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?
No comments:
Post a Comment