Arjuna’s problem in Vyasa
Mahabharata is too well-known to recount here: somewhat roughly and in brief, he
would not kill his grandfather, other Kuru elders, preceptors, cousins and
relatives, although they stood facing him in the Kurukshetra battlefield as his
enemy, and if they wanted to kill him, he would not even resist and would
happily get killed. He considered raising arms against one’s very own as an act
of adharma. Besides, with the destruction of a family, family values and
culture would also be destroyed. He was sure that he had nothing to gain in
that war and everything to lose. He would not fight, he told Krishna.
Sarala’s Arjuna had a different
problem. He had no qualms about killing his enemies in the battlefield, whoever
they were, but he would not start the war. He would not shoot the first arrow.
Starting a war was a terrible sin because many innocents would get killed, who
would be fighting someone else’s war. If he was attacked, he would fight
because then he would not have to carry the sin of starting the war. This was
what he told Krishna.
In Vyasa Mahabharata Krishna tried
to make Arjuna see reason, which is what Srimad Bhagavat Gita is all about, as
far as the Mahabharata story is concerned. He was being merely sentimental, Krishna
told the despondent warrior. He told him about the illusory nature of death, and
about the senselessness of grieving over the dead on that account. He wanted
him to realize the consequences of his action at a personal level. He had got the
rare opportunity to fight in that dharma yuddha, righteous war, and it would be
unwise for him to withdraw from it, he said. Besides, whether he won or
perished, he would be a winner: he would enjoy the pleasures of the world as a
victor or the pleasures of the other world if he perished. But if he withdrew,
he would be mocked at as a coward during his life and after death.
It is unclear why at this stage Arjuna was not
asked to consider certain other matters that arose out of his stand. Getting
killed by the enemy without harming them might be acceptable to him, but was it
acceptable to him that his brothers, relatives, friends and all those others
who had come to fight for the Pandavas got destroyed as a consequence of his
stand? If killing one’s kin was wrong, was pushing one’s brothers and sons and
relatives to death was right? Did he really believe that even without him the Pandavas
would win the war? Was he so naive? One would rather think that he knew that without him the
Pandavas had just no chance of winning. He was not only a great archer, the
greatest according to Bhishma and Drona and many others; he had with him the
most destructive of divine weapons - he was the only one among the warriors
assembled there who had Shiva’s all-destructive pasupata astra. Besides, no one else in
the Pandava army had divine weapons, whereas in the Kaurava army ,Bhishma,
Drona, Karna and Aswasthama certainly had. Bhishma might have decided not to
kill the Pandavas (incidentally, not in Sarala's Mahabharata), but others had no
such inhibitions, and the grandfather had not vowed to protect them from the
warriors of the Kaurava army!
Arjuna was aware that Krishna was not wrong. If he withdrew
from the war, some would call him a coward - purely out of malice. But he believed
that many including the wise and venerable Bhishma, Drona, Bhurishrava, Karna,
and a host of others would not think so of him; they had known him too well for
that. They would not call him a coward who had single-handedly defeated them
all just a few months ago in the battlefield of the kingdom of Virata. But they
would be shocked and bewildered. Along with everyone else, Arjuna had been
preparing for this war ever since Krishna had returned from Duryodhana
empty-handed. Arjuna had never said a word by way of protest against the war. They
would be inclined to think of him as sentimental, immature and extremely
irresponsible. But would these have been less humiliating and more comforting for
him than being called a coward, one would wonder.
Coward or not, everyone would have thought of
him as a deserter at one level and a betrayer of trust at a more personal
level. As a kshatriya ("belonging to the warrior caste") it was his duty to fight for those whose war it was not, and yet had assembled to
fight for him, not abandon them right on the battlefield. His decision to
withdraw from fighting was actually an act of self-indulgence and selfishness, and
it showed that he was completely insensitive to his “own others”. Krishna
must have wanted him to understand that his selfishness and thoughtlessness in that
particular situation could lead to terribly consequences for them all, who had joined the Pandavas' side because their cause was just.
The Pandavas firmly believed that
they were fighting for a just cause. Duryodhana had become the crown prince
under wrong assumptions about them (that they had perished in the lac palace
fire) , but when the truth was known, no one in the Kaurava court said that if
the past could not be undone, the Pandavas could not be ignored either,
therefore they must be compensated in some way. As for the Pandavas, for the
cause of peace, they asked for just five villages, not half of the kingdom
which they believed was their due. But even that was refused. Yudhisthira, like
most – sages, Kaurava elders, Drona, etc. among them - had no doubt that the
Kauravas were entirely unfair to the Pandavas. He called the war a “just war”
out of conviction. As already said, all those who had joined the Pandavas’ side believed that
they had joined the virtuous in that just war. Arjuna’s withdrawal would amount
to his abandoning the fighters who were fighting in a just war. That would certainly
not be morally right. Now if a kshatriya did not fight for the honest and the
morally upright, and for those who were denied their due, he would be failing
in his caste-duties. As he was explaining his unwillingness to fight, Arjuna
told Krishna that he was not sure whose victory would be a better outcome of
the war: their own or the Kauravas’. Surprisingly, he was not advised that the
war was not just between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, it was also between
those who followed dharma and those who did not, and that in that situation there
must be no doubt in his mind about what would constitute the desirable outcome.
And as for the loss of the family
values and culture, one wonders why Arjuna was not advised that he had undue
anxieties. One branch of the family was going to fight against another; so there
was no fear of the culture and the traditions of the family perishing
irrespective of whoever won. But even in the extremely unlikely event of both
the Kauravas and the Pandavas being destroyed by the divine weapons of both
sides, there was little room for anxiety. If a great family dies, its
traditions and values do not really die, they live in other forms: those of tales and
legends, for example. And all said, aren’t the values of a family mere expressions
of a deeper set of beliefs, values and practices, common to an entire culture,
and at a still deeper level, to humankind as well?
About the problem of widows that
eventually brings about the moral collapse of a society, Arjuna’s apprehensions
were again rather exaggerated. This problem was not unknown to that society; in
all likelihood it had arisen when Bhagawan Parshurama destroyed the kshyatriyas
many times over. In order to deal with the problem of the widows, the society
had created the niyoga system, which was still prevalent in Arjuna’s time. If things
went terribly wrong, the society would again find some solution. One did not
have to get unduly exercised about it.
Moral issues as mentioned above,
which are rather straightforward and obvious, but by no means trivial, and
which do not demand understanding things at a profound supra-mental level, were
somehow not raised in the Gita to
persuade a despondent Arjuna to fight. One would think that if they had been,
it would probably not have been necessary to go beyond the familiar, the
rational (in the sense of “not supra-rational”) and the normal, and that the
discourse went, rather too early, to a far deeper and a highly profound
philosophical and metaphysical level to deal with Arjuna’s attitude. One gets
the impression that although anchored in Arjuna’s problem, the Gita discourse
was not really targeted to it specifically; it was concerned with, at one
level, many general issues concerning the human condition, and at another,
articulating a mode of one’s inner spiritual growth leading to one’s mokshya in
one terminology. Now, for a pure story
teller, his interest in the Gita is to the extent it takes the story forward elegantly;
he would tend to avoid whatever would conspicuously arrest its flow or affect
the smoothness of it.
Arjuna’s witnessing the Universal
Form of Krishna forms an important part of the Gita. He could see this Form
with the help of Krishna himself; he gave him the special power of vision for
the purpose. One might consider this
episode as part of a long argument to persuade Arjuna to fight. From this point
of view, there is something in it that is of special interest, namely what he
saw in the Universal Form. He saw the death of warriors from both the Kaurava and
the Pandava sides - he saw the time past and the time future as indistinguishable.
In that Ultimate Form he saw Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha and Karna, among
others, already dead. They could be identified among the Kaurava warriors, so
they were named. But none from the Pandava side was named; Arjuna did not see
Abhimanyu, Ghatotkacha and Draupadi’s five sons among the multitude of the
Pandava warriors who had perished too. Now, it cannot be said that his
knowledge that those Kaurava warriors were already dead influenced Arjuna in a
perceptible way. But one would never be sure how he would have been affected,
or affected at all, had he seen Abhimanyu dead. This scepticism arises because after
all, Arjuna was an ordinary mortal in terms of spiritual growth; he was not a
seer like the sages of the Upanishads or the Sanata Kumars.
Why Arjuna did not see what he surely did not want to see is a question that need not detain us here. Does it have anything to do with the fact that, unlike in Yasoda’s case, Krishna showed that Form to him because he wanted to see It? In any case, who can see the Whole as whole! He saw what Krishna gave him the power to see. And wasn’t Krishna trying to persuade him to fight!
Now Sarala, the story teller must
have felt it more manageable to alter Arjuna’s problem, and tell the story from
that perspective. In his narrative, Arjuna’s problem was intensely moral, but
did not invite any profound discourse or supra-human experience of Reality. Arjuna
did not need any advice. He simply had to wait. When two armies stood face to
face, something or the other would happen, someone or the other would lose
patience and shoot an arrow or hit one with a mace. And that would solve his
problem. This is precisely what happened, as we have seen in an earlier post in
this blog.
Snana Purnima, 2012
