The variations are with respect to
Vyasa’s Mahabharata (referred to,
alternatively, as Vyasa Mahabharata
here). Sarala Das’s Mahabharata (referred to as Sarala
Mahabharata here), composed in Odia in the fifteenth century, is not a
translation of Vyasa Mahabharata but
a remarkably creative retelling of it. Sarala re-conceptualised the ancient narrative
and retold it. In his narrative, he introduced variations in certain ways to
express his understanding of the classical text, his poetic vision and insights
into various matters, such as the human condition in the world, the nature of
agency in a pre-determined world and the nature of divine intervention in the
affairs of the humans, etc. Sarala
Mahabharata scholars over the years have enumerated many variations but
have not dealt, barring just a few, in detail with the significance of the
same. We discuss here in brief two stories which are Sarala’s innovations in
the sense that they do not occur in Vyasa
Mahabharata.
We begin with the story of the “Mango
of Truth”. Yudhisthira needed a ripe mango for a sage who had visited him. The
visitor had told him that he would accept only a ripe mango for his food from
him. It was autumn. The “sage” was Gauramukha, Duryodhana’s spy in disguise, who
he had sent to the forests to trace the Pandavas, who were already into their
ninth year of exile after losing the second game of dice. Just three years of
exile remained and Duryodhana was getting worried. Yudhisthira invoked Krishna
and he arrived. Krishna invoked sage Vyasa and Vyasa arrived. Vyasa planted a
mango seed, as told by Krishna and at the Avatara’s wish a plant appeared. Krishna
then asked each of the Pandavas and Draupadi to speak some truth about
themselves so that at the end a ripe mango would emerge. He warned them that if
anyone told a lie then the tree would burn to ashes. First spoke Yudhisthira,
then Bhima, then Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva in that order and finally Draupadi
spoke. Seven ripe mangoes appeared. Krishna gave one to the sage.
But he ensured that Gauramukha did not
take the mango to Duryodhana. He met him disguised as a brahmin and told him
that it was not a real mango because a ripe mango in the autumnal month of Bhadra is out of nature and that if he
went to Duryodhana with that fake mango, he would become the laughing stock in
the court. Gauramukha told him that the fruit was real because he had witnessed
the entire process of its coming into existence. Krishna told him that
utterance of truth cannot change the law of nature. He told him that he wanted
to subject it to a truth test. He uttered a number of lies, such as he had “seen”
the sun rising in the west and setting in the east, the sun shining at night
and the moon, in the day, a lotus grown on the top of a hill and the like. Unable
to withstand the onslaught of lies, the mango of truth disappeared. Krishna
told Gauramukha that the mango was unreal and that he had saved him from
ridicule in the Kaurava king’s court.
Turning to what Draupadi said when her
turn came. She said that although she had five husbands, she wished for Karna. This
occurs in the version of Sarala
Mahabharata published by Sarala Sahitya Sansad and seems to have received
popular acceptance. Sarala Mahabharata
scholars are generally of the opinion that exposing Draupadi as just an
ordinary woman and by no means a “sati” (virtuous woman), is the purpose of
this episode. Sarala Mahabharata, edited by Artaballav Mohanty and published
by the Department of Culture of the Government of Odisha does not contain this.
Here she said something else; she talked about her having the same weakness as
other women, namely that when they saw a handsome person, who might even be
their blood relative, they would desire him. She also said that she had a
special fondness for Arjuna. In either version, Draupadi emerges as an
unexceptional woman. As for the Pandavas, what they said revealed no dark secrets
about them and can be ignored in this discussion. (For some details of this
fascinating episode, see my post “The Mango of Truth” in the blog: saralamahabharat.blogspot.com).
One wonders if exposing Draupadi’s secret desires could be a strong enough
justification for this innovation in the Mahabharata story.
No Pandava ever talked about
Draupadi’s weaknesses and there was no change in the attitude towards her on
the part of any of her husbands on that account. After her death, Yudhisthira
did mention her special fondness for Arjuna as an act of adharma (sin) but
during her life time he never treated her unkindly for that. In other words,
Draupadi’s revelations about herself has no consequences at all for the narrative.
Her view of woman’s nature concerning handsome males may be interesting but it would
hardly count as a deep insight into the woman’s sexuality in the context of Sarala Mahabharata.
In our opinion, a Draupadi-centric
reading of the episode, which has been the case so far, as the literature on
this episode shows, can hardly raise questions of interest and significance. A
reading of it from a different perspective is certainly in order in my opinion.
We suggest a mango of truth-centric
reading of the episode. In this reading, questions of appearance and reality, of
the power of the utterance of truth and also of falsehood and of the role of
Krishna would arise. Can the words of truth really extend the possibilities of happenings
in the real world that defy the laws of nature? Was the mango of truth a real
world object? What is the power of lies? Is the power of truth and of untruth
inherent or derived? What is Krishna’s role in the appearance and the
disappearance of the mango of truth?
The Pandavas’ and Draupadi’s
utterances of truth made the impossible possible, but Krishna’s lies destroyed
what truth had created. So, truth can create, lies cannot. There was pratyaksha pramana (evidence based on
what the eye had seen) for the existence of the mango but that was no evidence
for the reality of the mango, as Krishna told Gauramukha when he advised him
that the mango should be subjected to a truth test to determine whether it was
real. When it was destroyed, he told him that it was indeed unreal because
words could not destroy a physical object.
Incidentally, there is no mention of
the other mangoes in the narrative. One could presume that they all vanished
once Gauramukha’s mango was destroyed. There is no mention of the mango- of-
truth event in the narrative thereafter.
It is true that the truth of the
Pandavas and Draupadi produced the mango but their truth was empowered by
Krishna. It was he who had told them that their truth would yield the desired
fruit. So in a sense his words for them were his truth. It was his truth that
created the mango and it was his lie that destroyed it. It is not clear whether
the mango was an illusion or a real object. A real world object could not be
destroyed by words but when Indra received the mango from Krishna, he must have
thought it was a real mango. In any case, the narrative does not need this
clarification. By creating the mango as the causer-agent, Krishna disturbed the
order of the natural world and by destroying it as the agent, he restored order
to it. Viewed thus, the episode is a description of his leela.
When we read Sarala Mahabharata, we must not ignore Sarala’s repeatedly
referring to his narrative as “Vishnu
Purana”. So Sarala used the story of the Kuru clan to expatiate on the leela of the Purna Avatara (the complete
manifestation) of the supreme god Vishnu.
Let us consider another innovation in Sarala Mahabharata. Here the last effort
to avoid a fratricidal war was made by Yudhisthira, not Krishna, as in Vyasa Mahabharata. Here Krishna did not offer
any advice to Arjuna when he expressed his unwillingness to fight in the Great
War in Kurukshetra. He left his brother’s problem in the hands of
Yudhisthira.
Incidentally, scholars of Sarala’s
magnum opus have observed that there is no Srimad
Bhagavad Gita in Sarala Mahabharata.
The explanation of its non-occurrence has mostly been in terms of Sarala’s
audience, who did not have the benefit of education. But it has not been noticed
by the scholars that Arjuna’s problem in this work was fundamentally different
from the same in Vyasa Mahabharata
(taking Srimad Bhagavad Gita to be
part of this work). In Sarala’s retelling, Arjuna was unwilling to start the war by attacking anyone in the
Kaurava side. If anyone attacked him, he would respond and he had absolutely no
hesitation in killing anyone in the enemy’s side, be it Bhishma or Drona or his
cousins, he told Krishna. He firmly believed that the sins of the killing in
the war, where blood of the innocents flows, accrues to the one who starts a
war. There were others in the world of Sarala
Mahabharata who had the same belief, Dhaumya, the venerable priest of the
Kuru family being one. This being Arjuna’s problem in Sarala’s Mahabharata, there is obviously no place
for the Gita discourse here.
To return to the war, when he heard
about Arjuna’s unwillingness to attack the Kaurava warriors, Bhima asked
Krishna to permit him to attack them. Krishna asked him to attack Dussasana. As
he was readying himself to do so, Yudhisthira stopped him and said that he
would make an effort to avoid the war. Ignoring the warnings of his brothers,
relatives and Krishna himself, he proceeded towards the Kaurava army all alone
and unarmed. In all humility, he paid due respects to Bhishma, Bhurishrava,
Shalya, Drona, Ashwasthama, Kripacharya and Karna, who he knew, as did everyone
else in the world of Sarala Mahabharata,
was his elder brother and received their blessings for victory in the war.
Then he met Duryodhana and pleaded
with him for five villages of Duryodhana’s choice. In contrast, Krishna had
asked for five villages of his choice when he went to Duryodhana as
Yudhisthira’s emissary. When Duryodhana refused, Yudhisthira asked for four,
then three villages, finally ending up with just one. Duryodhana said he would
not give him anything at all. He told him that if he won the war, then he would
be the king of Hastinapura and if Yudhisthira won, then he would be the king.
Yudhisthira chose to take his saying
literally and told him that since he held that view, then the war should be
fought between the hundred Kauravas and the five Pandavas and that he should
ask everyone else to leave the battlefield. He told him that that would ensure
that blood of the innocents would not flow in the battlefields of Kurukshera.
Duryodhana was unwilling. Yudhisthira’s understood that his attempt to avoid
the war had failed.
There is, to the best of my knowledge,
nothing comparable to Yudhisthira’s proposal in the entire puranic literature. It
celebrates humaneness most emphatically. In essence, the idea is that if a war
becomes unavoidable, then strictly only those who directly benefit from it must
participate in it. As for the others, such as the soldiers, it is not their
war. In that sense, they are innocent and their killing is the killing of the
innocents. In Sarala Mahabharata, war
is considered sinful, and there is absolutely no situation in which war is the
best solution to a problem in this narrative. In Yudhisthira’s proposal, Sarala
makes a rich contribution to the war ethics articulated in our puranic
literature.
By dissociating Krishna from crucial
decisions about war, the poet suggests that humans alone must decide their
destiny. It was pre-determined that the war would take place but human agency
is not undermined in the pre-determined world of Sarala Mahabharata. At the laukika
level (level of the phenomenal world), alternatives, even to war, are never
unavailable to the humans, neither is their freedom to choose.
As for Krishna, the devotee Sarala saved
his ista: the Avatara.
Note: A version of it under the title “Different Tales, Different Perspectives” is published in margAsia (
