SARALA MAHABHARATA (A SUMMARY OF IDEAS FOR A WELL-WISHER, WITH RESPECT)

“Sudra muni” 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 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 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 Vyasa Mahabharata 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 incarnation) of Narayana, and he called his Mahabharata “Vishnu Purana”. He said that he was uneducated and dull and had no knowledge of the shastras; he merely wrote what goddess Sarala, his divine mother, inspired him to write. The words were hers; he was merely the scribe.

In Sarala’s retelling, both Duryodhana and Sakuni, died, not in disgrace but in glory. 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 do so. 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. But he chose to die in the battlefield as he considered 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 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. He 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.

No one invited Yudhisthira to play a game of dice. Yudhisthira wanted to play and he expressed 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 karma.

In Sarala’s narrative, Drona and Drupada were never in any ashram, studying together and Drupada wanted to avenge his humiliation in the hands of the Kaurava princes. He wanted a girl child and conducted a yajna for that. Draupadi emerged from the sacred fire. For her father, she was merely an instrument for revenge. He taught her the use of weapons and wanted to have her married to Arjuna, thinking that someday, the Kauravas and the Pandavas would go to war for the throne. He was certain that the former would be destroyed in that war.

After her wedding, Draupadi lived the life of a good daughter-in-law of the Kuru family. She gave no reason to anyone to be unhappy with her, neither the Kauravas nor the Pandavas. There is no hint in Sarala’s narrative that anyone was upset with her in the least. The vastraharana event changed her. She never forgave Dussasana and Duryodhana; she bayed for their blood. Now, Duryodhana wanted to humiliate her in his court that day, not because he had any grouse against her; he wanted to humiliate the Pandavas by humiliating her. 

No one invited Yudhisthira to return to Hastinapura for a second game of dice. Unable to bear the agony of failure, he sought an opportunity to redeem his honour. In the second game of dice, it was not with the magic sticks of Sakuni that they played the game. It was not Sakuni who rolled the dice that day. It was Sahadeva. Sakuni was only an onlooker. Sahadeva ensured that the Pandavas lost. Divinely bestowed with special insight, he knew that that was what the gods wanted - the Pandavas’ exile was needed so that the wicked Kichaka could be killed. That was the cosmic design.

In the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Arjuna was reluctant to start the war because he would not attack anyone unless he was attacked. He would not strike first. War was papa (sinful) and the one who started it would be bear the burden of papa. He joined the war only after it had started. There is no Bhagavad Gita in Sarala Mahabharata. Krishna did not persuade Arjuna to fight; he did not say that it was his duty to do so. He left Arjuna to live by his own moral beliefs.

Bhishma did not enter the battlefield, deciding that he would not kill a Pandava; he had indeed tried to kill Arjuna, but unknown to everyone, gods and mortals, Krishna’s intervention saved Arjuna. For the war, Bhishma held the Pandavas responsible as well. It was not the case that there was no alternative to war; there was, certainly, the option of non-violent action. But that demanded great sacrifice; the Pandavas were not prepared for that. He said this to Arjuna in the battlefield when the latter told him how Duryodhana had thrust a war on them. Yudhisthira called the Kurukshetra war “dharma yuddha” because of the cause (from his point of view); Duryodhana also called it “dharma yuddha” but not because of the cause. He certainly did not believe that he had entered the battlefield with the banner of adharma. For him, it was dharma yuddha because the entire war field had become sacred on account of the Avatara’s presence there. He would be the witness to who was following dharma in the battlefield and who was not. This is what Duryodhana had told the Pandavas when the two sides had met to work out a war code to ensure that the fight between brothers did not sink to the level of barbarism. 

Draupadi had Dussasana’s blood all over her and a little of it touched her mouth as it flowed down from her head. It had to happen to her. Dussasana perished for his karma. Neither of them remembered their past. In the aeon of Truth (Satya Yuga), Dussasana, as Sudraka Brahma, had committed papa against goddess Ketuka, now born as Draupadi, in the aeon of Dwapara. Bhishma most willingly paid for the wrong he had done to Amba, then born as Shikhandi. During the war, one day, he pleaded with Krishna to allow Shikhandi to become the cause of his fall. Bhima fell to his death because Yudhisthira did not want him to go to Swarga, the abode of the gods, in his mortal form. He was prone to violence and was wicked; Yudhisthira ensured that he perished in the mountains. Granting his wish, goddess Hingula tore Bhima to pieces. And Yudhisthira went to Swarga, not because he wanted to, but because Krishna wanted him to go to there without passing through death.

Arjuna won the archery test because Krishna wanted him to win, Abhimanyu was killed because Krishna had assured the divine, which Abhimanyu really was, that he would return to Swarga the day he turned fourteen. So he had to engineer his death. Only Sahadeva knew about it. Gandhari wanted to destroy Yudhisthira but ended up destroying her son, Durdasa, who had survived the war and these happened on account of Krishna’s intervention. Duryodhana became king because of Krishna; only Vidura, Sakuni and Sanjaya knew that the Pandavas had not perished in the fire in the lac palace. Krishna had made Vidura, Sakuni and Sanjaya promise to him not to divulge the truth about the Pandavas. They betrayed King Dhritarashtra and the kingdom of Hastinapura but kept their word to the Avatara. Under the impression that the Pandavas were dead, Bhishma and other Kuru elders agreed to King Dhritarashtra’s proposal for Duryodhana’s coronation. Bhima dealt mortal blows to Duryodhana, not with his mace, but Vishnu’s, whose complete manifestation, Purna Avatara, Krishna was. No one knew. All in all, whatever happened in the world of Sarala Mahabharata, happened because of Krishna’s will. All who died in the battlefield of Kurukshetra were killed by Krishna’s divine chakra; humans in their illusion thought that they were the agents.  They were not even instruments. That was the lila of Krishna.

In Sarala Mahabharata, no one was entirely vicious and completely dedicated to adharma; no one was entirely without moral blemish and totally committed to dharma. In this retelling, the issue of the succession to the throne of Hastinapura was complex; the claims of both the Kauravas and the Pandavas for the throne were not without substance. Outsiders’ interventions complicated the issue further. The kingdom of Hastinapura was never divided formally, although the Pandavas and the Kauravas were living separately; the former in Varunavanta and the latter, in Hastinapura. Thus, Yudhisthira lost much wealth, which he had got as gift at the time of his wedding from Drupada and later from the kings who participated in the rajaswiya jajna he had performed, but he lost no kingdom as such in the first game of dice. Dhritarashtra returned whatever he had lost, not as the king of Hastinapura, which he was not then, as mentioned above, but as the Kuru elder.

These are only a few of the numerous differences between Vyasa Mahabharata and Sarala 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 possibility 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, its inherent sinfulness as blood of the innocents flowed in the battlefield inevitably and the possibilities of there being alternatives to it.

A very innovative idea in Sarala Mahabharata concerns the question of why one must practice dharma. For Yudhisthira, the embodiment of dharma on earth and as such, the mouthpiece of “dharma” in the narrative, it is not for a life in Swarga after death, it is not to attain Swarga without passing through death, it is not even to escape the cycle of life and death and attain immortality; one must live a virtuous life because when he is gone, the future generations will talk about him as a follower of dharma – katha rahithiba (Word / The story will remain) as Sarala puts it. This is nothing short of a revolutionary point of view on the matter in the context of our puranic literature.

Perhaps the most creative concept in Sarala Mahabharata is that of Purna Avatara. Sarala explores the idea of the fullest manifestation of God in a human form, defined in terms of inclinations such as satwa, raja(s) and tama(s). Sarala conceptualized Purna Avatara as the one who has Self-Knowledge – knowledge that none has, neither gods nor mortals; as the one who embodies the ultimate expression of each of these gunas, which makes him, at the same time, the most spectacular among the created beings in satwic terms and the meanest of the humans in the tamasic terms. In him are manifest the most glaring contradictions. In none in the Creator god Brahma’s creation do these contradictions exist in non-conflicting togetherness.

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.

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A NOTE ON MY POST ON JAGANNATH WORSHIP: HOW SARALA CONNECTED KRISHNA WITH JAGANNATH

I thought I should write a note to say why I posted a piece on Jaganath worship in this blog on Sarala Mahabharata.

Was Sarala the first to connect Krishna with Jagannath through a narrative? That might be the case, this post suggests.

The Musali Parva of Sarala Mahabharata connects Shri Krishna with Mahaprabhu Jagannath. Neither Srimad Bhagavata nor Harivansha nor Vyasa Mahabharata made this connection. Neither did Shreepurushottama-kshetra-mahatmyam of Skanda Purana, which deals with the origins of Jagannath and His worship in considerable detail. Neither did the twelfth-century poet Jayadeva. In his dasavatara (ten avataras) slokas, Keshava or Krishna is conceived as the Source and Matsya, Nrusingha, Vamana, Rama, etc. are his incarnations. Jagannath, who, some, but not Jayadeva, believe to be non-distinct from Buddha, is considered by them as the ninth avatara of Keshava. But Buddha was an avatara of Bhagawan Vishnu and that avatara shared with the Buddha of Buddhism only the name. To the best of my knowledge, the Gita Govinda says nothing that connects Krishna with Jagannath persuasively.

The celebrated Jagannathastakam, each stanza of which ends with “Jagannathah swami nayana pathagami bhabatu me”, relates Krishna with Jagannath. Aadi Shankaracharya is popularly believed to have composed this hymn but many argue, persuasively, that it was composed by Sri Chaitanya. In the sixth stanza, for instance, there is the mention of Radha but the special gopi (milkmaid) of Srimad Bhagavata came to be known as “Radha” in Brahmavaivarta Purana, composed centuries after Aadi Shankaracharya. If Sri Chaitanya composed this hymn, then it was after Sarala’s time.

So, was Sarala the first in the Jagannath narratives who created this connection between Krishna and Jaganath? I guess he was but am not sure; many puranas (Skanda Purana, Padma Purana, Narada Purana, Bhavishya Purana, among others) and at least one upapurana, namely Kalika Purana have mentioned Jagannath. There are other important texts dealing with Jagannath and His worship, such as Niladri Mahodaya and others composed in Odia, but these are post-Sarala, as far as I know. I haven’t read most of the puranas and the upapurana mentioned above. I will be grateful for help in this regard from friends who would care to read this post.

The barest essentials of the theme of the Krishna-Jagannath connection in Sarala Mahabharata is this: After Krishna departed from the mortal world, keeping his word to Angada, born as Jara, in the preceding yuga, Treta (in Musali Parva, the Divine Voice told Arjuna that Jara was Angada), Arjuna and Jara tried their best to cremate his body but did not succeed. Fire would not be able to consume the body, said the Divine Voice from the sky and directed them to float it in the sea, which they did. As Arjuna left for Dwaraka, he asked Jara to keep watch over the body.  Jara followed it. As far as I understand the narrative, this story effectively ends here; its continuation till the emergence of Jagannath is mediated by the Divine Voice from the sky, instructions from Krishna to king Indradyumna during dreams, etc. But this Krishna can only be a name of the Supreme god, Narayana, the avatara Krishna’s Source, because the avatara Krishna had merged into Him after he left the mortal world. In this part of the narrative, both “Narayana” and “Krishna” are used, but they have the same reference, to my mind, namely, the Avatari (the Source). Now, why did the poet use the word “Krishna” then? I surmise that he did so in order to suggest that Musali Parva was a continuation of his Mahabharata, although the Kurus had no presence in the narrative of the emergence of Jagannath. But there was Jara in Musali Parva, who figures both in the Mahabharata narrative and the one of the origins of Jagannath.

But is the Jara of the Mahabharata and the Jara of the Jagannath narrative in Musali Parva, the same person? As far as I m concerned, the answer is “no”. In Sarala Mahabharata, Jara is a name borne by different savaras in different times. Jara was another name of Ekalavya, Jara was the son of Kiratasena, the ruler of a forest kingdom, Jara was the one whose arrow had mortally wounded Krishna, Jara was the name of the savara who worshipped Neela Madhava and Jara was the one who was chosen by Krishna (Narayana, because Krishna had merged in Him) to play a crucial role in the making of Jagannath and later, His worship.

To me, Sarala uses “Krishna” and “Jara” as terms that connect the narrative of the Kurus and the narrative of the origins of Jagannath – these terms occur in both. This is a lexical strategy that the poet used. Had he used “Narayana” instead of “Krishna”, who, to repeat, had lost his identity after returning to his Source, and some other name for the particular savara to distinguish him from the other Jaras, the two narratives would not have been as unobtrusively blended as they are in Sarala Mahabharata.    

The savara’s involvement in Jagannath worship makes this worship unique. A savara is outside of the caste system and when he enters it in Jagannath worship as a daita or daitapati (name of a group of servitors in Jagannath worship), he does so as a non-brahmin. The daitas perform intimate seva (ritual service) of Jagannath (a cover term for Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshana) during anasara (during which period, He is accessible only to two categories of servitors: daitapati and pati mahapatra, a brahmin but not a shotriya brahmin); they take care of the Murtis. Anasara ritual requires the seva of both daitapatis and pati mahapatras. Sarala is certainly not the first who articulated this inclusive form of worship, but I feel confident to assert that no one had assigned a more crucial role to the savara in the relevant narrative than him.

Mahastami, 2019

TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING JAGANNATH WORSHIP: A NARRATIVE OF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE BRAHMINICAL AND THE LOCAL AND ITS RESOLUTION

Abstract

An attempt is made here to study the conceptualization of Lord Jagannath and the ritual system associated with his worship over centuries in terms of brahminization, localization and the resolution of the conflict between these two. Analysing Skanda Purana and Sarala Mahabharata and a particular ritual, anasara, in some detail, it brings out the inclusiveness of Jagannath worship.

Key words: Jagannath, Jagannath worship, Neela Madhava, brahminization, localization, inclusiveness, Jara 

In 2014, touching the Deities on the rathas (chariots) was not allowed to the devotees by the Jagannath Temple administration of Puri, on the advice of the Shankaracharya of Govardhana Peetha, Puri, whom they had approached for advice on this matter, setting aside the circumstances under which they had done so, because that will take us far afield. The Gajapati King of Puri, who is the first among the servitors of Mahaprabhu Jagannath (henceforth, “Jagannath”, as he is popularly and fondly called, without any honorific suffix or prefix) had strongly supported the Shankaracharya. Touching the Deities is papa (sin), the Shankaracharya had declared. The devotees were not allowed to climb on to the rathas to reach the Deities. The only ones who opposed this were some daita (also called daitapati) sevakas (servitors of a non-brahmin category), who said that the disallowance was against the tradition but their opposition was to no avail. The following year, this proscription was even more strictly followed, with the Odisha High Court’s ruling in favour of it and criminalizing the touching the Deities. Incidentally, in 2006, the Temple administration had arranged for ladders so that the devotees could climb on to the rathas and everyone knew that they would touch the Deities. Sin was in nobody’s mind; I presume that at least for most of the devotees, it still is not. In any case, this aspect has not figured in public discourse on the subject. It must be mentioned that the disallowance has turned out to be hugely popular but its popularity is entirely unrelated to the matter of sin. It has been popular because the devotees have since been having a clear darshan of the Deities, untroubled by someone or the other asking or bullying them for a fee for darshan.  Earlier, often those who were on the rathas, both servitors and the devotees, would surround the Deities, making it difficult for those on the ground to see them clearly. It was often alleged that many of the devotees on the rathas had paid money to the servitors to be there.

   Still on the matter of touching the Deities, sparsa darshana (literally, touching the Deities, while having darshan of them), as it is called, was allowed by convention, even when the Deities were in the garva griha (sanctum sanctorum), seated on the platform called “Ratna Sinhasana”. During paramanika darshana (paid darshan) or sahanamela (public darshan), devotees could touch the Deities on certain days: Dola Purnima when the Deities were in their suna besha, (dressed with gold ornaments) or in their Padma (lotus) besha, among similar occasions. Some believed that the Deities could be touched when they were not on their platform in garva griha, where they received worship in terms of the mantra-centric brahminical tradition. In 2014, Puri Shankaracharya pronounced that the Deities must not be touched irrespective of where they were: on the platform in the garva griha, or rathas or anasara pindi (inside the temple, but outside the garva griha, where the Deities remain for fifteen days) or on the ground during their pahandi (moving step by step) while going to their rathas or snana bedi (the designated platform inside the compound of the temple, where the Deities are given a special “big” bath once a year). Shankaracharya’s view could be viewed as discouraging the non-brahminical, vyabaharic tradition and providing support to the brahminization of Jagannath and the ritual system in the Jagannath temple, a process that started centuries ago.

   This is the context for the present paper. Trying to understand Jagannath and his worship, it constructs a narrative of the brahminization (preferring this term to “Aryanization”) of Jagannath worship, its contestation by concepts and practices that are contrary to it, which is called here “localization”, rather tentatively and of the resolution of the contradiction between brahminization and localization in this worship. Evolution of Jagannath and his worship is too rich and complex a topic to be dealt within the familiar limitations of a paper; this paper is rather of an indicative nature with respect to its subject and hasn’t gone beyond merely scratching the surface of it. The terms “brahminization” and “localization” are merely descriptive labels and have no connotations at all, either favourable or negative. And “brahminization” subsumes the concepts underlying the terms “Vishnuization”, “Krishnization”, etc. used in this paper. As far as the origins of Jagannath and his worship are concerned, the paper has drawn its data from some puranic narratives, in particular, Skanda Purana in Sanskrit and Sarala Mahabharata in Odia. As far as the rituals performed in the temple dealt with here, are concerned, some informative texts on this topic, my own experience as an observer of some of these rituals and my discussion on this subject with scholars on Jagannath culture and a few locals, including the servitors of the temple, constitute the data.  

    

   Jagannath appears to be unique in many respects, considered against the background of the religious narratives and the relevant tattwik (philosophical) deliberations of ancient and medieval India on murti worship. Many questions arise with respect to him, especially his origins, some of which are as follows: what explains the incompleteness of his murti (form) and the nature of that incompleteness? What explains his colour and the colours of Balabhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshana, along with whom he receives worship and when and why the above three came to be worshipped with him, assuming, not without reason, which we just cannot go into here, that in the beginning he was worshiped alone? There is a body of literature on these and one might find answers to the above satisfactory or inadequate and unsatisfactory. There is at least one question that has hardly been addressed by scholars, which is about the colours of the Deities (Jagannath is black, Balabhadra, white and Subhadra, yellow.) Although in the recent centuries, he has come to have been generally viewed as the manifestation of Vishnu, some have connected him to Buddhism, Jainism, Krishna-centric Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, Ganapatya sect, among others. For some, he is the Purushottama of the Rig Veda, for others, Brahman of the Upanishads, the Buddha of Buddhis; for some Shaivites, he is Shiva, the Shaktas, Mahavairava (the Great Vairava), the Vaishnavas Krishna, for the Ganapatya followers, Ganesha and the like. Now, no god in the pantheon of Sanatana dharma (henceforth “Hindu”) has been as acceptable to the followers of such diverse faiths and beliefs as him. For fifteen days a year, except for two categories of servitors, the Chaturdhamurti (The Four-fold-Form), are inaccessible to the devotees and these two categories of servitors, who are engaged in this secret and intimate worship of Jagannath, are patimahapatras, one sub-category of “Jagannath-temple brahmins” (to distinguish them from shotriya brahmins), and daitas (also called daitapatis, non-brahmins, whose ancestors are said to be savaras, who, being forest-dwellers and non-Aryas (Aryans), were outside of the caste-system, and did not enter the caste-system later as high caste. Incidentally, the term “daita” is entirely unconnected with the term “daitya (asura or demon)”. Now, no other Hindu god is worshipped by the brahmins and the savaras, who belong to two significantly different cultures. There are many more such aspects to the worship of Jagannath, which are unique to it. So the question has often been asked about Jagannath, namely, “Who is Jagannath really?” by those, as Surendra Mohanty suggests in his celebrated novel “Neela Saila” (1979, p. 299), who are inclined towards philosophy, religion and history of culture. This question shows that those who ask it would like to find Jagannath related to a single, specific religious tradition.  They find the inclusiveness of Jagannath uncomfortable. As far as the common man is concerned, as Mohanty observes (1979, p.299), he has no interest in this question. In the spirit of Neela Saila, we would like to articulate his perspective as follows: Jagannath is Jagannath, not restricted to any single religious tradition. However, if one wishes to see in him Krishna or Vishnu or Shiva or Ganesha or whosoever else, including goddess Kali, one could do so. Every view is legitimate; no view is privileged; so, no room for the question, who he really is. In the idiom of the tattwiks, this perspective of the common man can, roughly, have the following form: “Being Nothing, the Void, he absorbs everything”.  

   In sum, there are two contrastive perspectives on Jagannath: the brahminical, considered educated and “sophisticated” by those who believe in the authority of the shashtras and the puranas, composed in Sanskrit, and the other, the people’s perspective, the “localized” one, in the sense it is used here.  The former dismisses the people’s view as naïve and simplistic; as for the latter, the former is uninteresting and meaningless.  But neither has cancelled out the other in course of centuries, each finding its own space in both the narratives about Jagannath and the rituals performed in the temple.  This inclusiveness constitutes the resolution of the conflicting perspectives of brahminization and localization, with respect to Jagannath and his worship.

 

   Probably the first detailed account of Jagannath’s origin in the brahminical tradition occurs in “Utkala Khanda”, which is a part of the twelfth century composition, Skanda Purana, cited here as Das (2016). A sketchy but entirely adequate summary for our present purpose is the following: The first worshipper of Neela Madhava, taken to be the ancestral form of Jagannath, was a savara named Viswabasu. King Indradyumna, a great devotee of Vishnu, was advised that Vishnu was manifest in his fullest divine glory in the forests of Utkala and was being worshipped by a savara. At the king’s behest, the brahmin Vidyapati, the younger brother of the minister of the king came in search of the Deity. Afraid of the brahimn’s curse, Viswabasu showed him the Deity, an idol who had the familiar human form of the Hindu deities. When on the following day he came to worship Neela Madhava, he had disappeared. The king was inconsolable. The Divine Voice told him not to worry. He would manifest himself in the form of a log of wood. The following day, the king’s men found a splendid log of wood on the shores of the sea nearby. No one knew where it had come floating from. The brahmins took the sacred wood and placed it on the chosen platform. No one knew how to make the murti (idol) of Vishnu. The Divine Voice told the king that an old carpenter would come to him and he would make the murti in fifteen days. The carpenter worked all alone and in complete secrecy and in the appointed time, he made the murtis of Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshana. The job done, he disappeared; he had actually absorbed into the murti of Jagannath, which no one knew. Only Vishnu could make his own murti; no human could. The Deities had hands and feet, etc. unlike their incomplete counterparts today, who have been receiving worship for centuries now.  Indradyumna was advised by the Divine Voice to designate the savara Viswabasu’s descendants and the brahmin Vidypati’s descendants as the servitors of Jagannath. This system of worship, not initiated by a human agent but by the divine decree, made Jagannath worship un-brahminical, or at least, only weakly brahminical, right from the beginning.  By including the savara in the worship, the divine voice had set limits on the brahminization of Jagannath worship.

   There are variations of this narrative in several puranas and puranic texts, some of which have dealt with how the incomplete Deities came to be worshipped, in contravention of the brahminical system. One extremely popular account, which can be said to have become part of the Odia consciousness, is the following: The Creator god himself, assuming the form of a very old and frail carpenter, told king Indradyumna that he needed twenty-one days to make the murtis and that he would be alone inside the temple, making the murtis and that no one must have access to him under any circumstances. Every day, for fourteen days, the king and his queen, Gundicha, would hear, from outside, the sounds of the making of the murtis but on the fifteenth day, they could hear nothing. Persuaded by his queen, who was extremely worried that the carpenter had died inside, Indradyumna opened the door of the temple and found the incomplete Forms. The carpenter had disappeared. The Divine Voice said that Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma would receive worship in their incomplete Forms. The rest of the story is of no concern to us. This account is similar to Sarala’s, as we shall see.

   The following are of interest to us in the Skanda Purana narrative: (a) the names Neela Madhava and Viswabasu, (b) The murti of Neela Madhava having the form a supra-human, of Vishnu, as in the puranic depictions of him, with four hands, etc. (c) the shifting of the divine wood from the sea shore to the platform by the brahmins and (d) the making of the murtis by the carpenter.  Now, the names above are not tribal names and tribal communities are not known to have worshipped murtis having a graceful, human form.  This shows that the brahminization of the object of Viswabasu’s worship had already taken place and inevitably, the narrative of the origin of Jagannath as well. The god of “no-tradition” (what else would describe him better, when he had just one human worshipper - of course, the great gods worshipped him, but they are not part of any articulation of the Little and the Great traditions - who had hidden him from everyone’s view till Vidyapati’s arrival) had been assimilated into the Great tradition.

   We now turn to Sarala’s narrative of the making of the murtis. Sarala Das, the aadi kavi of Odia literature, who belonged to the fifteenth century and who is the first non-brahmin to retell the great classical narrative in a regional language, composed the story of the origins of Jagannath in his Mahabharata in “Musali Parva”. Despite similarities, his narrative shows some fundamental differences from Skanda Purana. In brief, in Sarala Mahabharata, the equivalent of Viswabasu is Jara, and of Vidyapati is Vasu and between the personal names, Jara and Viswabasu, the former sounds less brahminical than the latter. The Divine wood manifested itself at the Rohini Kunda (pond), and not on the shores of the sea.  That wood was the form of Krishna himself, the complete manifestation of Vishnu. In Sarala’s account, Shiva wanted to be with Vishnu and so did Brahma, when they knew that Vishnu had decided to receive worship in Neelachala (Puri of today). The brahmins, the royals and the ministers of Indradyumna tried their best to move the Divine wood into the majestic temple King Indradyumna had built for Vishnu but it would not move. Krishna told the king in a dream that night that only the savara Jara and the brahmin Vasu together would be able to move the Wood. The following morning, Jara and Vasu moved the wood into the temple. Now the murti had to be made and Indradyumna did not know who to engage for that. He meditated on Krishna and he told him in a dream that Jara would be the one to make the murtis. The king told Jara that Krishna himself had chosen him as the one to make the murti; how he would do it, was up to him, he told him: kemanta kaributi tuhi janasi bhale / pratima nirmana kara tote sri Krishna agyan dele (How to make the murti you know / Krishna has ordered you to make the murti ( Musali Parva, p. 2643).

   With Jara inside the temple, the king closed the door. Jara was wondering what to do; he had never made a murti and had never even seen portraits. As he was mulling over these things, the Creator Brahma arrived in the form of a brahmin, made the murtis and entered the one of Subhadra. Now, with no sound of murti-making coming from inside, king Indradumna was worried, thinking that Jara must have fled. On the tenth day, he opened the door of the temple and found the incomplete murtis. They were without legs and in addition, Jagannath’s and Balabhadra’s murtis had no palms and Subhadra’s no hands. Indradyumna was not upset; he asked the brahmin, Basu (Viswabasu) who the Deities were and he told him that they were Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra, Forms of Narayana, Shiva and Brahma. After Brahma entered Subhadra’s murti, at Krishna’s behest, Jara had covered the wooden murtis with the thick paste made of the bark of the saal trees.  Jagannath (the cover term for the three Deities) had chosen to hide his feet; that would be his Form in Kali yuga (the age of darkness), says Sarala. About two centuries later, the poet Vipra Nilambara, in “Deula Tola”, which tells the story of the origin of Jagannath, offered a different explanation for the incompleteness of the Deities but it must be stressed that essentially, it is a variation of Sarala’s story, as Mansingh remarked ( 1981, p. 100 ), a view, with which we concur.

   In the episode of the making of the murtis in Sarala Mahabharata, Krishna is Narayana, the Source of the avarata Krishna, into whom the avatara had absorbed, after his passing away.  Thus, it was Narayana’s wish to remain incomplete and receive worship in that form. This is interesting for our present purpose. Unless in a symbolic form, such as salagrama or linga, the Hindu gods are worshipped in the form similar, essentially, to the human form, complete with hands and feet. Some, like Vishnu, has four hands and Brahma, four heads, etc., but the basic similarity with the human form remains. Now, in Sarala’s creation, the murtis of Vishnu (Jagannath), Balarama (Shiva) and Brahma (Subhadra) are in complete dissonance with the way the Trinity are represented as forms in the shashtras and the puranas.  In their incomplete form, in which they look less human and more abstract, they are symbolically closer to the objects of tribal worship, where the same are not forms which resemble a human. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Sarala had tried to restore, although partially, Jara’s god for him from Skanda Purana’s brahminized Neela Madhava – “partially”, because the Deities that Jara was involved with in their making had non-tribal names. Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra are not tribal names. This said, still remaining within the framework of the brahminical narrative of the origin of Jagannath and his worship in Skanda Purana, Sarala introduced innovations that are unmistakably non-brahminical - local, in our terminology.

   Now, we find that in Sarala’s narrative, the cooperation of the savaras and the brahmins has been highlighted far more strongly than in Skanda Purana. Unlike in the latter, in Sarala’s, the Divine Wood could move only when Jara was involved in it; the earlier attempts to do so with the brahmins and the royals alone had failed. More importantly, Jara, was involved in the making of the murtis. He was the chosen one. Thus, Sarala’s narrative of the origin of Jagannath counterposes the puranic or shashtric (scriptural) account with a distinct non-brahminical or local flavour. His narrative can be viewed as an effort to reclaim Jagannath for the savaras.

   Incidentally, at the conceptual level as well, Sarala can be said to have brought about a paradigm change in the thinking on man’s relationship with God. According to tradition, it is through bhakti (devotion) that man connects best with God. Now, in the puranic literature, be it Savari  or Hanuman of  the Ramayana, the gopis of Srimad Bhagavata, Radha of Vaishnava literature or Prahlad of Vishnu Purana, it is the bhakta (devotee) who seeks Bhagawana (God) and needs his companionship, longs to be his servitor, etc. but in the Jara-Krishna relationship, it is the opposite: it is Bhagawana who needs man and his chosen one may not be his bhakta, in the accepted sense of the term, based on the idea of navadha bhakti (nine forms of bhakti) of Srimad Bhagavata and of the Ramayana.

   Vaishnavization transformed Anantadeva of the first part of Skanda Purana (2016, p. 307) and Balarama of Sarala Mahabharata into Krishna’ elder brother, Balarama. In Skanda Purana, Subhadra was described at once as goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s (manifest as Jagannath) consort and as Rohini’s daughter and Balarama and Krishna’s sister, Subhadra, when Vishnu took the avatara of Krishna. In the episode under discussion in Sarala Mahabharata, Subhadra is not sister to Balarama and Jagannath, neither is she the manifestation of Lakshmi. She is the creator god, Brahma. Vaishnavization had frozen Subhadra to being the sister of Jagannath and Balabhadra, by which name Sarala’s Balarama is known today as part of Chaturdha Murti or the Four-fold-Form.

   The savara’s (be it Vishwabasu of Skanda Purana or Jara of Sarala Mahabharata) object of worship, Neela Madhava (be it a shining gem or a murti) had no story of his own. It was only after his Vishnuization that the stories of the origins of Jagannath emerged (in the brahminical Skanda Purana and some other puranas, and the partially non-brahminical Sarala Mahabharata). However, in our view, the more accurate statement would be the following: Neela Madhva story may be disconnected from the Jagannath story. The former ended with his disappearance. With the Divine Wood began another story: Jagannath’s story in both the brahminical and the non-brahminical frameworks. The Divine Voice, Krishna’s directives, etc. connect these two different stories to tell how Jagannath originated.

   Neither in Skanda Purana nor in the Musali Parva of Sarala Mahabharata, is Jagannath viewed as an avatara of Vishnu. He is conceptualized as Vishnu himself. The savara’s god had been Vishnuized into Jagannath in Skanda Purana and Sarala accepted it, although, as mentioned above, his narrative is different from it in crucial respects. In due course, the stories of the avataras of Vishnu got attached to Jagannath. As this happened, the ritual system was augmented to reflect this; thus, Krishna janma (birth), Rama janma, Vamana janma, etc., Kaliya dalana (taming), Rukmini vivaha (wedding) and some other rituals connected with Krishna and Balarama as children in Gopapura, Rama avisheka (coronation) and many rituals connected with the avataras entered the ritual system of Jagannath worship. Barring one or two rituals, related to Krishna, these find no mention in Skanda Purana. Pushyavisheka is there but it is unrelated to Rama’s avisheka of today. Attribution of the stories associated with Vishnu and his avataras to Jagannath and the augmentation of the ritual system by avatara-centric rituals indicate the increasing Vishnuization of Jagannath over centuries. The Ganapatya (a sect that worships Ganesha as the Supreme god), connection of Jagannath is evident in the Hati vesha (Elephant dress) of Jagannath and Balabhadra on Snana vedi (the platform for the Great Bathing).

   Now, stories, unconnected with the puranas and the shashtras, thus, local, were composed, in which Jagannath is seen as Jagannath, not Vishnu, as in the brahminical literature on Jagannath. These stories counterpose the brahminical perspective. One such story describes how, granting his wish, Jagannath waited for his devotee, Sala Bega, who was not in Puri then, to come and see him on the ratha. Another is how, once, listening to the pleadings of Balarama Das, Jagannath manifested himself in his sand ratha during Rath Yatra. He returned to his ratha when Balarama Das allowed him to. There are quite a few such stories. At least two of these, the Rai-Damodara story and the Talichha Mahapatra story have impacted the ritual system. The former has led to a besha, called Rai-Damodara besha and the latter, a dhupa (food-offering) called Bala dhupa. This dhupa is held when the Deities are in their Rai-Damodara besha. Incidentally, Rai-Damodara is now being brahminized as Radha-Damodara.  Rai in the relevant narrative is Jagannath’s spouse and is unconnected with Krishna.

  

   Snana (Bathing) and Ratha Yatra are unique rituals because the mula vigrahas, that is, the murtis themselves, not their representatives (chalanti pratima, as they are called, who are taken out during festivals) leave the platform in the sanctum sanctorum and come out, which is un-brahminical. Both the brahmin and the non-brahmin (daita) servitors participate in the rituals, although the sevas (what they do) are different. In Skanda Purana, the savaras were excluded from these rituals (Part I, p.399). Their subsequent inclusion in the same can certainly be viewed as an assertion of the non-brahminical tradition in Jagannath worship.

   Two rituals that find no mention in Skanda Purana concern the renewal or the repair of the murtis; there is no description of the navakalevara and the anasara rituals. The former takes place once in a few years, the details of which we skip. It is a forty-five-day ritual. The old murtis are given a ritual burial and in their place, new murtis are made and worshipped. It is an elaborate and complex ritual, but details are out of place here. What is of present relevance is the following: in the gupta (secret) seva in these two rituals, the daita servitors of the savara origin, have an extremely important role. This is more in tune with the Sarala Mahabharata narrative of the making of the murtis than the Skanda Purana narrative of the same.  Recall that it is in the former that the savara, Jara, has a crucial role; his equivalent, the savara, Vishwabasu has no comparable in the latter. Jara does not make the murtis; the divine carpenter, the Creator god himself, does. But Jara covers the wooden murtis with the paste made of the barks of the saal tree.

   Anasara is observed every year. It is a fifteen-day ritual, essentially the same as navakalevara, except that there is no replacement of the existing murtis. The existing murtis are attended to. The role of the daitas during the anasara ritual and the navakalevara ritual, as far as the murtis are concerned, is essentially the same. Like Jara, the daita servitors today put pastes on the murtis, the difference being that the materials used today are not just the paste of the bark of the saal trees; herbs, oils, etc. are used as well. The nature of involvement of the daitas in this intimate ritual highlights the fact that Jagannath worship is not entirely brahmincal; it is basically inclusive. Skanda Purana had mentioned that both the brahmins and the savaras (descendants of Vidyapati and Vishwabasu respectively) would be involved in the worship but what role the savara servitors would have, it did not mention or even suggest. Going by the spirit of Skanda Purana, it couldn’t be as central as it was in Sarala Mahabharata.

   The significance of the anasara (and the navakalevara) ritual is this: it is virtually totally un-shashtric or un-brahminical. It ensures that Jagannath worship cannot be totally brahminized; the seva of the daitas, which, to repeat, is central to it, cannot be done away with. If it ever happens, then it would be the origination of a different Jagannath worship. Just as with the disappearance of Neela Madhava, his story ended, as we have suggested above, similarly, with the elimination of the non-brahminical seva during anasara and navakalevara, the present story of Jagannath and his worship would end, as far as we are concerned. And just as the Divine Voice connected the story of Neela Madhava with the story of Jagannath, similarly, the culture historians will connect the two narratives of Jagannath, the present one, characterized by inclusiveness and the future one, if at all there will be one, to be characterized by exclusiveness. With this remark, we conclude the paper.

Bibliography

Behera, Dukhi Shyam. Shreekshetra Jujnasa. Bhubaneswar: N. C. Mahapatra

Das, Chaitanya Charan (2016). Sripurushottama-kshetra-mahatyam, Parts I and II. (Utkala Khanda of Skanda Purana) Puri: Shree Jagannath Temple Administration. (Second Edition)

Das, Pandit S.N. (2010). Odia Sahityara Itihasa Part I. Cuttack: Grantha Mandir. (Fifth Edition)

Mansinha, Mayadhar (1981). Odia Sahityara Itihasa. Cuttack: Grantha Mandir. (Third edition)

Mohanty, Artaballabva (ed.) (2007). Sarala Mahabharata. Cuttack: Sarala Sahitya Sansad.

Mohanty, Asit (2017). “Kabi Sri Jagannath O Kabyakara Balarama”. In Lilamaya Niladrisa. Bhubaneswar: Bhubaneswar Bhanja Bharati.

Mohanty, Surendra (1979). Neela Saila. Cutack: Cuttack Students’ Store. (Fourth edition)

Patnaik, B.N. (2012). Introducing Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.

Sarangi, Nrusingha (1999). Odia Purana Sahitya. Cuttack: Bidya Prakashana.

Note: It has just been published in Journal of Exclusion Studies, 9 (2), pp. 164-174.

  

  

WAS DRAUPADI HAPPY (PART II)

For Draupadi, that was a terrible, terrible day. She was dragged to the Kaurava court by her Kaurava brother-in-law, Dussasana, and Duryodhana asked him to disrobe her in front of all present. What needs to be noted is that neither Duryodhana nor Dussasana nor Sakuni or for that matter, anyone in the Kaurava family, had any complaint against her and was waiting for an opportunity to take revenge. Had Yudhisthira listened to the venerable Bhishma and stopped playing the game, Draupadi would have been safe at home; loss would have been only to the Mahabharata narrative.

   Till she was reduced to the status of Duryodhana’s slave, she wasn’t in anyone’s mind. After losing himself and his brothers, in a moment of sick frenzy, the hurt loser, who was unable to cope with defeat, ignored his grandfather’s words and pawned wife Draupadi in the game of dice and lost her. Instigated by Sakuni, Duryodhana wanted her to be brought to the court. There was nothing wrong in it, he was assured, because a slave had no right to privacy. Sakuni’s secret agenda was to push the Pandavas and the Kauravas to the battlefield. His father’s words came to his mind and he realized that his time had come (for details, see “The Revenge of the Dead: The Story of the Special Dice of Sakuni”, in this blog, posted on May 21, 2017). Humiliation of Draupadi would be the humiliation of the Pandavas - many-fold! - and once she was disrobed in public, that would have meant that for the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the point of no return had been reached.

   Duryodhana surely didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of Draupadi being his slave. Would a king ask his brother to go and bring a slave to his presence? What prevented him to send a few soldiers, if he thought that one might not be enough? Dussasana had dragged her from the palace but not into the court yet. When he told his brother that Draupdi was in her periods, Duryodhana said that he wouldn’t want her in the court because seeing a woman in her periods brought only misfortune.

   Sakuni must have sensed that his plan was going to go awry; so he readily thought of a different way to persuade Duryodhana.  His fear was unjustified, he told Duryodhana; misfortune would come if the woman in periods was virtuous and since Draupadi, with five husbands, was not, no harm would come to anyone who would see her. Further details are unnecessary here. (Essentials of the disrobing episode are given in the piece entitled “The Disrobing of Draupadi and the Sun god”, which was posted in this blog on April 4, 2008.)

   We may note that she was a pawn in the hands of Yudhisthira and a means in the hands of Sakuni.  She wasn’t the cause of her suffering; she had done no wrong. Thus, she didn’t have the comfort of coming to terms with her suffering through acceptance, which comes to the conscientious sufferer when he realizes that the suffering was morally deserved – a just punishment for the wrong he had done earlier. And not just Draupadi, we may also note that once Yudhisthira lost her in the game of dice, Duryodhana also became an instrument, a means, for Sakuni. And again, not just him, but all those, who, one way or the other, became part of that chain, Dussasana and Bhima, among others, unknowingly became his instruments. No one, except, of course, the One who knew everything and perhaps Sahadeva, who had the knowledge of the past and the future, knew that Sakuni was the agent, but neither would tell. Neither Bhima nor Draupadi ever bayed for Sakuni’s blood.

   Returning to Draupadi’s humiliation, if it did not move Yudhisthira, in the sense that he did not want revenge, it did another of her husbands, Bhima, who thundered revenge - he would tear apart Dussasana’s body and break Duryodhana’s thigh. But that would happen in future; on that day, none of her five husbands came forward to protect her from Dussasana.  To what extent Draupadi felt reassured that her torturers would perish one day, we do not know. We only guess that in the Kaurava court Bhima’s thunder meant almost nothing to her. Five affectionate and caring husbands; yet, when she was face-to-face with the gravest crisis of her life, instead of the help she needed, all she got was the assurance of revenge. For the first time in her life, she realized her vulnerability and the powerlessness of her husbands to respond adequately in her moment of crisis.

   But come to think of it, that day was not really her torturers’ day. It had turned out to be her day instead. She could not be disrobed and in the court, she was hailed as a virtuous woman. Her angry look directed at Duryodhana’s palace, burnt the women’s quarters and the royal inmates rushed out and were exposed to the public gaze. What Duryodhana wanted to do to Draupadi, in a way recoiled on his very own. Another angry look, this time at Dussasana, still at pulling her clothes and he collapsed on the floor. Dritarashtra and Gandhari came to the court and prayed to Draupadi to pacify her. Dhritarashtra, the head of the Kaurava family, gave Draupadi what she asked for - her husbands’ freedom and the wealth they had lost.

    By the way, it was also Sakuni’s day. He had attained his objective for that day; he must have believed that war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas would certainly take place someday. How else would Bhima redeem his vows? As for Draupadi’s disrobing, he had absolutely no interest in it. And he knew that that was not going to happen. In Sarala Mahabharata, didn’t he tell this to Krishna, after the fire in the lac palace: “Since you are protecting them, what harm can the imbecile and worthless Kauravas cause them?”

   

   That day, the Pandavas left Hastinapura in a pleasant atmosphere. There was bonhomie among the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Says Sarala, “aneka priti badhila sate uttare panchubrate (there was a lot of affection among the hundred and five brothers)”. Draupadi’s untied hair and Bhima’s suppressed anger could not spoil the geniality of the mood. And that surely wouldn’t have made her feel good, one would think.

   Unable to cope with defeat in the game of dice, her husband Yudhisthira went to Hastinapura desperately wanting a win. So the game was played again. This time, her youngest husband, not Sakuni, rolled the dice (for details, see “The Second Game of Dice” in this blog, posted on May 7, 2010). And Yudhisthira lost.

   Draupadi found again how vulnerable she was during the twelve-year long exile and a year’s incognito living. She realized, for the first time, that she couldn’t protect her husbands when they faced what threatened to be a calamity for them. Sage Durvasa, who would not forgive anyone for failing to satisfy his wants, arrived with his disciples and demanded food from Yudhisthira and went for ablutions. Now, Draupadi was the family’s food giver and she had nothing to give the guests. It is another matter that things so happened that day that the awe-inspiring sage did not return.  

   She found herself vulnerable again, when one day, her brother-in-law, Jayadratha, Duryodhana’s sister’s husband, took advantage of her being alone in their hut and tried to molest her. She would have wanted him dead, but her eldest husband would allow Bhima to only humiliate him. Kin could just not be punished with death. During their incognito living, the mighty Kichaka lusted for her. This time Yudhisthira did not constrain Bhima and he crushed Kichaka to a ball of meat. That immensely pleased Draupadi. 

  

   Only once after that she was in that state. That was when Bhima poured the blood from the mangled Dussasana’s body on her hair. As the blood trickled down, her tongue touched it. For two aeons she had been waiting for this (see “The Killing of Dussasana” in this blog, posted on April 3, 2008). After thirteen long years of waiting, she tied her hair. She invited Bhima to spend that night with her.

   She must have come to know that her five children had been killed before Duryodhana died. He had humiliated her and with his death, her revenge was complete. But that was not in her mind then. The loss of her children had devastated her. She told Krishna that she would kill herself. Then she told him, “mora putra bairi maribu ehiksani (Right now kill the enemy of my sons)”. Not to her husbands, but to Krishna she had turned this time. Maybe she knew that Yudhisthira would not allow his guru’s son to be killed – hadn’t he disallowed Jayadratha’s killing? The guru’s son had a much higher status than kin.

   Now, all Krishna did was dispossess Ashwasthama of his weapons. And that too, through cheating, which means he didn’t harm him physically. He showed the weapons to the weeping Draupadi and told her that he had stolen them. She was “pleased”, says the poet: “draupadi chhamure dileka debahari / dekhi sananda hoile je dropada kumari ((He) gave (the stolen weapons) to Draupadi / Seeing that, the daughter of Drupada was pleased)”.

   Was she really pleased? A reader of Sarala Mahabharata would ask, in disbelief - she isn’t someone who would be content with so little. She would ask for a sound justification, at the very least. She did nothing of that sort. So, did she only pretend to be pleased, realizing that there was no point in pursuing the matter since beyond Krishna there was just nothing? And there was no point asking Krishna. In Sarala Mahabharata, his answers and explanations were like his doings. Lila (cosmic play) does not explain itself. Trying to understand it, the mortals and the immortals construct their own explanations. And no one’s is privileged.

   The war over and won, the Pandava family were talking animatedly about on whose account the victory was achieved. Draupadi claimed that it was her. But so did everyone else: the five brothers, Kunti and Subhadra. She didn’t argue. Her ahamkara (arrogance) was gone, with the death of all her sons, her brother and her father. She became the queen but the episode of Yudhisthira’s rajyabhisheka (enthronement) hardly makes a mention of her. One would wonder what happiness the grieving mother would have felt, sitting with her husband on the throne during the ceremony of inauguration.

   She faded into the background in the narrative. It had lost interest in her. She had emerged from the sacred fire to kill. Her children’s death had doused the fire within. In her private moments in the royal palace of Hastinapura, she must have shed copious tears for her beloved little ones.  All alone. As did Kunti. She spent sleepless nights grieving over the death of Karna, Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu and she condemned Arjuna for killing her son. As for Gandhari, what can one say? She had a hundred sons and she had lost them all. She wept alone, like did Kunti, like did Draupadi, although the poet Sarala ignores her in the last parvas (cantos) of his retelling. We do not know from Sarala Mahabharata how she felt when Krishna passed away.  

   After they left Hastinapura on their vanaprastha, Draupadi figured in the narrative meaningfully only once.  In the Himalayas, feeling extremely cold, tired and unwell, she pleaded with Yudhisthira to be allowed to rest for a while. Yudhisthira said, no. They had come to give up their bodies in the sacred mountains, so why indulge it, he told her. “A world without Krishna is unfit for living”, he said. She said nothing. Was she convinced by Yudhithira’s words? We do not know.

   Soon after, she had fallen to her death, before she had accepted death.

   Let us end with this: if my understanding of Draupadi in Sarala Mahabharata is correct, with Krishna, and Krishna alone, deep down, Draupadi felt “at ease” even when she gave vent to her anxiety, frustration or anger in front of him and sometimes even targeting him. But his presence calmed her, deep down. The feeling of ease that we are talking about cannot be called “happiness”, because happiness is an experience of the ego. She connected with Krishna with an attitude of surrender, where ego dissolves.  And no wonder, since theirs was a relationship aeons old. It was just that her birth in the mortal world had wiped out that memory.       

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"WAS DRAUPADI HAPPY?" (PART I)

asked Sriparna, the computer scientist, the other day.  One would think she must have been, she said; for if one day, one of her husbands was cross with her, there was enough room for compensating comfort – there must have been at least one other of them from whom she would have received care and affection on that day. But life being a tale of many twists, did it really happen that way to her, she asked.

   It didn’t, said the computational linguist, Sobha. That was what Pratibha Ray’s famous novel “Yajnaseni” suggests, she said. One gets the same impression from S.L. Bhyrappa’s well-known novel “Parva” as well.  Only the contexts are different and the victims, surprised and hurt, are different. In Ray’s novel it was the wife Draupadi. In Bhyrappa’s, it was the mother Draupadi. The mother Draupadi realized that Arjuna was teaching Abhimanyu, his son from Subhadra, military strategies that he did not teach his son from her. Maybe he found Abhimanyu more intelligent and more receptive; after all, didn’t Drona teach things to Arjuna which he was disinclined to teach his son? Draupadi felt too badly let down to even think of such a thing. 

   Dealing with five husbands, we guess, who were five different personalities, she might have been emotionally drained and often felt lonely, when she found time to be alone. In any case, that was a very demanding task, Sarala’s Bhima told Yudhisthira in the snowy Himalayas, and she had performed it with much grace and élan. She was extraordinary, he said.

   One gets the impression from Sarala Mahabharata that that each of her husbands desired her, respected her and was genuinely fond of her (although one of them – Yudhisthira -  was not at ease with her, but he kept his discomfort to himself till when saying it out loud wouldn’t hurt her) and she didn’t seem to fail in performing her wifely duties with respect to any of them. None of them said anything to the contrary. Till after she fell in the Himalayas. “She fell because of her sin”, said Yudhisthira to Bhima. And what was the sin? Taken aback, Bhima wanted to know. What he said shocked and shook Bhima but it is not relevant to our present concern, namely, whether she was happy; so let that pass.

   Yudhisthira’s response to Bhima’s question in Vyasa Mahabharata is relevant to us. He said that though she was the wife of all the Pandavas, she was partial towards Arjuna. On that account, she had failed in her stree dharma (wifely duties). Now, as far as we are concerned, doesn’t it show that she lived a life of compromise in the matter of her heart and had tried to conceal it all through her life? Now, was she happy?

   She had concealed something else too, according to Sarala Mahabharata, although the edition that I use makes no reference to this, namely that although he had five husbands, she was attracted towards Karna. In “Yajnaseni”, the author, drawing from both Vyasa Mahabharata and a certain edition of Sarala Mahabharata, makes a connection – Karna, a Kaunteya, was a brother of the Pandavas. We can think of it this way: before she saw Draupadi, Kunti had asked her sons to share whatever they had brought. That turned out to be a young woman, not alms. That there was an absent son when she said this, no one knew - not that she had him in mind then. But words, once uttered, are no more bound to the utterer, his intentions and the specific circumstances. Sometimes they materialize in the form predicted and sometimes in a form entirely unexpected; sometimes on account of the utterer, sometimes, on account of the context of the utterance.

   Born from the sacred fire of a yajna, performed for an unholy purpose by the great sage Vyasa himself for king Drupada, Draupadi was born to be the instrument of revenge. After giving two children to the jajman Drupada, the holy fire was unwilling to give him another; the gods eventually relented because of Vyaa’s spiritual energy, and the girl had emerged. Drupada wanted to avenge his suffering in the hands of the Kauravas. He needed a daughter who would fulfil his dark wish. He had prayed to Bhagawan Shiva to grant hi the boon that would enable him to kill the Kauravas. The great god, who is easily pleased and who readily grants boons without a thought, did not oblige; he told him that he would never be able to kill the Kauravas; only Arjuna could do that. He would give the girl in marriage to Arjuna, and one day, Drupada told Vyasa, there would be war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and Arjuna would destroy the Kauravas and he would have his revenge. From the yajna fire had emerged, first, the one, neither male nor female, who came to be known as Sikhandi, then the boy, who came to be known as Dhristadyumna. Drupada was very upset but Vyasa asked him to look after them well because Shikhandi would be the cause of Bhishma’s death and Dristadyumna, of Drona’s and it would be only after their death that the Kauravas could be killed, he told him.

   Little is said about Draupadi’s upbringing in Drupada’s palace. We can imagine though what kind of upbringing she would have had, knowing that for her revenge-obsessed father, she was an instrument for the attainment of his objective.

   Incidentally, what had the Kauravas done to Drupada? They had given him a sound thrashing which he did not deserve and when he was not in a condition to defend himself. It was certainly a wicked act by the Kauravas. But for that did they deserve to be eliminated? And for that to happen, if venerable and virtuous persons like Bhishma and Drona had to be killed, Drupada wasn’t concerned in the least. When one thinks of Drupada’s revenge, Sakuni comes out as a saint! (About Sakuni’s revenge, see the posts “Concerning Duryodhana’s killing of his Maternal Grandfather” and “The Revenge of the Dead: The Story of the Special Dice of Sakuni” in this blog.)

   One dark and rainy night the fire in the lac palace had happened and it upset Drupada’s plans. He heard that the Pandavas had perished in the fire. He now had to find someone who could kill the Kauravas.  So he arranged a swayambara for Draupadi. It was swayambara only in name; Draupadi had to marry the person who would succeed in the archery test. She had no say at all with respect to her wedding. Destiny would decide things for her and her destiny had a manifestation: Krishna! He wanted Draupdi to marry Arjuna, so he succeeded in the archery contest – let’s ignore the details. He sanctioned her marriage to the five Pandavas, so she married them all.

  

   Without going into details, let us note that her married life was uneventful in Sarala Mahabharata until her humiliation in the Kaurava court. There is not even a faint suggestion that any elder in the Kuru family was unhappy with her. Almost nothing is said about her interactions with Duryodhana’s wife, Bhanumati or any other princess in the Kaurava family. She didn’t do anything that would have upset any Kaurava brother. “The blind man’s son is blind” is what she had said in some other versions of Mahabharata, not in Sarala’s. There is no mention of her being impolite to Sakuni. As for Karna, in Sarala’s version, everyone knew that Karna was Kunti’ eldest child; thus, there was no relation of disrespect between her and Kunti’s eldest. She had not stopped Karna from participating in the archery test and Krishna had not suggested to her that she did so. Obviously, there is no place for that in a narrative in which Karna’s identity was no secret, namely, that he had grown up in the suta’s house but was Kunti’s eldest. Karna did not participate in the archery test to win her for himself; he wanted to win her for Duryodhana. He failed to hit the target; only the Creator god Brahma in the abode of the gods and sage Vyasa on earth knew how he failed, and of course, did Krishna. Let’s leave this matter here because it has nothing to do with our present concern. All in all, Draupadi’s wedded life was smooth; so perhaps she was happy; perhaps she was not. For the wife, especially for someone like Draupadi, sensitive, intelligent and self-confident, and wife to five persons, a quiet married life can be interpreted either way.

   Having five husbands had made her conceited and arrogant, was what Yudhisthira thought of her. He wasn’t really wrong. Now, anxiety and unhappiness are companions of conceit and arrogance. The arrogant person tends to take offence easily and loses self-control and becomes unhappy as a result.  

   In Sarala’s narrative, the first time she felt insulted in public was during the rajaswiya jajna of Yudhisthira. Bhima’s son, Ghatotkacha, from his demoness wife, Hidimbaki (Hidimba, in some versions) had arrived - his presence was needed. Following his mother’s advice, he bowed to his father, Krishna, Vyasa and Yudhisthira in that order. His mother had strictly forbidden him to bow to Draupadi, who, with five husbands, was a fallen woman for her.  The one who had emerged out of fire would not tolerate being slighted in public and she pronounced a curse on him: he would die the most dishonourable death in the battlefield. Hidimbaki came out of her hiding and cursed her that her yet unborn sons would die, when still children. How much it troubled her, the poet hasn’t told us. Sitting with Yudhisthira as a queen in the sacred jajna, among the Kuru family, sages and kings and princes, would have been a fulfilling experience for her had she not forgotten that she was like a mother to Ghatotkacha. What would have been a fulfilling experience for her turned out to be extremely unpleasant.

   To be fair to her, this was an exception, when it comes to her conduct as a member of the Kuru family. Incidentally, she hadn’t acted out of jealousy; that Hidimbaki was her husband, Bhima’s, first wife, or that her son was the first child in the Pandava family do not seem to have mattered when she cursed Ghatotkacha. 

   Bhima had married Hidimbai before he married Draupadi. But Arjuna had other wives after his marriage with Draupadi. However, apart from Subhadra, none of his wives lived with him. Draupadi had to swallow her pride and accept that situation because Subhadra was Krishna’s sister. We do not know about their interaction; we do not know whether they preferred to avoid each other rather than meet and talk like friends. In Sarala Mahabharata there is no murmur that they were unfond of each other, but there is no suggestion either that their relationship was truly cordial.

   Now what would one say? Was Draupadi happy or suffering so many compromises in life she had forgotten that there was an experience called happiness?

WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE KURUKSHETRA WAR, ACCORDING TO SARALA MAHABHARATA

When a war comes to an end and life limps painfully to normalcy, comes the time for questions: about its cause, about who must be held responsible for it, among others. The voice may be agonizingly loud or fearfully subdued. It was no different in the case of the Great War at Kurukshetra. Two facts of relevance in Sarala’s retelling are these: Duryodhana had started it, when he had ordered his army to attack his brother Durdasa who, responding to Yudhisthira’s call, had just declared that he was joining the Pandavas. Shortly before that, as the Kaurava and the Pandava armies, facing each other, were waiting for permission to attack, Duryodhana had turned down Yudhisthira’s desperate plea for peace - he wasn’t willing to give the eldest Pandava even a single village. Given these facts, who else, but he could be held responsible for the war, one would think! But that is at one level –the “formal level”: it is the king who decides on the war and on when to start the attack. However, at the informal - indeed the more important - level in the narrative, the same question was raised and responded to by quite a few characters. And only a few named Duryodhana as the one directly responsible for that calamitous war. One was Arjuna, not unexpectedly. And then Krishna, somewhat indirectly though.

   In Swargarohana Parva, when Draupadi fell, Yudhisthira, the very embodiment of dharma in the mortal world, squarely blamed Draupadi for the war; for thirteen long years she had left her hair untied, had used her untied hair to remind her husbands about her humiliation in the Kaurava court and had provoked them relentlessly to take revenge. She had tied her hair after consuming ninety-nine Kaurava brothers, the son of god Dharma told Bhima. He condemned Sahadeva too for the war. He had the knowledge of the past and the future; instead of keeping his mouth shut, had he told him what was going to happen, the war would not have taken place. Incidentally, here, unlike in some versions of the great narrative, Sahadeva was not constrained to tell what was to happen, unless asked. Only that he would have to tell when one specifically asked him – je tote pacaria gata agata katha / abashya tu kahibu bhuta bhavishya barata (Whoever would ask you about the past and the future / You will have to tell him about the past and the future). Surely Sahadeva had his reasons for his silence, but a proper articulation of the same would need detailed discussion, which is out of place here.

   For Gandhari, Krishna was responsible since he did not stop the war when it was within his power to do so. She was certain that had he pressured the Pandavas and the Kauravas enough and sincerely to opt for peace, sooner or later, they would have listened to him. They all held him in great reverence, which was true. Considering the matter at the laukika or the worldly level, rather than at the supra-human, cosmic level, one could say that it was not really in Krishna’s hands to stop the war; all he could have done was postpone it. Even that was by no means certain. In any case, the postponement wouldn’t have helped anyone; it would only have made things even more stressful for the Kauravas and the Pandavas and the relation between them would have worsened further. Krishna of course said or suggested none of this. What he told Gandhari was that had she listened to the wise Vidura, things would not have come to such a pass. He had always asked her to control her children. Incidentally, possibly a little out of the context here, he had often reminded Dhritarashtra that had he listened to him and given up Duryodhana soon after his birth, his other sons would have been safe.  Duryodhana would be the cause of the destruction of his line, he had warned him then.

   Both before and during the war, Yudhisthira and Arjuna blamed the Kauravas for it; it was thrust on them, they said. Bhishma did not agree. He told Arjuna that the Pandavas’ commitment to peace was not strong enough. If it was, then they would have retired to the forest, leaving the kingdom to Duryodhana. He did not of course blame the Pandavas for the war; he merely said that they could not hold Duryodhana solely responsible for the war and absolve themselves of the responsibility. In his last meeting with Duryodhana, Dhritarashtra told him that he had been the cause of his brothers’ killing, but it is clearly not the same thing as blaming him for the war. That he never said, never believed to be the case. He did not explicitly say it but he must have been disappointed with Yudhisthira. Once he became aware of the Pandavas’ might and started worrying about Duryodhana, he drew solace from his belief that the embodiment of virtue would never allow a fratricidal war, how strong the provocations. He knew that Duryodhana was safe because Yudhisthira was committed to dharma.

   Dhritarashtra and Gandhari had often warned Duryodhana against trusting Sakuni. Gandhari had told him clearly that Sakuni would work for the destruction of the Kauravas and thereby avenge his father’s and uncles’ killing by him. Kunti often blamed Bhima for the hostility between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He was dusta (wicked), he would tell him. Yudhisthira had the same opinion bout Bhima. He too often called him dusta. Krishna knew he was dusta by nature and could be easily provoked to do things wicked. Now, if Kunti and Gandhari were less insecure, more cordial and less jealous of each other, when the Pandavas and the Kauravas were growing up in Hastinapura, the princes would not perhaps been so confrontational towards each other, right from their childhood. But that was not possible. Gandhari wanted Duryodhana to succeed Dhritarashtra, and Kunti wanted Yudhisthira to become the king. As children, neither prince was probably aware of their respective mother’s ambition, but the Kaurava and the Pandava princes had not failed to sense the hostility their mothers had towards each other. At the same time, Gandhari and Kunti did not encourage their children to be antagonistic towards one another. As Kunti often chided Bhima for his bellicosity towards the Kauravas, Gandhari did not fail to scold Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas. The fire in the lac palace or Duryodhana’s feeding Bhima poisonous sweet had not changed Kunti. She changed only after the humiliation of Draupadi in the Kaurava court. Before he went to Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary for peace, Krishna, unknown to the eldest Pandava, had met each of his four brothers and Draupadi and Kunti separately to know whether they shared Yudhisthira’s disinclination towards war. He found that the last two alone wanted war. And desperately. But no one ever blamed Kunti for the war. Much later, Yudhisthira did make a mention of her instigating them to go to war against the Kauravas, but his tone said that he was not really holding her responsible for the war.

   No one blamed Yudhisthira directly either. Bhishma’s observation about the Pandavas’ weak commitment to peace, as mentioned above, can be construed as the closest criticism of Yudhisthira in the relevant regard. Now, suppose the second game of dice had not taken place. Would there have been a war? The Pandavas got back whatever they had lost in the first game of dice. When they left, there was considerable bonhomie between the Kaurava and the Pandava brothers. No one from the Kaurava side invited Yudhisthira to return for another game of dice. Yudhisthira went to play because he wanted to win. The defeat in the first game had upset him. The defeat in the second game led to the Pandavas’ twelve year- long exile in the forest and a year’s incognito living. Suppose all this had not happened. Just as, suppose, Sahadeva had spoken!

   For many listeners / readers of Vyasa Mahabharata or Sarala Mahabharata, Sakuni would be the one primarily responsible for the war. In Sarala’s version, Duryodhana was willing to give two villages to Krishna for the Pandavas but it was Sakuni who persuaded him not to do so. That was the immediate cause of the war. Yet none in the world of Sarala Mahabharata, except one, considered Sakuni responsible for the war.

   And that was Sakuni himself. Only Krishna, Arjuna, Sahadeva, Sanjaya and Vidura knew that he was committed to avenge the treacherous Duryodhana’s gruesome killing of his innocent father and his relatives. He masterminded the complete destruction of the Kaurava brothers through a terrible war. As he was fighting Sahadeva in the battlefield, he told him that he was responsible for the war. There is no evidence in the text that Sahadeva agreed with him.

   When Gandhari held Krishna responsible for the war, Krishna told her something else too, apart from what has been mentioned above. He told her that he had been insulted in the Kaurava court and that he had had his revenge through the war. This amounted to his putting the blame for the war on Duryodhana. However, there is no persuasive evidence in the narrative that directly or indirectly support Krishna’s assertion. As for Krishna’s being revengeful, one might cite three examples from the narrative, but none is really convincing. After the war, in a certain context, his sister Subhadra claimed that he had destroyed the Kauravas to punish them for their killing of her son, Abhimanyu. But the narrative says something very different: it says that Krishna had actually orchestrated his nephew’s killing; he had given the divine, which Abhimanyu really was, word that he would return to his natural abode, the Swarga loka, once he completed fourteen years in the mortal world. Krishna had not got Jarasandha eliminated because he had inflicted many defeats on him, thereby insulted him. Jarasandha’s killing had to do with Yudhisthira’s rajaswiya jajna. Details do not concern us here. Although the matter is really complex, involving aeons and rebirths and redemption, one might isolate the incident and argue that he killed Sishupala for insulting him. Now, if Duryodhana had insulted him and he wanted to punish him, did he have to have such a destructive war? What he told Gandhari is best understood as a retort to her almost like this: “Your son insulted me, so I gave him well-deserved punishment. Why are you blaming me?” And this goes well with what he also told her, namely that she should have heeded Vidura’s advice.

   Now, you, my friend, who has obliged me by reading this piece so far, what do you think who was responsible for the war? Forget for a moment who blamed who in the world of Sarala Mahabharata, extremely important though it is. Or putting it differently, what the poet thought about the question of responsibility; after all, he was the creator of that world. Maybe, you are inclined to think that not a single individual, but all those mentioned above, and probably more, were. You might think that an event of such dimensions cannot just have a single cause and a single causer or doer. I would agree, enthusiastically! But think of this:  

   When there was one throne to inherit and two parties staking claims to it, and no party willing to make the sacrifice needed, namely, giving up his claim, the issue had to be settled in the battlefield. Those like Sakuni, Karna and Ashwasthama complicated matters and made the narrative very much dramatic and enjoyable. As for Krishna, as Sarala, the devotee, transformed a simple narrative of succession to Vishnu Purana, he transformed his doings into the purna avatara’s (complete manifestation of Narayana) lila. Now, one does not sit on judgement over lila, one only witnesses it and celebrates it.