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)
