully into any language. It seems that more than a hundred years ago, parts of it were translated into Bengali but this translation is unavailable now. In the recent years, the first two Parvas have been translated into Hindi and parts of two other Parvas, into English.

And the people of Odisha have grown up with Vyasa Mahabharata, not Sarala Mahabharata.

(An earlier version of it is published in Samachar Just Click on 23.6.22)

 

KUNTI'S VANAPRASTHA

 

Kunti and Gandhari never had an easy relationship. It was bound to be so. Kunti wanted her eldest son, Yudhisthira, inherit the throne of Hastinapura whereas her sister-in-law, Gandhari, wanted her eldest son, Duryodhana, to do so. But neither encouraged their children to be hostile to their cousins; in fact, on occasions, Gandhari harshly scolded Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas, as Kunti did Bhima, equally harshly. After the wax palace fire happened, in which the Pandavas and Kunti were believed to have perished, Duryodhana was enthroned as the king of Hastinapura. Kunti seemed to have more or less resigned to this situation. But after her daughter-in-law Draupadi’s humiliation in the Kaurava court and the Pandavas’s exile in the forest for twelve years and their one year and thirteen days’ humiliating stay, incognito, in the state of Matsya in the service of king Virata, Kunti bayed for revenge. She wanted the complete annihilation of the Kauravas. Before Krishna went to Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary of peace, he met her and she asked him to give her his solemn word that he would work for war, instead of peace, in the Kaurava court and ensure that war took place between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. When the Great War was going on, she often reproached her sons for not being able to kill the Kauravas, even after so many days of the fight. Once she went to the extent of abusing even Krishna on this account! Her language was so venomous and insulting that Bhima got infuriated and wanted to punish her but Krishna saved the situation for both. When the War was over, like the Pandavas, Draupadi and Subhadra, she too claimed that the victory was solely due to her.

After the Belalasena episode, she virtually disappeared from the narrative. Much that was terrible happened after that:  Gandhari tried to destroy Yudhisthira with her yogic energy and Dhritarashtra tried to kill Bhima with his physical energy. Both failed because of Krishna’s interventions. Draupadi’s sons were killed and Abhimanyu’s son was killed in his mother, Uttara’s womb. On account of Krishna’s intervention, the dead son was restored to life but Uttara died. The narrative does not say anything about Kunti’s reactions to these. 

Despite the uneasy relationship that she had with Gandhari, when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari left for their vanaprastha, Kunti surprised everyone by saying that she too would go on vanaprastha with them. Yudhisthira asked her why she was leaving them. She said that she would not be happy in the palace when Gandhari would live in hardship and sorrow in the forest. Yudhisthira asked her whether Gandhari was living in sorrow when she was living in misery in the forest. Kunti told her son that it would not be right to think in such terms about her, the miserable mother, who had given birth to a hundred sons and had lost them all. Yudhisthira told her that throughout her life she had undergone great suffering in order to bring the five of them up all alone and now by leaving for the forest, she was not giving them the opportunity to serve her and was thereby leaving them with a huge burden of debt towards her. Kunti took him aside and told him that she had to go to the forest; it was absolutely imperative on her part. Both blind, they would, in the forest, face all kinds of difficulties and each time they would, they would curse him. She told Yudhisthira that she would serve them well and thereby protect him from their curses.

When Gandhari came to know that Kunti was joining them, she asked her with concern and affection, why she was leaving her sons in the time of prosperity and opting for a life of deprivation. What she told her sister-in-law shocked Yudhisthira. She said that she had been living in great sorrow in the palace. She had sleepless nights thinking of her son Karna, who she had suffered humiliation on her account throughout his life. He was a celebrated warrior and a very virtuous person. She condemned Arjuna as a sinner – “papistha ”– for taking advantage of his unfortunate situation in the battlefield and killing him (Ashramika Parva: 2544). She told Gandhari that she had lost Ghatotkacha, Abhimanyu and many others who were her own and she had no peace.  None in the family knew about her suffering; she obviously hadn’t shared her grief with anyone – she had alienated herself from her own. Deeply upset, Yudhisthira told her how she had been responsible for the war: how she had desperately wanted war and how she had made Krishna promise her that the war took place. Kunti cut him short and told him that it was pointless to think of those things at that moment. She also told him that parents could not live with their children all the time.

What Kunti did can be viewed as an exemplary moral act. She voluntarily chose a life of privation and suffering over a life of comfort and that too at her old age.  And she chose to do so to serve her elder brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who did not ask for her help and did not expect her to help them. Kunti knew that she could be extremely useful to them. It is true that Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were not going to be alone in the forest and that Vidura and Sanjaya would be with them, who had served him well for years. One might surmise that she might have thought that despite that, she would be of service to them, in other ways than Vidura’s and Sanjaya’s. The text does not say anything explicitly in this regard but isn’t suggestiveness a basic feature of poetic expression?

There is no reason to suspect that she was not sincere about what she told Gandhari by way of explaining why she had opted for being with them. The devastating war had levelled both the victors and the vanquished – they had all become losers. The War had ended their life-long uneasy relationship.

As Kunti had told Yudhisthira, there were three of them: Gandhari, Madri and she herself. With Madri gone in the service of her husband (se swami karjya kala se punyamani – literally, she did her husband’s work; she was a virtuous person. “Her husband’s work” can be understood as “she did what pleased her husband”) (Ashramika Parva: 2544), only they two were left, suggesting that she did not want to be separated from her from then on. Besides, with Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Vidura and Sanjaya leaving Hastinapura, there would be no one from her generation in Hastinapura. For years, she had looked after her children (she had never treated Madri’s children differently from her on) but had not shared her hurts and feelings with any of them. If she did with anyone, it was Krishna. In view of this, it is not implausible to think that she wanted to spend her last days with those of her generation.

These suggest that her decision to serve Dhritarashtra and Gandhari was not entirely altruistic, not entirely out of her sense of duty. What Kunti had told Yudhisthira in confidence reinforces this perspective, namely that the real reason she was going to be with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari in their vanaprastha was to protect him from their curses. The quintessential mother, she had felt that she had still to take care of her children, who needed that care from her and she could do so by not staying with them. In sum, the intention behind her clearly noble act was not as noble.

Think again. Hers was a self-centered selfless act in the sense that she did not do it for glory or fame or anything to do with the promotion of her ego. When the mother acts to protect her children, then questions of ego become irrelevant. Hers was a moral act and a truly impeccable one at that.

TOWARDS A HUMANISTIC READING OF MAHABHARATA

 

About a month ago, I listened for a while to a television debate in Odia on the decision, presumably by the Government of Madhya Pradesh, to include Ramayana and Mahabharata as elective subjects in the first year Engineering programme in that state. The assumption of both the participants, both young (which was a good thing), was that these are religious works. This piece disagrees but it does not enter into this debate.

Incidentally, at many of our universities, IIT and IIMS, in elective courses in literature (including comparative literature), philosophy, history, culture, leadership and related areas, these great works, in part at least, are already being taught. But to the best of my knowledge, course content had never been a subject for a debate in the electronic media. There could be more reasons than one for this but no need to go into all that here.

Ten years ago, I taught an elective course on Mahabharata to the final year undergraduates at IIIT Hyderabad. The title of the course was “The human condition as depicted in the Mahabharata”. The basic perspective was this: A truly great work, like Mahabharata, allows itself to multiple interpretations. Often different schools of thought assign different meanings to it. And then, as the world changes and new knowledges arise that give people new world views, people see meanings in the great works that the earlier generations did not. In our view, each interpretation is valid if it satisfies the requirements of internal consistency and local (at the level of episodes, for instance) and global (the interpretation as a whole) coherence. It is possible that an interpretation would miss out of something but then would project something that was missed out in earlier studies.

Now, Mahabharata could be read as a humanistic, i.e., non-religious, work. It can be viewed as essentially a narrative of the humans: their aspirations and struggles, their attitudes and values, their compulsions and options, the way they sin and are sinned against, their hopes and frustrations in interpersonal relationships, the problems they face, dilemmas that trouble them, and the way they resolve these and much, much else.

From this perspective, let us consider Sarala Mahabharata, a magnificent retelling of Vyasa’s Mahabharata in Odia, composed by Sarala Das in the fifteenth century.  It deviates from the Sanskrit text in many ways, although, needless to say, the basic story remains the same. So, for our present purpose, it would make no difference which text we consider: Vyasa’s or Sarala’s. In Sarala’s retelling, some episodes are somewhat differently conceptualized and it is reflected in the characterization and plot construction. This is in fact the tradition of retelling in the regional languages of the Sanskrit Ramayana and Mahabharata in our country. Ramcharitmanas is not a translation of Valmiki Ramayana, neither is Kambar’s Ramavataram.

In Sarala Mahabharata, on the Kurukshetra battlefield, the Pandava and the Kaurava armies stood face-to-face, each waiting for the other to attack. Both knew that war was sinful. The Pandavas were the aggrieved party, which might be why Sri Krishna asked Arjuna to attack the enemy, but he said he wouldn’t but would retaliate when attacked. Retaliation would be no sin because the attacked had the right to protect himself. Sri Krishna didn’t say a word and reported the matter to Yudhisthira. The eldest Pandav considered his brother’s attitude eminently reasonable and tried to make one last attempt to avoid war. He pleaded with Duryodhana to give them just one village, if he didn’t want to give them five, as he had asked for earlier. When Duryodhana refused even that, the eldest Pandava realized that war was inevitable.

He then told Duryodhana that since the issue was the succession to the throne of Hastinapura, only the hundred Kaurava brothers and the five Pandava brothers must fight and settle it. It was their war, not the war of all those who had assembled there to fight for them – Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Jayadrath, Sakuni, Drupad, Abhimanyu, Lakshmana Kumar, among others and then the countless soldiers. They were all outsiders. Their blood must not flow in a war that wasn’t theirs. None of them would inherit the throne. The idea was that if war couldn’t be avoided, it must be ensured that its scope remained strictly local so that the damage would be minimal. Duryodhana did not cooperate with Yudhisthira. Considerations of victory required that help of the outsiders was badly needed. If it would bring large scale damage, so be it. But at least a moral option to this attitude was clearly articulated through Yudhisthira; faced with such a situation, humankind must make its choice.

When Ashwatthama demanded from his father Drona that he teach him how to use Brahmashira, one of the most destructive of the divine weapons, the wise guru refused. His son complained that he was being very unfair to him, who was his own, considering that he had taught its use to Arjuna, who was not his own. Drona knew that his son was jealous, excitable and prone to anger. He had no self-control. He feared that Ashwatthama would misuse that astra. Arjuna, in contrast, was calm, composed and self-possessed, which made him worthy of receiving the knowledge of that divine astra.  

Ashwatthama’s mother had died while giving birth and Drona had been his mother and father both. He was, understandably, extremely indulgent towards him. One day he succumbed and gave him the knowledge of Brahmashira. On a certain occasion, after the Kurukshetra war was over, in frustration and anger, Ashwatthama used, rather misused it. Fortunately for Drona; he had died before this happened.

So, power must reside with them who have a highly developed moral sense. A social arrangement based on this principle, would give rise to inequality. In fact, not just his son but his Kaurava shishyas had often charged Drona of partiality towards the Pandavas, in particular, Arjuna. But in the wise guru’ view, in certain domains, inequality must be accepted, not resisted, for the good of the society.

By the way and rather irrelevantly for this piece, today, not many would agree with this view. Noam Chomsky would be one of them. This principle, they would say, would give rise to dictatorship. Dictatorship of the enlightened, they would say, is as unacceptable as that of the thug. In each case, the people would lose their rights and dignity. The ruler would decide what they must do.

Once a war is over and the victory celebrations have taken place, it’s time to fix the responsibility for the war. In the Great War at Kurukshetra, there were two victors: Yudhisthira and Sakuni. Yudhisthira became the king of Hastinapura, with the challengers to the throne having been completely eliminated. Sakuni had achieved his purpose. He had to avenge the brutal killing of his father and uncles by Duryodhana. In Sarala Mahabharata, he used treachery to imprison them in a specially designed palace, which he had built for that purpose and starved the hundred unfortunate men to death. Sakuni was promise-bound to his father to avenge their killing. He virtually achieved his objective on the seventeenth day of the war. By then no Kaurava was alive except Duryodhana. Sahadev and Arjuna knew about Sakuni’s objective and Sahadev suggested to him that since Duryodhana’s fall was imminent, he should go to Gandhar and rule his kingdom.

Sakuni did not and chose to get killed in the war. He held himself responsible for the killing of many great warriors and countless soldiers. He had resorted to manipulation and treachery to bring the Kauravas and the Pandavas to the battlefield, certain that the Kauravas would be completely destroyed in a war with the Pandavas. He had avenged the killing of his father and his relatives but at the same time, he could not forgive himself for the death of the innocents. He atoned his sin by sacrificing himself in the war.

In the end, Yudhisthira held Draupadi and Sahadeva responsible for the war – Draupadi for ceaselessly instigating her husbands to avenge her humiliation in the Kaurava court and Sahadeva for not warning him about what would happen, although he had the knowledge. “Would the game of dice have taken place if the results were known in advance to the eldest Pandava?”, one would wonder.

Ordinarily the victors in a war hold the defeated responsible for it. Here the victors held themselves largely responsible for the war. Victors cannot punish themselves as war criminals. War criminals are punished by others, not themselves. But they can repent. This is what Sakuni did. As for Yudhisthira, he was troubled by a deep sense of guilt and had no peace.

In Sarala’s retelling, the relationship between Gandhari and Kunti was never cordial and Kunti bayed for the Kauravas’ blood after Draupadi’s humiliation. But when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari decided to go to the forest for their vanaprastha, she decided to join them and serve them. She knew they, both old and blind, would need her. When Gandhari asked her why she was rejecting her royal status and the comforts of the palace, she told her that she had been spending sleepless nights, grieving over the loss of her son Karna and her grandchildren. The war had made both Gandhari and Kunti miserable losers and Kunti had made her choice about who she would be with, in the very last part of her life.  

Now, where is religion in all this?