ON KUNTI

This is a humble response to a comment I had received sometime back. The commentator who was kind enough to read the post on Kunti and Gandhari had expressed her strong displeasure on the way Kunti was depicted there. In that story Kunti and Gandhari quarreled and the commentator observed that Kunti was not one who would degrade herself by quarreling with anyone. As such, the narrative was unfair to a virtuous and dignified woman.

As we know very well, Sarala Mahabharata is not a translation of Vyasa’s Mahabharata, but a creative retelling of the ancient narrative. Retelling has been one of the two main traditional ways of engaging with a classical text: be it kavya or shastra, literary or knowledge-based text. And any retelling of such ancient texts involves interpretation and re-conceptualization of a text. Kamban Ramayana is a creative retelling of the Ramayana narrative, as are the retellings of Mahabharata by Nannaya and Pampa and Kumara Vyasa, who preceded Sarala. Sarala followed that tradition, but whether he himself was aware that he was doing so, it is impossible to tell, given the available information on the poet. However, at least one thing is very clear: Sarala Mahabharata contains nothing at all on the basis of which one could argue that he was indeed aware of the retellings that existed before his own.

Sarala Mahabharata being a retelling, we would expect variations in it from the canonical version of the narrative: Vyasa Mahabharata. The essential spirit is the same. Let us read each such narrative composed in other languages with an open mind and with generosity. We will then appreciate the extremely rich potential of the Mahabharata story and its creative explorations in different times by different narrators as they engage with it. 

Some characters in Sarala Mahabharata are cursed divinities, born as humans, in order to undergo the fruits of their karma and some were born to become part of the lila (divine play) of the avatara in different ways. To the first category belong, for instance, Pannaga Narayana, who was born as Duryodhana, one of the Sudraka Brahmas (the fourteenth one), who was born as Dussasana and Dharma, who was born as Vidura. To the second belong Sahadeva and Sakuni, for example, who were servitors of Bhagawan Vishnu in Vaikuntha. They came into the mortal world to assist Krishna in the fulfillment of his cosmic objective. As for the avatara himself, he was there to redeem his word to his servitors and devotees in different yugas or aeons and they include Jaya, Vijaya and Angada, all born as humans. 

In Sarala’s retelling, each of the gods and other divinities born in the mortal world, as the avatara himself, had the familiar, in fact, defining, human weaknesses. There was a distinct streak of ordinariness to their personalities. So Yudhisthira, who found unpleasant atmosphere around him suffocating and tended to withdraw, often kept quiet when he should have spoken up. Bhima used to deliberately insult and mentally torture Dhritarastra who was living with the Pandavas after the Kurukshetra war honouring Yudhisthira’s very genuine request. King Yudhisthira strongly disliked Bhima’s treatment of the helpless, old Kuru elder, his very own, but he didn’t say a word to him in this respect. Despite all the care and love that Nakula received from his foster mother Kunti and from her sons, this Pandava could not get over the feeling that after all, he and his brother Sahadeva were not sons of Kunti. As he confided in Krishna once, he was unsure as to how her sons would treat them once the war was over and the Kauravas were all killed. Draupadi felt insulted when Ghatotkacha did not pay her due respect during rajaswiya jajna, so she cursed the young man to die in the battlefield in a manner disgraceful for the warriors. This punishment was very unjust, being entirely disproportionate to Ghatotkacha’s misbehavior. What she did was totally unbecoming of a queen of the illustrious Kuru family and was totally unacceptable considering she was like a mother to him, who was Bhima’s son. Gandhari, the queen of King Dhritarastra at that time, was annoyed when she discovered that Kunti, an ordinary subject of the kingdom - she had by then lost her husband, Pandu - had the temerity to worship Bhagawan Siva in the same temple, that too even before she did. It hurt her pride and she scolded her. Kunti scolded Krishna once in such foul language that even Bhima got mighty upset. Yudhisthira had once done the same to Krishna, making Arjuna upset. The young and virtuous Bhishma one day ordered that the helpless Amba, who served him like a dasi, a maid, in his house at her father’s behest, be thrown out of his house for no fault of hers. The problem was that he was finding it increasingly difficult to control his passion towards that beautiful princess. The venerable guru Drona was so blindly fond of his son, Aswasthama, that instead of asking him to control his anger and develop a sense of discrimination, he asked him to please Brahma through tapas and get the boon of immortality from the Creator god, fearing that being a friend of Duryodhana, he might get killed in a Kaurava-Pandava war. The great goddesses, Parvati and Lakshmi, once fought, each claiming that her husband was greater. The venerable sages such as Vyasa and Durvasa would curse for no reason at all. Durvasa wanted to hold the baby Dussasana in his arms and the restless baby’s foot hit his chest. So powerful was the impact that the sage fell down. Out came the curse from his mouth targeting the innocent baby: may his chest be torn apart in a war! In sum, the ordinariness of Sarala’s characters is very conspicuous. Such ordinariness, which leads to moral failings, is part of his vision of humanness: it is about the co-existence of satvik, rajasik and tamasik tendencies in human nature and none of these is entirely absent in a human being. In the context of Sarala Mahabharata, Kunti’s abusing Krishna in harsh language out of frustration or her quarreling with Gandhari on the issue of whether she must wait for Gandhari to worship Siva first irrespective of when she arrived for offering worship (before her or after her) only point to the ordinariness of her character and not at all a censor of her. 

Setting aside Sarala’s poetic vision for a while, let us reflect for a moment whether quarrel is really all that bad. Quarrel can be a mode of demonstrating moral power and confidence through protesting against injustice, as was his mother Hidimbaki’s ’s angry, hateful and revengeful response to Draupadi when she cursed Ghatotkacha; she cursed in return that her yet unborn children would meet early death. Quarrel can be used to convey an argument, when the situation does not make it possible to engage in a polite dialogue. Hidimbaki gave Draupadi reasons why she had advised her son against paying her respect: her son was a king and as such could not pay his respects in public to her. Besides having five husbands she was unchaste and deserved no respect from him. Quarrel can be a means of drawing attention and pleading for understanding. It can clarify things and resolve misunderstanding and save a relationship from disintegration, and very importantly, it often works as a substitute for physical violence. Doesn’t then quarrel have a legitimate place in a society? Besides, given human nature, isn’t quarrel in some sense rather natural? Can one really say that a society free of quarrel is a utopia? If I have to look for some kind of an answer in Sarala Mahabharata, such a society, I suspect, will most probably look like a “Babarapuri”.

Ratha Yatra, Nabakalebara 2015

 

SARALA DASA AND JAGANNATH DASA ON A CERTAIN MORAL ISSUE CONCERNING KRISHNA

Jagannath Dasa wrote Bhagavata in Odia in the sixteenth century, about eighty years after Sarala Mahabharata was composed. Jagannath Dasa had to suffer for writing the most, or one of the two most, sacred Sanskrit texts in Odia language. I do not know when it got general acceptance in Odisha, but for a long time it has been regarded as arguably the most sacred text in Odia. During the three main dhupas (food offerings), it is ritually recited in the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Often it is recited at the bedside of a dying person in Odisha which is reminiscent of Suka – Pariksita sambada (episode of the sage Suka and the king Parikshita as the king was awaiting death). As for Sarala Dasa, he needs no introduction in this blog.

  

In both Sarala Mahabharata and Bhagavata, Krishna can be said to have emerged as the purna avatara or the complete manifestation, in terms of attributes, of the Supreme god Narayana. Born as a human, he had a human aspect to his exalted divinity. He was supposed to have relationship with many women to whom he was not ritually married. In times when extra-marital relationships were socially unacceptable, both Sarala and Jagannath were uncomfortable with this and this piece is about how these celebrated poets responded to it.  

To start with Sarala Mahabharata. Krishna had just departed from the mortal world and Jara, the forest dweller, whose arrow had wounded him fatally, and Arjuna had made a huge fire to cremate him. They sat quietly nearby, deeply distressed, lost and forlorn, waiting for the body to burn. But it wouldn’t. They put more and more wood in the fire and the flames leapt higher and higher but the body would still not burn. Arjuna was wondering why. He recalled the doings of Krishna as a child. He had sucked a woman to death, he had killed a bull, they were demons, true, but they had assumed such forms: Putana was a woman and Arishta, a bull.  Then he had sinful relations with so many women. He thought that the body was not burning because it was a sinful body. Many people of older generations still believe in Odisha at least, that the body of a virtuous man burns very fast and that of a sinner takes long to burn. When he was alive, the fruit of his sinful karma could not touch him, and now since he has departed, it had taken control of his body. But he immediately regretted thinking like that. May be the real reason was something else, he thought. Did the body become impure because of his touch, he being a mere mortal and a sinner? Sarala does not tell us what was going through Jara’s mind. Going by his portrayal of him, one could guess that he could be thinking of Krishna, who he knew was worshipped Indra, Brahma,Siva, and all the other gods. Anyway, Arjuna had begun to feel guilty about his first impious thought of Krishna. At that time the Voice from the Sky asked them to float the body in the ocean because fire was incapable of consuming it.

The Voice from the Sky was the poet’s voice as was Yudhisthira’s in Swargarohana Parva with respect to his brothers and as was god Dharma’s with respect to Yudhisthira. It was a declaration of the poet’s final judgement on his Krishna: out of the karmic cycle, when he lived among the mortals, he was the purest of the pure, so was his body after he had left it. Now, Arjuna’s thoughts and in the order in which they came to him, the latter cancelling out the former, can be said to express the attempt of the troubled poet to try to explain an aspect of the avatara to the humans, which they understandably find un-understandable.  With the Voice from the Sky speaking, the poet sweeps away all doubts and uncertainties.

Jagannath Dasa confronted the same question but he came up with a different resolution, which sounds so modern. Extramarital relationship is socially unacceptable, but it is there. Those who indulge in it are those who are the bada loka (big men) of the society. But what choice is there except to look the other way when they are involved? What can one say when the leaders of the society violate societal norms! There is no questioning the powerful – bada lokaku uttara nahi (there is no answer to the big people), as goes the popular Odia proverb. The import is clear: if the avatara in the human form chooses to remain in the society, he cannot be exempt from societal norms. The society can only grumble if he does, but cannot utter even a word of disapproval. 

During Jagannath Dasa’s time came Sri Chaitanya to Puri. He gave the title ati badi (very great) to Dasa, who thus came to be known as ati badi jagannath dasa. With Sri Chaitanya’s coming, a sect of Vaishnavism came into being in Odisha, which subsequently came to be known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism (Vaishnavism from Gauda – the modern Bengal), distinct from Utkaliya Vaishnavism (Vaishnavism of Utkal – native Vaishnavism). There are significant differences between these two forms of Vaishnavism, but one thing was common to both: Krishna’s relationship with the gopis was spiritual; paramatma’s (the Supreme, Universal Soul) relationship with atma (the individual soul / self); the physical expression was only a mode of articulation, a mere metaphor, an illusion.

BABANA BHUTA

At a recent seminar on unwritten languages and oral myths, in a certain context, I referred to a bhuta (roughly, ghost) in Sarala Mahabharata, called Babana bhuta. Some were curious and wanted me to tell them some more about it. For them a bhuta, a character in grandmother tales, was an odd presence in a Mahabharata narrative, although they did not say it in so many words. 

The story of Babana bhuta occurs in Udyoga Parva. This is a story Duryodhana’s wife, the virtuous Bhanumati, told him in private.  Krishna had gone to the Kaurava court as Yudhisthira’s emissary to ask him for five villages for the Pandavas.  Respecting the advice of Bhishma and reluctant to displease Krishna because he was uncertain about victory in a war in which Krishna would be on the enemy’s side, King Duryodhana was inclined to give two villages to the Pandavas. At that time he did not know which villages Krishna had in mind. He must have thought that two, instead of five, was not a bad deal. But Sakuni would not hear of it. He was pressuring Duryodhana not to give anything at all to the Pandavas. When Bhanumati heard of this, she told her husband the story of Babana bhuta, which in brief is the following:

In a certain village, named Gyanapura, near the river Tungabhadra, for some unknown reason, people became pretas (a category of ghosts) after death. A gunia (tantric, roughly “sorcerer”, because unlike a sorcerer, there are no evil associations with him) named Sudraka, came to live in that village with his family and soon gained the respect of the inhabitants because of his good nature. He once noticed a nice piece of land near the hill and sought the permission of the villagers to cultivate it, but they warned him against doing so because that land belonged to the notorious ghosts. He told them that he wasn’t afraid, and that he could imprison the ghosts. He sent his ploughmen and labourers to cultivate the land. When the ghosts harassed them, he caught them in a net using his tantric powers. Then the ghosts made peace with him and obtained their release by giving him a considerable measure of til. After sometime the king of the ghosts, Babana bhuta, very dangerous and wicked in nature, arrived and was greatly annoyed to see that their play field had been usurped and was being used for cultivation. Despite warnings of the ghosts, he possesses Sudraka’s only son, but got terribly scared when Sudraka tried to imprison him with iron nails. He got his release by giving him a very huge amount of paddy, which the ghosts collected by attacking people of neighbouring villages.

One would end up like Babana bhuta, said Queen Bhanumati to her husband, if one enjoyed the property all alone that belonged to all.  It was her suggestion and her warning too:  Hastnapura belonged to the Kurus; i.e., the Pandavas and the Kauravas both. Depriving the Pandavas of their share of the kingdom was unjust and would certainly lead to great trouble for the Kauravas. Duryodhana did not follow her sage counsel; he chose to follow Sakuni instead. 

What is noteworthy here is the fusion of the classical and the popular. Babana bhuta story couldn’t have been part of the classical tradition. It has a distinct loka katha (folktale) flavour. By linking the two traditions, Sarala, in a manner of speaking, restored a bit of a great classical narrative to the oral, where, one could assume, all narratives have their beginnings. Which oral tales the celebrated Vyasa assimilated into his telling as he composed the story of the Kuru clan, one would never know. Once a part of the grand narrative, these tales lost their original loka katha flavour. Now Sarala was retelling the immortal Mahabharata story to the poor, uneducated and marginalized villagers, and he was doing so in their own language, Odia, not the in the language of scholarly discourse in Odisha at that time, namely, Sanskrit. Thus in a way a loka katha returned to where it belonged. It does not matter that the loka kathas could not have been the same in Vyasa’s narrative and Sarala’s. To the best of my knowledge, there is no story in Vyasa Mahbharata that corresponds to the story of Babana bhuta. No one knows whether it was Sarala’s creation or his adaptation of an existing tale. 

In loka sahitya (oral or folk literature) in all cultures ghost is a popular character. This fact reflects a strong and very popular belief in the ghost in the past. In turn, that belief was strengthened when the ghost entered loka katha. However, ghosts have never been of interest in themselves; loka kathas in which ghosts figure do not describe the world of the ghosts for its own sake. The ghost is of interest only when it interacts with the humans, in whatever manner. The story of Babana bhuta is used by Sarala as an illuminating metaphor for the dreadful consequences of greed.

WHAT HAPPENED TO GANDIVA IN SARALA MAHABHARATA

Is what a friend wanted to know.

As the Pandavas were climbing up the cold Himalayas to submit themselves to death, they had no weapons with them. They had discarded them. Except Arjuna, who had his divine bow, Gandiva, with him. It is not that he wanted it for his or his brother’s protection in the mountains. It is just that he was deeply attached to it. It is not clear from the narrative whether for keeping the bow he had the permission of Yudhisthira or the approval of his brothers. 

But whatever is given is taken away, sometimes early, sometimes late. Krishna had given him a fraction of his kala (attribute) and he withdrew it when he was giving up his mortal form. Told by Sahadeva not to do so, Arjuna would not touch him, despite Krishna’s pleading. So he requested Arjuna to extend Gandiva towards him so that he could have a feel of his dearest sakha (friend) at least indirectly; isn’t a touch of someone dearest soothing when one is in pain? That’s the way Arjuna thought and as he held out the bow, the avatara touched it and with that he withdrew his attribute. At once Arjuna became like any other mortal. The youngest Pandava, who knew everything, knew that the avatara would not return from the world incomplete, leaving a bit of him behind. So he had asked his brother not to touch him, no matter how heart-rending his pleading. But there are limits to human intelligence; the purna avatara (complete manifestation of all attributes) was not bound by any.

It was fire god Agni’s turn now. At the time of the burning of the forest of Khandava, he had given this divine bow to Arjuna. Now he manifested and told Arjuna that he had come to take back Gandiva. Arjuna refused right away. It was not merely a weapon for him; he loved and respected it so profoundly that he had taken an oath that he would not forgive any disrespect to either Krishna or Gandiva – just them; no Kunti, no Yudhisthira, no Draupadi - and would kill the offender. Everyone knew of his oath. Thus once he was going to kill Yudhisthira when he insulted Gandiva. Krishna intervened and saved the sanctity of Arjuna’s oath and Yudhisthira’s life both. That story that does not concern us here.

Agni pleaded with him but Arjuna was reluctant. This was when Yudhisthira intervened. He sharply told Arjuna that if he was so attached to his bow he should return to Hastinapura and assist King Parikshita in the protection of the kingdom. Arjuna got the message and gave his bow to the god. It must have dawned on him that clinging to worldly things, including the divine ones given by gods, was actually clinging to life. Attachment to life negated the last jajna that he was performing along with his brothers and Draupadi in the sacred Himalayas.

Then Agni said something that was intended as much for him as for the listeners of the great narrative, sitting in front of Sarala more than five centuries ago, and also his listeners and readers since then: Arjuna should not feel disappointed. In future times Mahabharata would be re-enacted again and again and Arjuna would return again and again, and at that time he would give back Gandiva to him. The poet does not tell us what these words meant to Arjuna - if at all he registered them - but he informs and warns those who were listening to him and those who would in future about the human conditions, about the inevitabilities.

Sarala does not tell us whether there would be Krishna in the future enactments of Mahabharata. He knew that there was no point trying to figure out what Narayana would do. He knew that He is beyond the comprehension of anyone – man or god. He knew that Agni knew it too.