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The Complete Virata and Udyoga Parvas of the Mahabharata: transcreated from Sanskrit by Padma Shri Prof. P.Lal, Writers Workshop, Kolkata pp.407 and 962. Hardback Rs.400 and 1000, flexiback Rs.300 and 600 with 80 and 130 pages respectively of facsimile reproductions showing the extensive revisions and additions; special limited edition, numbered and signed, with original hand-painted pata-chitra Rs.800 and 1500.

Change of scenario, shifting of the spotlight from one protagonist to another, a sudden speeding up of pace— all these come to the fore in Vyasa’s narrative art in the Virata and Udyoga Parvas, the fourth and fifth books of the Mahabharata. In the Sambhava sub-parva of the first book, Arjuna took over centre stage from Bhima-the-rescuer till the focus shifted to Yudhishthira in the shattering climax of the gambling match. In the forest exile, the prime attention swayed between Bhima and Arjuna with the eldest brother and Draupadi anchoring the centre. When we come to the incognito phase, the spotlight stays on Bhima, turning only at the end to highlight the grotesque figure of Brihannala laying low Duryodhana’s forces.

 

It has become fashionable, since van buitenen’s translation and Peter Brook’s dramatisation, to label the fourth book of the Mahabharata as Vyasa’s udyoga at burlesque— all because the brothers and their wife assume low class disguises followed by a theatrical victory over enemy forces. On study, however, patterns emerge that continue and reiterate themes articulated in the earlier books. There is much anguish, considerable trauma and little of fun-and-games (Kichaka caressing Bhima disguised as a woman; Brihannala, skirts flapping and braid flying, chasing the fleeing Uttara— but in both cases the momentary hilarity is transformed into brutal blood-letting). In this fourth book, Vyasa looks before and after; there are interesting parallels and contrasts.

The attack by the forces of Hastinapura, with which the fourth book of the epic climaxes, is a reiteration of a see-saw conflict over succession between the cousins—one set whose parentage is unquestioned and the other who suffer from dubious fatherhood—that began with the mountain-dwelling Pandavas finding a royal home but having to escape the flaming house-of-lac and live disguised as wandering Brahmins, as they have to again years later. Their fortunes turned with Arjuna first obtaining a gift of wondrous horses from a Gandharva and then winning Draupadi. A skirmish followed with the frustrated princely suitors, prefiguring Kurukshetra, that was beaten back by Bhima (who threw Shalya down) and Arjuna (from whom the awed Karna withdrew) and was dissipated by Krishna who, in his very first appearance, commanded immediate compliance. The glory of Indraprastha and the royal Rajasuya sacrifice crowned the restoration through the removal of two major obstacles—Jarasandha and Shishupala—and the creation of the fateful Maya-sabha that fed Duryodhana’s envy afresh, leading directly to the gambling hall.

 

A second reversal of fortunes occurred in two stages: Arjuna enjoying a long self-imposed exile in which Krishna played a major role at the end; and the gambling away of Indraprastha twice over, with Krishna absent (in the Vana Parva he says that had he been present none of this would have occurred). These and the outraging of Draupadi’s modesty sowed the seeds of inevitable fratricide.

The next reversal occurred in the forest, with the advantage going to the Pandavas in rescuing Duryodhana from the Gandharvas while Karna fled the scene, as he does again in the Virata Parva. Krishna had no role. In this incident Vyasa replicates a Vedic motif absent in Valmiki—cattle as prime wealth—repeating it in the Virata Parva once again with Duryodhana who assumes the role of the Panis vis-a-vis the Indra-Pandavas.

There is a graded shift from encounters with demonic beings in the forest starting with Hidimb the cannibal, then the terrifying Kirmira, both strongly reminiscent of Valmiki’s Rakshasas, followed by Draupadi—the “Shri” (good fortune) of the Pandavas—being abducted first by Jatasura disguised Ravana-like as a Brahmin, and again by the human Jayadratha. The Pandavas win her back promptly, with even Yudhishthira fighting for the first time in the second event. In Kurukshetra, Jayadratha, released magnanimously by Yudhishthira, will defeat all of them and cause Abhimanyu’s death. Krishna continues to be off-scene. The mysterious mythic worlds of the forest—where lakes bloom with supernal blossoms guarded by demons; where an ape and a python can immobilise invincible Bhima—now give way to the rough-and-tumble of urban life in Virata’s city.

In Virata’s court they assume the disguises of a Brahmin gambler, a cook-cum-wrestler, a dance-and-music tutor with “a long reed”, a groom, a cowherd, and a chambermaid, which Dumezil tried hard to fit into his tri-functional Indo-European paradigm. Arjuna’s eunuch-hood and its verification by young women inversely parallels Shikhandi’s, while his sex-reversal parallels the Yaksha Sthunakarna’s. Draupadi’s modesty is outraged for the fourth time and she is even kicked in the court, with two of her husbands and the king remaining silent— a parallel of the Hastinapura scene. As this occurs during the Brahma festival, van Buitenen equates it with Saturnalia and Holi, which socially sanction the licentiousness that he finds inspiring the parva. Draupadi succeeds in getting Kichaka killed, but is abducted yet again to be burnt alive with his corpse. She calls out the secret names of the Pandavas, all of which are linked to the “Jaya” that is a synonym for Vyasa’s composition. Of these only “Vijaya” is a real name, being Arjuna’s, who does not respond. It is Bhima who, once more, saves Draupadi.

Now Duryodhana launches a full-scale attack featuring all the heroes who later figure in Kurukshetra. The entire lot is knocked unconscious, except Bhishma, by Brihannala (presaging Shikhandi in the Great War). Krishna is absent. Indeed, the disguised Arjuna is to the terrified and demoralised Bhuminjaya-Uttara what sakha Krishna becomes for him in dharmakshetre-kurukshetre, even to the extent of the significances of the many names/vibhutis of Arjuna/Krishna and the words in which Uttara begs pardon for having addressed Brihannala lightly. To believe that without Krishna the Pandavas are nothing is to reveal an extremely superficial reading of Vyasa’s complicated epic narrative.

A remarkable feature of this book, brought out in the transcreator’s insightful preface, is the breathtaking speed at which the narration proceeds. Prof. Lal’s effort to provide an English approximation of Sauti’s recitation is most satisfying. After the slow-moving, elaborate descriptions of forest life and holy pilgrimages in the preceding book, the complete change of scenario to the cut-and-thrust of court life is so well transcreated that the orality of the epic comes through forcefully. Vividly we listen to different voices speaking, the exchanges between apprehensive Sudeshna and pleading Sairandhri, the gossiping maids and humiliated Draupadi, lustful Kichaka and desperate Panchali, boastful Uttara and flustered Brihannala, sobbing Draupadi, unmoved Kanka, timid Virata and furious Ballava, the giggling girls and pig-tailed Brihannala.

In contrast, the Udyoga Parva presents a “heady mix of sincerity and duplicity”, with the spoken word holding us in thrall. “Nowhere”, writes Prof. Lal, “(is it) more charming and cunning, more straight and double-edged, more selfish and altruistic…A wonderful exercise in public relations and double-speak.” In this “Vyasan U.N. of sorts” each speaker is a mouthpiece, exploiting language to the maximum for pushing a case, irrespective of his personal beliefs, both sides bent on war. Such posturing can only result in the Ragnarok of Kurukshetra. As the fulminations die down, Vyasa introduces a wondrous vignette: Krishna-Karna-Kunti face-to-face, leaving it to us, Prof. Lal points out, to figure out where the moral rectitude lies. Is Karna right or Kunti; is Kunti the “real” mother or Radha; is Krishna right in tempting Karna with Draupadi? Buddhadeb Bose, in Pratham Partha, added another layer to the scenario by making Draupadi approach Karna in person.

Some issues need to be raised: why does the transcreator begin with an invocation saluting Vyasa that is not in the Mahabharata? The original runs: “Bowing to Narayana, and Nara, the best of men, and to the goddess Saraswati, utter Jaya.” A baffling incident in the Virata Parva is Brihannala assuring Uttara that he will not be defiled by climbing up the Sami tree to bring down the weapons because “There is no corpse on this tree” (41.4) although one specifically described as “foul smelling” was tied there by the Pandavas. Incidentally, this is the only place (section 43) where the bows, arrows and swords of the Pandavas are described lovingly in detail. Uttara’s description of a “bee-headed and bee-symbolled” sword (42.11 & 20) is a mistranslation of “shili prishtha shili mukha” which connotes “frog”. The translation of “Bibhatsu” as “the Loathsome One” (44.18) is also questionable, “horrific deed-doer” or “the Horrifier” being more appropriate. Curiously, Arjuna explains it as the opposite: “one who never commits any horror”, just as “Janardana” means “grinder of the people” but signifies the opposite for Krishna. The transcreation of 53.21 contradicts this by reversing Arjuna’s explanation in his announcement to the Kaurava host, “I am dreadful-deed-doer Bibhatsu” (53.21). It is difficult to make out the meaning he gives of being named “Krishna”. According to Lal and Ganguli, Pandu gave it out of affection, as he was “the dark boy of great purity”. Van Buitenen translates, “out of love for that little boy of the dazzling complexion” which provides an interesting link with his soul-mate, Krishna. In 66.13, victorious Arjuna can hardly ask Uttara, “Escape from the field!” The correct translation is “go out through the middle while they are unconscious”, collecting their upper garments, which avenges the Pandavas’ loss of their uttariyas in the gambling hall. When the Hastinapura army departs, Arjuna does not stand “still silently” (66.25). Rather, he follows them momentarily to pay his respects silently (the mode is described in the next two verses). In introducing Draupadi to his father, Uttara does not refer to her as “golden-skinned beauty” (71.18), but as kanakottamangi…nilotpalabha, “bedecked with gold ornaments…glowing like a blue-lotus”.

In the Udyoga Parva, on page 408, verse 19 of section 89 has not been translated. Instead, the last two lines repeat the preceding verse. This should run: “Then Dhritarashtra’s priests greeted Janardana as was proper with offerings of cow, honey-curds and water.” On page 724 verse 9 of section 171, the reference is not to Shishupala, who is long dead, but to Dhrishtaketu. The puzzle of why the sons of Draupadi are not considered for Uttara is answered in the Udyoga Parva where Draupadi speaks of her five sons led by Abhimanyu avenging her. This means they were all born later, which casts an interesting sidelight on what did not happen in Indraprastha during Arjuna’s exile. But Vidura’s prescription that cooked food, salt, honey, milk, curd, ghee, oil, meat, sesame seeds, roots, fruits, red cloth, molasses and perfumes should not be sold is puzzling and unglossed.

Before the incognito exile begins, the priest Dhaumya’s advice on how to behave with kings depicts the ruler as a self-willed tyrant— precisely the converse of the dharma-raja and giving us some idea about the Kshatriyas whom Parashurama destroyed and who are infesting the land once again. It is at the beginning of this book that, for the first time, we find a description of what the ominous dice looked like. Yudhishthira carries golden dice set with sapphires instead of the traditional vibhitaka nuts. Prof. Lal’s transcreation (red and black dice and ivory, blue, yellow, red and white pawns) is more correct than van Buitenen’s dice made of beryl, gold, ivory, phosphorescent nuts and black and red dice. The disguise he chooses is that of a royal sabhastarah, one who spreads the rug for dicing, for which Lal’s “courtier” is hardly adequate. Yudhishthira’s invocation to Durga for protecting them— hailing her first as Yashoda and Nandagopa’s daughter— is clearly a late interpolation coterminous with the Shakta puranas, as is the later prayer to her by Arjuna in the Bhishma Parva.

Curiously, Virata’s capital remains nameless (surmised to be Bairat near Jaipur) and the only place-name we have in his kingdom is Upaplavya where the action of the Udyoga Parva is located. Bhima undertakes to wrestle but not to kill any challenger, yet that is precisely what he does with Jimuta in the Brahma festival that becomes the occasion for Kichaka’s assault on Draupadi whose appearance is described more often in this book than anywhere else by Yudhishthira, Sudeshna and Kichaka. When the attack by the Trigartas is beaten back and Bhima drags Susharma to Yudhishthira addressing him as their slave—as he had done with Jayadratha—the eldest Pandava repeats the mistake by releasing him with foolish magnanimity. Jayadratha and Susharma become the causes of Abhimanyu’s death, one by preventing help from reaching him; the other by keeping Arjuna fully engaged elsewhere.

A hitherto unknown aspect of Draupadi comes to the fore in this book— her ability to use her sexual appeal to get her way. She approaches not Arjuna, knowing his total subservience to Yudhishthira, but the emotional Bhima who has not given a second thought to risking his life on several occasions in the forest to please her fancy. How succinctly yet memorably Vyasa paints the scene: “The room was ablaze with her beauty/and mahatma Bhima’s splendour.” Her seduction of Bhima is an elaborate affair spanning over 200 verses spread over five sections beginning with twining herself around him as he sleeps. The images Vyasa uses are all from the wild, evocative of primal passion: mating forest-born heifer and bull, female and male cranes, lioness and lion, she-elephant and tusker. Beginning with a plangent lament that plays skilfully on his psychology, she administers the coup-de-grace by holding out to him her hands chapped by grinding ointments for the queen. Simple Bhima’s reaction is all that she had hoped for: he covers his face with her hands and weeps in anguish.

Bhima’s attempt at consoling her by quoting examples of five renowned satis of the past includes a reference to Indrasena-Narayani that is of great interest because it looks back to the account Vyasa gives Drupada of Draupadi’s previous birth. Incidentally, Indrasena is also the name of Nala and Damayanti’s daughter who married Mudgala the eldest of five sons of Brhamyashva who founded the Panchalas. A number of manuscripts contain the account of Indrasena-Narayani’s remarkable devotion to her husband, the irascible and leprous sage Maudgalya, which led to her being cursed to have five husbands in the next birth. In the Rig-Veda (10.102) she is valiant Mudgalani, driving her husband Mudgala’s chariot, acting like “Indra’s dart” to win back stolen cattle. A passage in one of the manuscripts refers to yet another previous birth of Draupadi that links her to the Matsyas too. As Shaibya, daughter of Bhumashva, she wedded in a svyamvara the five sons of king Nitantu named Salveya, Shurasena, Shrutasena, Tindusara and Atisara who founded five branches of the Matsyas paralleling the five of the Panchalas.

What finally forces Bhima’s hand, however, is her threat of committing suicide, saying,

“Where will your maha-dharma be then
O my dharma-seeking husbands?
You will keep your word,
but you will lose your wife.”

It is a tactic she repeats with him at the end of the war for avenging the murder of her brothers and sons by Ashvatthama. We are given an extremely rare glimpse into Arjuna’s heart, most sensitively transcreated, when he tells Sairandhri, who reproaches him with enjoying himself in the women’s quarters while she suffers:

“Brihannala has griefs too, terrible ones,
She is fallen into the womb
of an animal.
You will not understand anything of this,
my good girl…
No one can look into the deepest places
of another’s heart.
You don’t know me,
you don’t know what I feel.”

But nowhere does Draupadi ever recall an attempt at stripping her. Even when Ashvatthama berates Duryodhana he mentions her being dragged in her period in a single cloth into the gaming hall, but nothing more. When Arjuna rebukes Karna, it is only for letting a “wicked rascal” drag Panchali into the sabha. In his peace embassy, Krishna accuses the Kauravas of this same dragging by the hair only. Was the attempt to strip added later?

Despite all her fulminations against her eldest husband, the complexity of Draupadi’s relationship is instructive indeed. When Virata gives Yudhisthira a nose-bleed—the first ever physical wound he has suffered—he has only to glance at Sairandhri for her to understand immediately and catch the blood in a vessel so that it does not drop on the ground to cause famine and to hide it from Arjuna’s eyes.

This parva provides a rare chronological clue when Brihannala tells Uttara that Arjuna carried the Gandiva for 65 years (43.7), which could be stated only by someone who knew the end of the epic and has to be an interpolation. In the Udyoga Parva (52.10) Dhritarashtra says that 33 years ago Arjuna burnt the Khandava forest, which provides another indicator.

An information of interest is that a special area was set apart to be ruled by Suta chiefs like Kekaya whose children were Kichaka and Sudeshna. The Suta Karna’s conduct vis-à-vis Draupadi is paralleled here by Suta Kichaka, whose unrestrained passion conflates Duryodhana and Duhshasana, his brothers being like the Dhartarashtras. The Udyoga Parva presents another parallel in Nahusha’s lust for Indrani, recounted by Shalya to the eldest Pandava. Similarly, the laying low of the Kaurava heroes by Brihannala, including the knocking down of Bhishma without his losing consciousness, anticipates Shikhandi’s role in the fall of Bhishma. Arjuna defeating a joint attack by six heroes anticipates the similar attack by them on his son. Arjuna’s double sex change (man-eunuch-man) parallels the conflation of Shikhandi (woman-man) and Sthunakarna (man-woman). Virata’s bewilderment when Arjuna refuses to wed his daughter parallels Drupada’s when faced with the opposite demand regarding Draupadi. Arjuna’s reaction reveals not just his sensitivity to social mores but also Virata’s insensitivity—the exact reverse of the Pandavas’ attitude to Panchali’s polyandric marriage.

Krishna pours Yadava wealth into Pandava coffers thrice over: when they marry Draupadi; when Arjuna marries Subhadra; and at Abhimanyu’s marriage. There might be a patron-bard issue involved in shaping the narration since Janamejaya, to whom the epic is being recited, is Abhimanyu’s grandson.

Shiva plays a crucial role in these critical events: he grants Drupada the boon of getting a Bhishma-killing son and gives Amba the boon of killing Bhishma as a man. It is the leader of his hosts, Kubera, whose attendant bestows his manhood upon Shikhandi. Draupadi’s five husbands are Shiva’s boon, and it is he who curses five Indras to be born as the Pandavas. It is by Shiva’s boon that Jayadratha is able to defeat the Pandavas and get Abhimanyu killed.Shiva blesses Chitravahan’s ancestor with one son per generation because of which Chitrangada is brought up like a son (paralleling Shikhandi), whom Arjuna weds and is killed by his son from her. The gem by virtue of which Ulupi resurrects Arjuna is Shiva’s gift to Shesha-naga. By Shiva’s grace Krishna obtains his son Shamba who becomes the nemesis of the Yadavas.

The peculiar conduct of Bhishma anticipates what he will do in Kurukshetra. He provides Duryodhana with clues to track down the Pandavas and marshals his forces to oppose Arjuna, with no scruples in aiding Duryodhana in rustling cattle! The picture he paints of the kingdom where Yudhishthira resides is a virtual Rama–rajya. The battle with the Trigartas continues into the night as will happen in the Drona Parva. Kripa advises that six of them should jointly attack Arjuna, as Drona will do with Abhimanyu. Uttara’s vainglorious boasting contains an apocryphal reference to his defeating “Surya’s son Karna” (36.6) which is a mistranslation of “Karnam vaikartanam”, the reference being to his slicing off his skin-armour which is shown when Arjuna’s arrow rips through his coat of mail into his flesh (60.26). The same mistake in translation occurred in the passage describing the skirmish between Karna and Arjuna after Draupadi was won in the Adi Parva (192.10) where “Vaikartana” was translated as “Vikartana’s son”.

In the dice-game, Yudhishthira’s response to the assault on Draupadi had been silence. Her independent thinking was never to his liking. Here the gambler Kanka’s response to Kichaka’s kick contains the notorious verse:

“A woman is never free.
As a girl, she is protected by her father;
as wife, by husband;
in old age, by her son.”

He adds a sly dig at Sairandhri, stating that a devoted wife, whatever her sufferings, “never criticises her husband”. What this reveals of his attitude helps us to make sense of his callous explanation at the end of the epic about why Draupadi cannot make it to heaven.

After the Brahma festivities comes the gathering storm. Post-wedding, the Pandavas marshal their allies: Satvata-Vrishnis (Kritavarma and the Bhoja-Andhakas are with Duryodhana), Matsyas, Ushinaras, Chedi, Panchalas, Magadha, Kashi, Kekaya princes (whose forces are with Duryodhana). The southern Pandya king is an intriguing addition till we find that in southern recensions Chitrangada is the Pandya princess, a detail that van Buitenen misses out and hence finds this inexplicable. The split among the Yadavas is now open as Balarama’s sympathies lie with the Dhartarashtras whom he praises and blames Yudhishthira for walking into disaster with open eyes. It becomes quite clear that the Panchalas are the real force behind the anti-Hastinapura alliance, which is why Dhrishtadyumna is designated commander-in-chief. Bhishma’s long account of Amba mentions that much before Drupada organised the ritual for obtaining a Drona-killing son, he had propitiated Shiva demanding a son who would kill Bhishma. Duryodhana does not ask Bhishma why and van Buitenen annotates “there is no reason for Drupada to hate Bhishma.” The reason is given in the Harivansha, appropriately styled the appendix to the epic. After Shantanu’s death, the Panchala usurper Ugrayudha had demanded that Satyavati be handed over to him in exchange for a handsome bride-price. Bhishma slew him; hence the enmity.

Van Buitenen presciently notes that the Pandava alliance stretches from Mathura in the north to Magadha in the east, all along the right banks of the Yamuna and the Ganga. The five villages asked for are also located here. The Kauravas range from the northwest to the southeast along the left bank of the Ganga (Gandhara, Kamboja, Sindhu-Sauvira, Shalva, Madra, Trigarta, Pragjyotisha, and Avanti and Mahishmati near the Vindhyas, southwest of the Pandava coalition). They clash at Kurukshetra on the right bank of the Yamuna. Interestingly, the last scion of Rama’s dynasty, Brihadbala of Koshala, fights against the Pandavas and dies at the hands of Krishna’s nephew.

Besides the geographical conglomeration there is a deeper political impetus that ranges these kingdoms on either side. Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that with the Kauravas are those who refuse to accept Krishna’s new concept of a samrat, an overlord who will bring disparate chiefs under a single umbrella of righteous rule. In Indian history it is these areas which always remained recalcitrant to any type of unification, efforts for which were invariably articulated from the lower reaches of the Ganga.

This parva gives us a unique scene of Krishna and Arjuna with their wives in the inner apartments (section 59.7) when Sanjaya visits them, where even Abhimanyu and the twins do not enter. A preliminary glimpse of this was given before the burning of the forest in the first book when they retired with the women for a riverside picnic. Sanjaya finds them reclining, drinking,

“Keshava’s feet rested in Arjuna’s lap
and mahatma’s Arjuna’s feet
reposed in the laps of Krishnaa
and Satyabhama.”

Krishna makes a significant comment: he is yet to repay the debt owed to Draupadi for not aiding her in distress. There was, therefore, no miraculous supply of garments in the gaming hall and the attempt to disrobe Draupadi is most likely a subsequent addition.

The gathering storm reveals the Kautilyan side of Yudhishthira once he knows that Duryodhana has beaten him to obtaining the alliance of Shalya (a parallel to Arjuna and Duryodhana vying for Krishna as ally). The dharma-raja asks him to betray Karna. He repeats this, after listening to his lengthy account of how Indra regained his throne by perfidy, till he obtains the promise. The story of Nahusha’s fall as a python that Shalya recounts links up with Bhima’s encounter in the Vana Parva and with Yayati’s fall because of overweening pride in the first book. Quite uncharacteristically we find Yudhishthira telling Krishna that artha, wealth, is the basic dharma (72.29), anticipating Arjuna’s celebration of this in the Shanti Parva.

The message Drupada’s priest conveys contains the intriguing assertion that the Pandavas are stronger despite having a smaller army, an unexplained statement that Duryodhana repeats to Bhishma at the beginning of the Gita. Dhritarashtra’s discourse to Sanjaya tells us that Shishupala had a chariot-duel with Krishna and it was no miraculous decapitation inside the Rajasuya sabha. Several manuscripts contain lengthy passages describing this duel at the end of which Krishna uses the chakra.

Sanjaya’s embassy to the Pandavas contains a bitter truth, “neither winning nor losing/will bring any good…what joy will you get/after you have killed (elders and cousins)”. This strikes home at the end of the war when Yudhishthira repeats this realisation and wishes to abdicate. Yudhishthira himself echoes this while urging Krishna’s peace-embassy. This speech includes ominous forecasts about many jointly killing one (Abhimanyu), of survivors grouping to wipe out victors (Ashvatthama). He even uses the image of dogs fighting which Arjuna repeats in the Ashvamedha Parva when lamenting before Duhshala over the loss of kin. It is supremely ironic that Yudhishthira’s reply to Sanjaya repeats his ancestor Yayati’s warning, “kama-and-artha/feed upon desires/like fire upon ghee,” but directs it at the Kauravas, oblivious of his own admission in the Vana Parva that he had gambled hoping to win Hastinapura.

Sanjaya’s reply and Krishna’s—both here and in response to Yudhishthira’s plea to undertake the peace-embassy and in reply to Bhima—state doctrines regarding dharma and karma that anticipate the Gita. Krishna also uses the Anukramanika Parva’s image of two massive trees for the two sides. Sanjaya’s report to Dhritarashtra contains several passages regarding the atman that anticipate the Gita as does Vidura’s advice and the oft-repeated verse,

“Where dharma, truth, simplicity
and humility are,
Govinda-Krishna is.
And where Krishna is, victory is.”

Vidura speaks the famous verse that Krishna repeats in the Hastinapura court:

“For the family, sacrifice a man;
for the village, a family;
for the country, a village;
for the atman,
the world.”

He warns to curb craving, repeating Yayati’s advice from the Adi Parva. Sanata-Sujata, like Krishna, declares that the Vedas and sacrifices cannot liberate men, but knowledge, ascesis and renunciation of attachment can. He also celebrates the thumb-sized, heart-dwelling eternal Purusha.

The Udyoga contains fascinating myths that hark back to the Rig Veda (Indra treacherously murdering Trishira and Vritra), and the Adi (a different version of Vishvamitra’s attainment of Brahminhood; Yayati’s fall from heaven and his daughter Madhavi’s polyandry, the subject of plays by Bhisham Sahni and Girish Karnad and novels by V.S.Khandekar and Chitra Chaturvedi). It creates new myths like that of omnipotent Garuda being foiled in his prey (the theme of Subodh Ghose’s brilliant creation, “Sumukha and Gunakeshi”) and humbled by the female ascetic Shandili; Amba’s sex change (the theme of Chitra Chaturvedi’s recent novel); folk-tales like the mice (Kauravas) and the hermit-cat (Yudhishthira). We also come across lost myths, like the reference to Divodasa making love to Madhavi as Narada did to Satyavati, Shukra to Shataparva and Pulastya to Pratichya.

Duryodhana is the only Kaurava clear-sighted enough to realise that it is Krishna who seeks to destroy them and make Yudhishthira the samrat. Krishna, like Rama, has no pretensions to divinity and tells Arjuna plainly that he does all that is humanly possible but cannot alter what destiny (daiva) dictates (79.5-6). It is quite a surprise to discover that the only husband of Panchali to urge war is not Bhima, as one would expect, but Sahadeva, the youngest. No wonder Draupadi, feeling let down, says that her old father, brothers and adolescent sons will avenge her. That is when Krishna declares his vow in implacable terms recalling Devavrata’s:

“The Himavant hills may move,
the earth shatter
in a hundred pieces, heaven collapse;
my promise stands.”

Yet he undertakes the embassy so that none may say that he never tried to stop the world-destroying war. Unfortunately, despite this, that is precisely what Gandhari accuses him of and curses him.

The two Krishna-Kunti meetings expose the anguish behind Pritha’s iron façade. She blames her father most of all for her misfortunes, beginning with giving her away in childhood “like money squandered by a rich man”, and also holds her father-in-law responsible for her griefs of which the greatest is the insult to Draupadi. The message she conveys through her nephew to her sons is an elaborately structured rhetorical exercise that moves deeply while trumpeting a resounding call to arms. Its highlight is the exhortation of Vidula to her defeated son Sanjaya that Sri Aurobindo translated into English for rousing the martial spirit in Indian youth against foreign domination.

Duryodhana’s response to the embassy via Uluka has interesting convoluted logic: he refused to compromise so that the Pandavas would be motivated to wipe their mother’s tears with a victory and to prove that they were true Kshatriyas, not mere loud-mouths! He is not in the least impressed with Krishna’s cosmic manifestation (for which we have been prepared in the Vana Parva by Lomasha’s description of Parashurama seeing the cosmos in Rama and Bhima seeing it in Hanuman, as Dr.Vasudev Poddar has pointed out), which he dismisses as magic that he himself can replicate. His words even echo the message Kunti sent her sons (“the reason for which a kshatriya lady gives birth to a son is here”). But, in the allies he enumerates he makes a slip by including the Matsyas who are on the other side (160.103). His words fly straight to the mark as he points out that the Pandavas were saved from slavery not by Bhima’s mace and Arjuna’s Gandiva but by Parshati-Panchali.

Krishna’s embassy contains quite a few surprises. He announces that the Pandavas are willing to have Duryodhana as the crown-prince and his father as the ruler if they get back Indraprastha (124.60). There has been no mention of this in the consultations in Upaplavya. Similarly, he offers Karna overlordship with the added attraction of bedding Draupadi. Her reaction, had she got to know of this, offers rich scope for a creative writer.

Most unexpected is Karna’s foreknowledge about his own death and the annihilation of the Kauravas. He paints a vivid picture of the war in terms of a ritual sacrifice and narrates a dream that is an exact parallel of Avindhya’s portentous dream in the Rama-katha (Vana Parva) of Lakshmana seated on a heap of bones, gulping boiled milk-and-honey rice. Buddhadeb Bose’s play, The First Partha is a gripping recreation of the Karna-Krishna-Draupadi and Karna-Kunti encounters with fascinating innovations offering new insights going well beyond Tagore and Vyasa.

As the book ends, the Kaurava ranks split wide open. Bhishma succeeds in exploiting Karna’s hubris so that his pride overcomes his concern for Duryodhana and, Achilles-like he sulks in his tents, opting out of the war, warning that the army’s morale is being sapped by Bhishma who ought to be dismissed.

This fifth book is unique because of two possible historical references. Vidura’s warning about an angry Brahmin destroying a kingdom could be a reference to Chanakya and the Nandas and dates the final text of the epic as post-Mauryan, tallying with Hiltebeitel’s thesis in Rethinking the Mahabharata. There is also a great chariot-hero Paurava named by Drupada with the kings of northwestern India recommending him as an ally, whom Arjuna defeated along with the Kashmir chieftains in the Sabha Parva. Paurava becomes Duryodhana’s ally and there is no record of his death in Kurukshetra. Van Buitenen argues that this is a reference to the Poros of Arrian’s Indica whom Alexander honoured. Gilles Schaufelberger has noted that Guy Vincent in his lecture on the 21st May 2005 at the University de Provence identified Kalayavana and Alexander. We have, therefore, at least three identifiable historical figures, both denoting the same historical period.

The Complete Vana Parva translated by Prof. P. Lal

The forest in Bharatavarsha is not just a savage jungle where man reverts to the bestial. On the other hand, the very fountainhead of our civilization lies here, its helmsmen being the seers and sages, a place where man lives in harmony with nature. We stumble across hermitages resonant with the chanting of mantras, fragrant with the smoke of yajnic fires, holy teerthas to purify oneself. Yet, it is a mysterious world peopled not just by the usual denizens. Suddenly the blood freezes, accosted by terrifying shape-shifting demons and pythons hissing human speech, enchanting lakes guarded by Yakshas and Rakshasas, deceptively pellucid waters on whose banks lie corpses. Here woman faces down immutable, inexorable Death itself. That is why Tagore saw in ‘tapovan’, the forest of ascesis, the very soul of Bharata.

In Vyasa’s creation, the twelve years exile of the five brothers and their wife is not simply a period of inaction. It is an interval providing an opportunity for turning away from the external world and the extrovert personality to look within. The only one who does so is Yudhishthira, so ill at ease on a throne in a tumultuous capital city. He may well say with Andrew Marvell:

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence thy sister dear?
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men’
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;’
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

More mature than when they suffered their first exile in the forest of Hidimba, anguished by the incidents in the royal court, Yudhishthira repeatedly seeks guidance from seers and sages, eager to reach that state of which the Rig Veda and the Svetashvatara Upanishad speak:

Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

By the end of the Vana Parva, when he has satisfied the disguised Yaksha and won resurrection for his brothers, it seems that he may have approached it.

However, the forest exile is not a blissful sylvan break for the Pandavas. At Yudhishthira’s command, they have to take up arms to rescue their tormentor Duryodhana from the Gandharvas. Twice Draupadi is abducted’once along with three of her husbands who are helpless till Bhima turns up’and then by Jayadratha. Twice Draupadi inveigles Bhima into reckless confrontations with Yakshas and Rakshasas to satisfy her fancies. During their journey to meet Arjuna, Draupadi is first to collapse on the slopes of Gandhamadana, presaging the scene of the final departure, with the difference that her husbands rush to her rescue. Twice the story of Rama is brought before them: once to Bhima alone by Hanuman and then to Yudhishthira by Markandeya as an example of an exiled prince. Twice Bhima is taught the limits of his strength: once by his ancestor Nahusha-turned-python and next by his stepbrother Hanuman. Death is confronted twice, and on both occasions he gives in to the integrity of the human being. Yudhishthira is groomed for his final confrontation with the deadly Dharma-crane through the questions Nahusha puts to him, the dialogue between Savitri and the lord of death, and the many stories that he hears from the sages, notably those of Rama-Sita and of Nala-Damayanti in which the themes of dicing, exile in the forest, battle and restoration are repeated. The exile itself is doubled for the audience: the story of Rama’s fourteen year exile is recounted as a parallel to the Pandavas’ thirteen year ordeal.

The Vana Parva consists of eighteen chapters—a significant number in this epic of eighteen books whose climax is the eighteen days war. Much of it is taken up by a description of pilgrimage spots, as many as 350, related by Pulastya (235), Dhaumya (53) and Lomasha (60) in over 2400 verses. Similar accounts are found later in the Shalya Parva (43 spots in 77 verses) and the Anushasana Parva (81 in 66 verses). The interesting point is that these are not just magically cleansing lakes or river-crossings. Pulastya clarifies that visiting them is of value only if the visitor has faith and is pure of heart. It is here that for the first time we find a deliberate attempt to describe pilgrimage as an institution which became a feature of the Puranas. These descriptions came to dominate Indian cultural geography, covering practically the entire country with the idea that encouraging people to visit these in a circuit would foster cultural mingling and unity. Tagore points out that through the rivers the consciousness of the receptive human being touches the Supreme Consciousness, cleansing him of the layer of illusion.

The first chapter begins with the hermit Shaunaka (again a parallel to the sage to whom Sauti narrates the epic) reading the Pandavas a lesson in desire being the root of all misery, which reiterates the realisations of Yayati in the Adi Parva. He also provides Yudhishthira the core teaching of Karma Yoga by saying that the message of the Vedas is to do karma, but renounce its fruit; perform dharma, but take no pride in doing so.

In the second chapter, where Krishna visits the Pandavas, we find him explaining his absence. This is the first clue that his miraculous rescuing of Draupadi from being stripped is a later interpolation. When Draupadi upbraids Krishna, her ‘grief-rich tears’ drenching ‘her heavy, round, lovely breasts’, she does not refer to the attempted disrobing, only to being dragged while menstruating but specifically mentions being mocked by Karna. The transcreation captures the anguish in simple words flying straight to the mark:

‘Husbands, sons. Relatives, brothers, father,
I have no one. No one. No one.
Not even you, Madhusudana-Krishna’
Keshava, Krishna,
There are four reasons you must help me.
Am I not related to you?
Don’t you respect me as a woman?
Am I not your loved-and-loving sakhi?
Haven’t you vowed to protect me?’

How true the first two lines are about her situation at the end of the war! In response, Krishna makes his famous vow in words that echo those of Devavrata making his ‘Bhishma’ vow:

‘You will be rani of rajas!
The skies will fall,
The Himalayas shatter,
The earth split in two,
The ocean’s waters dry up’
But what I promise you, Krishna-Draupadi,
Will not fail to happen.’

In the process, ironically, he dooms himself and his entire clan.

The Parva provides a veritable cliff-hanger with its account of Karna deliberately giving away his impenetrable armour and celestial earrings for the sake of fame. This account also provides one of the several accounts of his birth, with a detailed narration of how Surya browbeat the adolescent Kunti into giving in to his demands. There is an interesting hint here of a shared identity between Durvasa and Surya, both described as being madhupingala in complexion.

In Puranic accounts, Shri leaves the demons and goes over to the gods to become Indra’s ‘good fortune and prosperity’. Draupadi’s insistence on accompanying the Pandavas into exile is, therefore, doubly significant: their Shri has not abandoned them. Throughout the exile she constantly badgers Yudhishthira, desperately and tirelessly labouring to arouse in him a desire to win back what she symbolises and which he has gambled away. When Jatasura abducts Draupadi along with the twins and Yudhishthira, her eldest husband’s warning to the Rakshasa contains a significant revelation of her destructiveness:

‘In touching this woman you have drunk a jar of well-stirred poison.’ (III.157.26)

While she is like a boat to her husbands, saving them from drowning in the sea of distress, to the wicked she is death itself. Throughout the thirteen years of exile she never allows her husbands and her sakha to forget how she was outraged and they were cheated of their kingdom. The marital relationship between Draupadi and the Pandavas is constantly that of a mahout goading an elephant into the fray. Krishna’s urging Yudhishthira in the forest that karma and individual enterprise, purushartha, are indispensable to preserve society and one’s integrity anticipates her sakha Krishna’s discourse to Arjuna on the battlefield. She is the only one among the Pandavas and Kauravas who assumes the atheistic stance in a violent outburst, exclaiming (III.30.23, III.32) that creatures are like wooden dolls (darumayi yosha) in the hands of a whimsical creator, recalling the significance of her own name Panchali, anticipating King Lear’s heart-wrenching ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport’ and Hardy’s ‘the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.’ This is part of the political science she learned, listening to a learned Brahmin discoursing to her father and brothers (III.30.60-61). It calls forth Yudhishthira’s plea to abandon such nastika heresy She gives this back in full measure after the war when he wishes to become a hermit, by saying that were his brothers not equally crazy, they would have tied him up as an atheist and ruled the kingdom themselves (XII.14.33).

The complete account of income and expenditure of her husbands was in her grasp and she alone knew the extent of their wealth. She kept track of what each of the many maidservants attending on her husband was doing. It is she who used to make all the arrangements for Yudhishthira’s tours, keeping count of the large retinue of horses and elephants and their quartering, laying aside her own comfort (III.233.458).

Another piquant passage is the conversation between Satyabhama and Draupadi. Krishna’s favourite wife is insecure and worried stiff over how to keep his interest active. Draupadi gives her a long lecture on wifely duties, which has the marks of a later interpolation all over it. However, it has some very interesting insights such as that she took care never to complain about her mother-in-law, whatever the aggravation; never surpassed her in ornaments, dress and even the food taken. The healthy respect the Pandavas had for her has been well brought out in Rajshekhar Basu’s delightful take-off, ‘Panchali, beloved of the five‘^[i].

We come across interesting insights such as the duel between Bhima and the Rakshasa Kirmira being compared to Vali and Sugriva clashing over a woman. In the Ramakatha that follows later, Vali suspects that Tara is dissuading him from responding to Sugriva’s challenge because she favours him. Valmiki’s epic is innocent of this hint, which was part of the older tradition. The Ramakatha has many other interesting differences from the Ramayana, such as Manthara being the gandharvi Dundubhi reborn sent by Brahma to bring about Rama’s exile, Sita being consoled by a Rakshasa named Avindhya who is richly rewarded by Rama. Lakshmana is seen, in a dream, to be licking boiled milk and honey rice on a heap of bones, precisely the image applied by Karna to Yudhishthira in his discourse with Krishna in the Udyoga Parva. There is no burning of Lanka by Hanuman, nor does he carry Rama’s signet ring to Sita, no fire-ordeal. The story ends with the return to Ayodhya.

Besides these major kathas, there are shorter stories about Agastya’s feats, Rishyashringa (again a link with the Ramayana), thousand-armed Kartavirya Arjuna, Mandhata, Dhundhumara, the hair-raising account of Somaka sacrificing his only son Jantu to beget a hundred sons, the self-sacrificing generosity of Shibi, Ashtavakra, the unusual story of Yavakrita which Girish Karnad turned into a remarkable play Agnivarsha, Chyavana-Sukanya and Parikshit-Sushobhana the heartbreaking frog-princess (turned into wonderful love stories by Subodh Ghose), the peculiar story of Indradyumna’s search for someone who remembers him, the birth and victory of Skanda that inspired Kumarasambhava.

There are some unusually ‘subaltern’ didactic stories that show the superiority of dedication to duty over asceticism (the devoted wife, the righteous butcher, the householder Brahmin Mudgala).

The climax of the Parva comes in the questioning of Yudhishthira by the Yaksha, where the depth of the Pandava’s wisdom is plumbed and not found wanting. It his dedication to anrishamsya, non-injury, that wins him the favour. That is when he is found fit to regain his kingdom in future and given the boon of not being recognised in disguise during the incognito exile period. The interaction contains some gems of insight that encapsulate in just a shloka the most profound truths of existence, such as:

‘That man is happy who,
Nor in debt and not in a foreign land,
In his own home, in the fifth or sixth part of the day,
Cooks a vegetarian meal and eats it.
Every day creatures die. They go to the realm of Yama
Yet everyone thinks he will live for ever.
What is more wonderful than this?’

This is also where the famous epigram, ‘Dharma violated destroys; Dharma cherished protects’ is spoken by Yudhishthira.

The transcreation is all through extremely reader-friendly, in rhythmic free verse. There are few errors, one of which is in the Ramakatha where in a dream (280.71) Sita is said to be proceeding south, the deathly direction, whereas the original has north. The volume is enriched with 123 facsimile reproductions showing the extensive revisions and note made by Prof. Lal to his original version for his weekly readings that began in October 1999. 4 pages of errata to the Adi and Sabha parva volumes are added.

The Introduction to the Mahabharata is a reproduction of what introduced the single volume condensation of the epic published in 1980 that remains unparalleled in English for its masterly selection of material and is the only one that effortlessly shifts to poetry where necessary. It is Prof. Lal who first called it ‘the Doomsday Epic’ and this introduction shows why the epithet is deserved. Besides the hard-core narrative, there are excellent thumbnail sketches of the major characters concentrating on the psychological mainsprings of action, and an insightful section on the message of the epic which contains a superb retelling of the Kalpataru parable. His conclusion is that the meaning of life lies in compassion, without which you end up with doomsday. It ends with a valuable discourse on the challenges of translating Vyasa.

The portfolio of Mahabharata paintings makes available paintings from Ramananda Chatterjee’s edition of Kashiram Das’ version of the epic in Bangla verse. Most artists belong to the Bengal Renaissance school, but there is Ravi Varma as well and some miniatures. One Ravi Varma painting depicts Simhika leading Draupadi, an incident known in the South but absent in Vyasa. In addition to these, the book provides the text of Prof. Lal’s brilliant valedictory address to Sahitya Akademi’s 1990 international seminar on the Mahabharata. To read it is to realise the profundity of insights hidden in the simplest of stories. Prof. Lal takes up four, some of which travelled all the way to the West to become famous as ‘Barlaam and Josaphat’, the tale of the man in the well. A veritable cornucopia indeed!

 

The Mahabharata of Vyasa Books 1 and 2: The Complete Adi and Sabha Parvas transcreated from Sanskrit by P. Lal, Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2005, pp. 1218 and 499. Rs 1200 and Rs 600 (hardback), Rs 800 and Rs 500 (flexiback). (A special numbered-and-signed edition has original hand-painted frontispieces by a patua-artist of Jagannatha temple, thematically appropriate for each volume).

What is it in this epic-of-epics, eight times larger than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined — denounced as “a literary monster” and “monstrous chaos” by Occidental Indologists Winternitz and Oldenberg — that appeals so irresistibly to modern man in search of his soul, when the audience for which it was composed — the enthroned monarch and the forest-dwelling sage — has long since sunk into the dark backward and abysm of time?

‘Shells were exploding over Leningrad. Enemy bombs were falling on the streets stirring up clouds of dust. On one of those spring days during the siege, Sanscrit language was being heard in the building of the Academy of Sciences on the Neva River embankment, in a room overlooking the side that was safer during the artillery strikes. First, in the original, and then in translation, Vladimir Kalyanov, a specialist on India, was reading Mahabharata, a wonderful monument of Indian literature, to his colleagues, who remained in the besieged city. He had started the translation before the war. He translated during the hard winter of 1941, with no light, no fuel and no bread in the city. Two volumes of books – one published in Bombay and the other in Calcutta – were lying on the table in the room. In the dim light of a wick lamp, he was comparing these two editions of Mahabharata, trying to find the best and the most accurate translation of the Sanscrit into Russian’. The translation of the Indian epic into Russian was never interrupted. [i]

Vyasa, master raconteur, weaves together a bewildering skein of threads to create a many-splendoured web from which there was no escape for the listener of those days and there is none even for the reader of today. The thousands of years that separate us from Vyasa have not, surprisingly, dimmed the magic of his art that had entranced Janamejaya and Shaunaka.

We find here a storyteller par excellence laying bare, at times quite pitilessly, the existential predicament of man in the universe. If, later in the epic, Vyasa shows us what man has made of man, here, in the very first book, he plumbs the depths of the humiliatingly petty pre-occupations of the Creator’s noblest creation. Indeed, the dilemmas the characters find themselves enmeshed in cannot even be glorified as ‘tragic’. Perhaps, that is why we find the epic so fascinating for, how many of us are cast in the heroic mould? We do not have to strain the imagination to reach out and identify with Yayati or Shantanu. We need no willing suspension of disbelief to understand why the Brahmin Drona should sell his knowledge to the highest bidder, or why Drupada does not protest too much when his daughter is parcelled out among five brothers who had routed him in a skirmish. Passions do, indeed, spin the plot and we are betrayed by what is false within. Then, as now, there is no need to look for a villain manoeuvring without.

If we resonate in empathy with the sense of tears in human things, we also thrill with joy on meeting the indomitable spirit of woman in an epic that many misconceive as celebrating a male chauvinist outlook. Whether it is Shakuntala proudly asserting her integrity and berating the mean-minded Dushyanta in open court; or Devayani demanding that Kacha return her love and imperiously brushing aside a lust-crazed husband; or Kunti refusing to pervert herself into a mindless son-producing womb to gratify the twisted desires of a frustrated husband time and again, it is woman standing forth in all the splendour of her spirited autonomy as a complete human being that rivets our attention and evokes our admiration.

This transcreation by P. Lal, Padma Shri awardee, Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow and Mircea Eliade Professor, allows the epic to grow on the reader through 19 chapters without any critical paraphernalia, for ‘the story’s the thing, catching conscience of commoner and king’ as he writes so perceptively. A companion volume contains the individual prefaces, notes and glossaries to the 26 fascicules of the original edition.[ii] This is the only English rendering that follows the Sanskrit text of the epic verse by verse as it is current today (the ‘vulgate’) in all the recensions ‘‘the full ragbag version” as he puts it, eschewing the not very consistent text of the Critical Edition that J.A.B. van Buitenen translates with its numerous excisions. Unlike the 19th century translators K.M. Ganguli and M.N. Dutt, Lal neither omits sexual passages ‘for obvious reasons’, nor Latinises them. It is also the sole translation that is a transcreation, consciously aiming at providing a sense of the original by effortlessly shifting from lyrical verse to trenchant prose as Vyasa’s text demands, while preserving the Sanskrit ethos. It is a transcreation that is, above all, meant to be heard. After all, that is what the hermits in the Naimisha forest were doing. Lal himself has been giving public readings of his transcreation every Sunday from October 1999, bringing home the oral and aural quality of the epic. How true are Vyasa’s prophetic words in the Adivamsavatarana (‘Down-comings’) chapter:

‘What is in this epic
on Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha,
may be elsewhere.
What is not in this epic,
is nowhere else’
It is recited in the present,
it will be recited in the future.’

We are not brought up short by jarring medieval turns of phrase that are anything but Vyasa as with van Buitenen’s ‘barons’, ‘chivalry’ and the like, nor have we to stumble over the archaic Victorian prose of Ganguli and Dutt. Mahatma, pranama, namaskara, ashrama and similar words, redolent with the flavour of Bharatavarsha’s air and earth and water, abound. The opening verses describing Creation are some of the most majestic compositions of all time, transcreated with biblical and Rigvedic reverberations:

‘At first, there was no light,
no radiance, only darkness;
then was born the egg of Brahma,
exhaustless and mighty seed of life’

Lal’s verse rendering is far better than any of the translations so far; terse yet poetically evocative and mellifluous:

‘She stood, a black-
eyed beauty on the hill-top,
statuesque,
like a golden girl.
The hill, its creepers,
its bushes, all flamed
With the golden beauty
of the golden girl.’

Tapati is another Cleopatra indeed in Chitraratha-Enobarbus’ glowing description which is immeasurably superior to the Ganguli and van Buitenen prosaic translations. Or take the unconventional ‘rakshasan’ rhythm he adopts for Hidimb’s slavering monologue where one feels as if Vyasa were writing in English itself; so natural, unforced and appropriate is the transcreation:

‘My favourite
Food!
My mouth
Waters’
My sharp
Eight teeth
Will bite
Delicious
Meat.
I’ll crunch
The throat
And veins,
And drink
Hot
Fresh
Bubbly
Blood.’

The Astika chapter has Vyasa at his best as the weaver of tales: stories spring from within one another in delightful succession till the parva becomes a veritable Chinese box of unending surprises with Sauti the raconteur weaving a magic web spellbinding his audience.

James Fitzgerald, the translator of the critical text of the Stri and Shanti parvas published in 2004 makes an extremely important point about the epic:

‘The Mahabharata argued for a cultural revolution that was historically successful in several important ways, I have come to see the Mahabharata not simply as an ancient monument of bygone times. Many themes and motifs in this epic require consideration by the thoughtful people of all kinds today, whether they are particularly interested in India and its history or not. [iii]

Looking back at the Adi Parva, a multitude of salient features; thematic, stylistic and eschatological; swim into one’s ken. Here we get to know that the epic has three beginnings: ‘Some read the Mahabharata from the first mantra, others begin with the story of Astika; others begin with Uparichara.’ There is the recurrent motif of Lust in Action with its attendant Quest for Immortality. Initially, they emerge as two separate themes in the Churning-of-the-Ocean and the Kacha-Devayani episodes, which coalesce in the existentially tragic figure of Yayati. Yayati, inheriting the taint of lust from his father Nahusha, sums up in himself the entire experience of the self-destructive poison of lust, with its initial violence of sensual orgiastic bliss, seeking in vain to gorge itself to satiation until the body is worn out. Yet, the flames of desire continue to lick the spirit into fresh agonies of torment, forcing Yayati into the very apotheosis of lust in replacing his worn-out senses by the vibrantly youthful body of his son, only to discover that lust is insatiable. Yayati’s life, indeed, is an interesting study in hubris that culminates in a veritable peripeteia as he is flung down from Heaven in a total reversal of situation, till he who prided himself on being the most generous in the giving of gifts (he even gifted away his daughter to earn unprecedented merit) is forced to accept gifts from his own grandchildren to win back his place in Svarga. Unfortunately, this blood-taint follows his dynasty as its nemesis, virtually wiping it out. It kills Pandu. The Pandavas are his foster-children by unknown surrogates, veritable parvenus aspiring to the ancestral throne.

Yet another pattern is that of the disqualified eldest son beginning, again, with Yayati whose elder brother Yati becomes a sage. Of Yayati’s five sons it is the youngest, Puru, who becomes the dynast. Next it is Riksha, Ajamidha’s youngest son, who founds the Hastinapura dynasty. Of Pratipa’s sons, the Brahmins challenge Devapi’s right to the throne because of his skin-disease. Like Puru, the youngest son Shantanu becomes king of Hastinapura. Instead of Devavrata, Shantanu’s eldest son, it is the youngest, Vichitravirya, who becomes king.

At this stage, the theme of the disqualified eldest is interwoven with an interesting set of parallels: Bhishma-Vyasa and Satyavati-Kunti. Both Bhishma and Vyasa are born of Ganga and Satyavati respectively before the dynastically crucial Shantanu-Satyavati marriage. Both are unmarried and deeply involved with the Kurus, one as protector, the other as surrogate-dynast. Kunti, like her grandmother-in-law, has a pre-marital son who disappears immediately after birth. Here the Parallelism dovetails into the Pattern, for Karna, the eldest Kaunteya, cannot inherit because of his illegitimacy. In relation to the Pandavas, he stands much in the same relationship as Bhishma to the Shantvanas. The parallel is stressed deliberately in the repeated confrontations between the two, culminating in Karna’s Achilles-like sulking in his tent so long as Bhishma leads the armies. All the eight Pandava sons are killed and Kunti’s dynasty continues only through Parikshit, Arjuna’s grandson via his junior wife Subhadra, a Yadava, thereby restoring the throne to the line of Yadu, Yayati’s eldest disinherited son.

An allied motif is the difficulty in begetting successors. Beginning with Bharata who had to adopt Bharadvaja, it recurs with Shantanu who deliberately discards the eminently eligible Devavrata only to have his eldest son by Satyavati die prematurely, followed by the death of his second son Vichitravirya also without any heirs. The engendering of Dhritarashtra and Pandu is itself a traumatic affair and both are physically challenged. Pandu, cursed to die in intercourse, cannot beget children. Gandhari aborts her inordinately long pregnancy out of sheer frustration. The Pandavas lose all their sons. Their grandson Parikshit, while in Uttara’s womb, is mortally wounded by Ashvatthama and has to be revived by Krishna, just as Gandhari’s aborted foetus is saved by Krishna-Dvaipayana-Vyasa.

From the stylistic view-point, there are such highlights as the all-prose Paushya parva and the dynastic account after Samvarana-Tapati; the story of Yayati almost wholly in dialogue-form; and the majestic Vedic chants in the Paushya, Pauloma and Khandavadahana parvas, all addressed to Agni, the mystic fire of the Rig Veda. The Vyasan technique’or perhaps the raconteur Sauti’s’is to weave in skilled unmindfulness: present the pith of the matter first, allowing details to be drawn out gradually through answers to questions skilfully interposed at critical stages of the narrative. It is not only the professional bards, Sauti et. al, who recite the epic, but also Brahmins such as Lomasha, Markandeya and, of course, Vaishampayana. It is not, as van Buitenen argues, that the baronial-bardic lore was giving way to a tradition of wandering reciters of brahminic lore. After all, Vaishampayana recited the epic before it was picked up by Sauti.

The Adi Parva, carries Vedic mythology on to a new stage where Indra has been reduced just to being king of the gods, worsted by the bird Garuda and the men Krishna and Arjuna, powerless to protect Takshaka who seeks sanctuary, paying the price of arrogance by being imprisoned in a cave by Shiva and forced to incarnate on earth. He is no longer the mighty rescuer of the celestial herds stolen by the Panis, riving open Vritra or Vala to release the celestial streams of light. Even Vishnu does not play much of a role here, the accent having shifted to a new duo of divine sages: Nara and Narayana. By identifying Krishna and Arjuna with them, beginning with the invocatory verses, the new myth is given more ‘body’ and appeals more powerfully to the popular imagination. As the epic unfolds, it reveals more and more of an infusion of a devotional strain orientated towards Shiva and Krishna, particularly in the discourses of Bhishma lying on his bed of arrows. The day of Vedic Indra, Agni and Varuna is past and the puranik Shiva-Vishnu rivalry is implied through the strenuous attempts to make each extol the greatness of the other in the Anushasana and Shanti parvas.

How does the Adi Parva leave us where the story of the Kurukshetra War and the Pandava-Kaurava conflict are concerned? The seeds of the fratricidal feud are sown during the childhood sports, culminating in the lacquer-house episode. In the meantime, a new figure has been introduced: Karna, who will figure prominently in the coming feud. The Drona-inspired attack on Drupada has laid the basis of a deep hatred of the Kurus in the defeated king that moves him to seek alliance with the Pandavas as a counterpoise against the Dhartarashtras and Drona. The intervening period, occupied by the Hidimba, Chitraratha and Baka episodes, is the training ground for the future inheritors of the Kuru kingdom. Simultaneously, these events help to span the time-gap and convey the sense of the long duration of the exile. The marriage with Draupadi and the coming of Krishna provide the Panchala-Vrishni-Pandava triangular set-up to oppose the Kurus at Hastinapura even more effectively with the establishment of a new kingdom at Khandavaprastha on the Yamuna facing Hastinapura on the Ganga.

The next book of the epic, Sabha Parva, is concerned with these two capitals and their two Halls of Kings. Vaishampayana has told Janamejaya that the story of his ancestors is concerned with division and loss, battle and restoration. In the Sabha Parva the narrative moves swiftly from the Pandavas’ escape from Duryodhana’s death-dealing moves to their restoration as heirs to the kingdom through the winning of the Panchala princess Draupadi in a contest of skill. Draupadi emerges gratuitously at the end of a sacrificial rite performed to wreak vengeance, like the kritya sent by the Kashi prince against Krishna to avenge his father’s death and the kritya invoked by demons to bring them the suicidal Duryodhana to restore his morale. Yajnaseni also resembles the blue and red (nilalohita) kritya of the Rig and Atharva Vedas. Like Janamejaya’s serpent-holocaust ritual performed by priests in black robes, the rite draws on non-shrauta tradition, a departure from the normal sacred sacrifice and partakes of the nature of abhichara (black-magic), death-dealing, because of which Upayaja, whom Drupada approaches first, refuses to perform it. Here, too, there is a resemblance with Kunti because Durvasa’s boon is described as abhichara samyuktam’varam mantragramam, invocations linked to black magic. In particular, it is linked to Yudhishthira’s birth. Pandu specifically urges Kunti to summon Dharma with abhichara rites, upacharabhicharabhyam. [iv]

Draupadi’s emergence is an unintended bonus for Drupada who performed the rite for obtaining a son to kill Drona. Her birth is accompanied by a skyey announcement that this lovely dark (Krishnaa) lady will destroy all Kshatriyas. Therefore, she appears to fulfil not Drupada’s purpose but that of the gods responding to the Earth’s anguished prayer to lighten her burden of oppressive Kshatriyas. Significantly, despite being aware of this announcement ‘or being conscious of it’ the gods-engendered Pandavas wed her and destroy the Kauravas whose birth is entirely human. Her marriage to the son of Yama-Dharma, Yudhishthira, reinforces her ominous links with death. Her very first appearance is as a mysterious femme fatale in the context of a twelve year sacrifice that Yama, the god of death, performs on the banks of the Ganga, during which there is no death in the world. In Ganga’s waters her tears turn into golden lotuses that attract Indra whom she leads into a nether-world like cave where four other Indras lie imprisoned for rebirth as the Pandavas. [v] Like Athena springing cap a pie out of Zeus’ head and Durga taking shape from the combined fury of the gods, Yajnaseni emerges in the bloom of youth from the yajna vedi, fire-altar, which is repeatedly cited as a simile for her hour-glass figure. Her manifestation does not require the matrix of a human womb, ignoring the absence of Drupada’s queen who does not respond to the priest’s summons as her make-up is unfinished. ‘Panchali’, as she is called when she first appears, is pregnant with double meaning: ‘of Panchala’ and ‘puppet’. This presages how she lives her entire life, acting out not just her father’s vengeful obsession, but as an instrument of the gods to bring death back to the world, which had halted during Yama’s yajna on the banks of the Ganga.

As the only kanya whose appearance is described in detail, the description is worth noting:

‘eye-ravishing Panchali,
black-and-smiling-eyed’
Dark-skinned Panchali,
Lotus-eyed lady,
Wavy-haired Panchali
Hair like dark blue clouds,
Shining coppery carved nails,
Soft eye-lashes,
Swelling breasts and
Shapely thighs’
Blue lotus
Fragrance for a full krosha
Flowed from her body’
Neither short
nor tall, neither dark nor pale,
with wavy dark-blue hair,
eyes like autumn-lotus leaves,
fragrant like the lotus’
extraordinarily accomplished,
soft-spoken and gentle’
She is the last to sleep,
the first to wake
even earlier than the early-rising
cowherds and shepherds.
Her sweat-bathed face is lovely,
like the lotus, like
the jasmine; slim-waisted like
the middle of the sacred
vedi, long-haired, pink-lipped,
and smooth-skinned.’ (I.169.44-46, II.65.33-37)

Vyasa categorically states that the creator had so fashioned her that her loveliness surpassed that of all women (reminiscent of Valmiki on Ahalya) and enchanted everyone. The South Indian cult of Draupadi sculpts her holding a closed lotus bud symbolising virginity, as opposed to the open lotus of fertility Subhadra holds. ‘The parrot symbolizing the principle of desire,’ writes Archna Sahni, ‘is poised atop the bud to tease it open, so as to begin creation. Draupadi, carrying the two interdependent and interactive symbols of desire and creation is none other than the goddess as the genetrix of all things.’ [vi]

The kings in the svayamvara hall are described as so tormented by the arrows of desire (kandarpabanabhinipiditangah) that even friends hated each other (I.186.5). When the brothers look upon her in the potter’s hut, they all lose their hearts to her. Noticing this, Yudhishthira recalls Vyasa’s prophecy and announces that she will be their common wife (I.190.12-14). Kunti’s announcement is by no means fortuitous. It is carefully planned. We tend to overlook the fact that Yudhishthira and the twins are already with her when Arjuna and Bhima return with Draupadi from the svayamvara sabha. Kunti is desperately keen that her words do not prove to be false. Vyasa turns up at the right moment to persuade the reluctant Drupada that having five husbands is pre-ordained for Draupadi.

Dark like Gandhakali, hence named Krishnaa, and gifted with blue-lotus fragrance wafting for a full krosha like Yojanagandha, she ‘knows,’ like her mother-in-law Kunti and great grandmother-in-law Gandhakali, more than one man. Like Kunti she is also described as an amorous lover in the Brahmavaivarta Purana (IV.115.73): Draupadi bhratripati ca pancanam kamini tatha. Dr. Nrisimha Prasad Bhaduri [vii] records an account narrated by Pandit Anantalal Thakur in which Duryodhana’s wife Bhanumati sneers at Draupadi asking how she manages five husbands, kena vrittena Draupadi pandavan adhitishthasi. Draupadi swiftly responds that among her in-laws the number of husbands has always been rather excessive, pativriddhi kule mama, a right royal riposte that encompasses in a fell swoop her mother-in-law Kunti, grandmothers-in-law Ambika and Ambalika (who are Bhanumati’s too) and great-grandmother-in-law Satyavati. The story shows how the popular memory has treasured Draupadi for her acute intelligence and forceful personality that took nothing lying down. Yet, hers is an immeasurably greater predicament compared to those women of her husbands’ family. Where theirs were momentary encounters, Draupadi has to live out her entire life parcelled out among five men within the sacrament of marriage.[viii] She shares with Satyavati and Kunti an imperishable, ever-renewable virginity:

‘The divine rishi, narrating this wondrous,
miraculous and excellent event said,
“Lovely-waisted and noble-minded indeed,
she became virgin anew after each marriage.”’ (I.197.14)

Is there a link with the Vedic marital hymns where the bride is first offered to Soma, Gandharva and Agni and only then to the human bridegroom as her fourth husband?

Somah prathamo vivide gandharvo vivida uttarah/
Tritiyo agnishte patisturiyaste manyushyajah//
‘Soma obtained her first of all; next the Gandharva was her lord.
Agni was thy third husband: now one born of woman is thy fourth.
Soma to the Gandharva, and to Agni the Gandharva gave:
And Agni hath bestowed on me riches and sons and this my spouse.’[ix]

According to the Villipputtur’s Tamil version of the epic, Draupadi bathes in fire after each marriage, emerging chaste like the pole star.[x] This emergence from fire reinforces the kritya image. It also reminds us of Rider Haggard’s ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’, renewing her youth by bathing in fire, an Anima archetype. She transforms herself into stone, like Ahalya, when touched by the demon Kempirnacuran by invoking her chastity in an act of truth.[xi] She resembles Madhavi, ancestress of the Kurus, in retaining her virginity despite being many-husbanded. [xii] Kunti herself describes Draupadi to Krishna as sarvadharmopacayinam [xiii] (fosterer of all virtues), using the identical term by which Yayati describes his daughter Madhavi while bestowing her upon Galava.[xiv] The conjunction of both occurrences of this epithet in the same parva is surely deliberate on part of the seer-poet for drawing our attention to these correspondences. Madhavi regains virginity every time after giving birth to a son each to the kings Haryashva of Ayodhya, Divodasa of Varanasi and Ushinara of the North West and to the sage Vishvamitra. Even after this Yayati holds a bridegroom-choice ceremony for her, but at that point she chooses to retire to the forest and become an ascetic. Sharadandayani, whom Pandu mentions when persuading Kunti to have children by others, stood at night at crossroads and chose a passer-by from whom she had three sons. However, neither Madhavi nor Sharadandayani nor Kunti had to live out their lives adjusting repeatedly to a different husband from among five brothers at specified intervals, so that by turn she had to relate to each as elder or younger brother-in-law. Possibly the only comparison can be with two women Yudhishthira mentions, both non-Kshatriyas: Marisha-Varkshi mother of Daksha married to the ten Prachetas rishis and Jatila spouse of seven sages, of whose lives we know nothing else.

A true ‘virgin’, Panchali has a mind of her very own. Both Krishna and Krishna appear for the first time together in the svayamvara sabha and make decisive interventions. It is Draupadi’s sudden and wholly unexpected refusal to accept Karna as a suitor (significantly, here Vyasa does not call her ‘Panchali’, the puppet) that alters the entire complexion of the assembly and, indeed, the course of the epic itself. The affront to Karna sows the seeds of the assault on her in the dice-game. It is her sakha-to-be, Krishna, who steps in to put an end to the skirmish between the furious kings and the disguised Pandavas.

The Southern recension of the epic states that in an earlier birth as Nalayani (also named Indrasena) she was married to Maudgalya, an irascible sage afflicted with leprosy. She was so devoted to her abusive husband that when a finger of his dropped into their meal, she took it out and calmly ate the rice without revulsion. Pleased by this, Maudgalya offered her a boon. She asked him to make love to her in five lovely forms. As she was insatiable, Maudgalya got fed up and reverted to ascesis. When she remonstrated and insisted that he continue their love life, he cursed her to be reborn and have five husbands to satisfy her sexual craving. Thereupon she practised severe penance and pleased Shiva, obtaining the boon of regaining virginity after being with each husband. [xv] According to the Brahmavaivarta Purana (Prakriti khanda, 14.54 and Krishna Janma khanda 116.22-23), she is the reincarnation of the shadow-Sita who was Vedavati reborn after molestation at Ravana’s hands, and would become the Lakshmi of the fourteen Mahendras in Svarga, of whom five incarnated as the Pandavas. Because she existed in the three yugas (in Satya as Vedavati, in Treta as shadow-Sita and in Dvapara as Draupadi), she is known as trihayani and being vaishnavi krishnabhakta is named ‘Krishna’. Draupadi’s astonishing intellectual acumen also has its roots in Vedavati, who was so named because the Vedas were ever present on the tip of her tongue (ibid.14.64):

satatam murttimantashca vedashcatvar eva ca/
santi yasyashca jihvagre sa ca vedavati smrita//

Significantly, this text states (14.57) that after the fire ordeal, the lovely and youthful shadow-Sita was advised by Rama and Agni to worship Shiva. While doing so, kamatura pativyagra prarthayanti punah punah, tormented by sexual desire and eager for a husband, she prayed again and again, asking the three-eyed god five times for a husband.

How does the Adi Parva leave us where the story of the Kurukshetra War and the Pandava-Kaurava conflict are concerned? The seeds of the fratricidal feud are sown during the childhood sports, culminating in the lacquer-house episode. In the meantime, a new figure has been introduced: Karna, who will figure prominently in the coming feud. The Drona-inspired attack on Drupada has laid the basis of a deep hatred of the Kurus in the defeated king that moves him to seek alliance with the Pandavas as a counterpoise against the Dhartarashtras and Drona. The intervening period, occupied by the Hidimba, Chitraratha and Baka episodes, is the training ground for the future inheritors of the Kuru kingdom. The marriage with Draupadi and the coming of Krishna provide the Panchala-Vrishni-Pandava triangular set-up to oppose the Kurus of Hastinapura. This alliance is strengthened through Arjuna’s exile during which Krishna has him abduct and wed his sister (and Arjuna’s maternal cousin) Subhadra. The confrontation becomes inevitable with the establishment of a new court at Khandavaprastha on the Yamuna facing Hastinapura on the Ganga.

The Sabha Parva is concerned with these two capitals and their two Halls of Kings. Against the capital of the Lunar Dynasty, Hastinapura, is set Indraprastha, founded on the holocaust of the Khandava forest (duly censored in the TV version out of environmental sensitivity!). The transformation of the jungle (Kuru-jangala) that was Khandavaprastha into Indraprastha is founded on a savage consuming of flora, fauna and living beings that reaps as fruits not only the wondrous Maya-sabha (that materialises not in a trice but takes fourteen months to build) but also an implacable pursuit of vengeance by Takshaka Naga culminating in the assassination of Arjuna’s grandson, Parikshit. This is also the occasion when the weapons that the heroes are renowned for are given to them: Arjuna’s Gandiva bow, Kapidhvaja chariot and Devadutta conch; Bhima’s club; Krishna’s discus and Kaumodaki mace. Khandavaprastha was the capital of Yayati, and it is here that the restoration of the descendants of his disinherited eldest son Yadu takes place when the Pandavas establish Krishna’s grandson Vajra in Indraprastha.

In this parva, we are in the thick of political intrigue. Krishna uses the Pandavas to remove the greatest threat to his clan: Jarasandha of Magadha, clearing the way for Yudhishthira being crowned emperor. Then, in the coronation ceremony, he removes a rival clansman, Shishupala. The doomsday bell begins to toll with the insult to Duryodhana coming from the magical Pandava assembly hall, where the Pandavas behave like the noveau-riche, much in the manner of the “night-grown mushroom” Gaveston in Edward II’s court. The devastating reply to the thoughtless slight is tortuously prepared and delivered in the Kaurava Sabha in Hastinapura, repeating the earlier exile-gambit. Nothing prepares Krishna and the Pandavas for the catastrophe of the game of dice in which Yudhishthira’s greed (as he admits in the Vana Parva) for winning Hastinapura leads to Draupadi (significantly, called “Panchali” here, one meaning of which is “puppet”) being staked and lost. But this puppet breaks out of the assigned role and exposes the feet of clay of the colossi we imagine the Kuru elders to be, putting a question that remains unanswered to the very end of the epic — has she been rightly won or not? It calls forth an admission from Bhishma:

“Dharma is subtle…What a strong man says
Often becomes the only dharma…
I do not know what to say…”

As Draupadi replaces Kunti as the central female interest in the epic with the Sabha Parva, there appears to be a sudden decline in the status of women itself. This begins with her silent consent to the shocking dispensation of becoming the common wife of five brothers. Her father and brother protest, but she does not utter a word throughout the multiple exchanges between them, Kunti, Yudhishthira and Vyasa. This is significant because, immediately before this, she astonished everyone by publicly refusing to accept Karna as a suitor despite Drupada’s announcement that anyone passing the test would win her hand. The very first night in the potter’s hut sees mother-in-law and daughter-in-law paralleling each other in the manner in their sleeping postures. Kunti lies horizontally at the Pandavas’ heads, while Yajnaseni lays herself down similarly at their feet, silently. Does Vyasa’s story of her asking for many husbands in an earlier birth represent a psychological truth about Krishnaa the kanya?[xvi]

As women, both Kunti and Draupadi are singularly ill fated. Like her mother-in-law, Draupadi never enjoys possession of her first love. Kunti had chosen Pandu above all kings in the svayamvara ceremony and soon thereafter lost him to the voluptuous Madri. How deeply this pained her is voiced frankly as she finds Pandu lying dead in her co-wife’s arms (I.125.23). Similarly, before Arjuna’s turn came to be with Draupadi, he chose exile. Her anguish at losing him to Ulupi, Chitrangada and Subhadra in succession is expressed with moving abhimana, hurt self-image:

‘Go son of Kunti,
where she of the Satvatas is!
A second knot loosens the first,
however tightly re-tied.’ (I.220.17)

Later, the manner in which she is described by her husband Yudhishthira, as he stakes her like chattel at dice, wipes out her very individuality as a human being. We are reminded that when she emerged from the fire-altar she was called ‘Panchali’, ‘puppet’. The manner in which she is publicly humiliated bring home Naomi Wolf’s condemnation of masculine culture’s efforts to ‘punish the slut’, the sexually independent woman who crosses the ambiguous lakshmana-rekha separating ‘good’ from ‘bad’.[xvii] Vimla Patil, editor of Femina, writes, ‘Most Indian women would agree that like this passionate heroine of the Mahabharata, millions of women are publicly humiliated and even raped as a punishment for challenging the male will or for ‘talking back’ at a man. Many men are known to use violence against wives merely because they ‘back-answer’!’[xviii]

A telling example of this occurs in Kashiram Das’ early 18th century version of the epic in Bengali rhymed verse. During the forest exile, Draupadi prides herself on her fame as a sati exceeding that of any king. Krishna crushes her pride by creating an unseasonal mango that she craves for and has Arjuna pluck for her. Krishna warns that this is the only food of a terrible ascetic, whose anger will turn all of them into ashes, and that only if they confess their secret desires will the mango be re-fixed to its branch. The mango almost touches the tree as the brothers state what obsesses each of them, but falls down when Draupadi states that revenge is her sole desire. Arjuna threatens to kill her, and then she has to confess that having Karna as her sixth husband has been her secret wish. Bhima, her invariable rescuer, upbraids her unmercifully for her evil nature. [xix] Here we have evidence of a male backlash expressed through inventive myth-making.

Just when we had least expected it, suddenly we find a complete reversal from meek passivity to an extraordinarily articulate and forceful expression of a personality that towers above all the men in the royal court. Fire-altar-born Yajnaseni shocks everyone by challenging the Kuru elders’ very concept of dharma in a crisis where the modern woman would collapse in hysterics. Her questions show her to be intellectually far superior to all the courtiers. Instead of meekly obeying her husband’s summons, as expected from her conduct so far, she sends back a query that remains unanswered till the end of the epic: can a gambler, having lost himself, stake his wife at all?

She has a brilliant mind, is utterly ‘one-in-herself’ in Esther Harding’s phrase for the ‘virgin’, and does not hesitate to berate the Kuru elders for countenancing wickedness. As Karna directs her to be dragged away to the servants’ quarters, she cries out to her silent husbands. Finding no response, with quicksilver presence of mind she seizes upon a social ritual to wrest some moments of respite from pillaging hands. Her speech drips with sarcasm. The elders whom she ceremoniously salutes, deliberately using the word ‘duty,’ have remained silent in the face of Vidura’s exhortation to do their duty and protect the royal daughter-in-law. Significantly, it is only Vikarna, a junior Kaurava, and a maidservant’s son Vidura who voice their outrage. The epic says that it was Dharma (Vidura’s other name) who protected Draupadi when she was sought to be stripped. The miraculous intervention by Krishna is shown up as an interpolation in the Vana Parva where he states he was unable to prevent the disastrous dice-game being away fighting Shalva. Indeed, the very episode of stripping is never referred to by Draupadi herself in her numerous upbraidings nor by anyone else, not even by Bhima when killing Duhshasana.

Let us attend to Draupadi’s choice of words:

‘One duty remains, which
I must now do. Dragged
by this mighty hero,
I nearly forgot. I
was so confused.
Sirs, I bow to all of you, all my elders
and superiors. Forgive me for
not doing so earlier.
It was not all my fault,
gentlemen of the sabha.’ (II.67.30)

It is a ‘mighty hero’ who is dragging into public view his single-cloth-clad menstruating sister-in-law by her hair. She has ‘nearly forgot’ her duty, while the elders are wholly oblivious of theirs, despite being reminded by a maidservant’s son. It is surely not her fault that she is being outraged, and certainly it is not she who is ‘so confused’, but rather the Kuru elders of whom Bhishma says,

‘Our elders, learned in dharma,
Drona and others, sit
Here with lowered eyes like dead men
with life-breaths gone.’ (II.69.20)

Yajnaseni succeeds in winning back freedom for her enslaved husbands and Karna pays her a remarkable tribute, saying that none of the world’s renowned beautiful women had accomplished such a feat: like a boat she has rescued her husbands who were drowning in a sea of sorrows (II.72.1-3). Later, (Udyoga Parva, 29.41-42), Krishna reiterates her remarkable deed saying:

‘That day Krishna did a deed exceedingly pure and difficult.
Herself and the Pandavas she lifted up
as in a ship from the swell of the terrible sea.’

With striking dignity, she refuses to take the third boon Dhritarashtra offers. For, with her husbands’ free and in possession of their weapons, she does not need a boon from anyone.
It is Yudhishthira’s craving to be emperor that proves to be the apple of Eris, because of which he agrees to Krishna’s plan to kill Jarasandha, ignoring Narada’s warning that the Rajasuya sacrifice brings ruinous war in its wake.

The warning of what is to come is heralded by Shishupala’s abusive assault on Krishna There is a chariot duel between Krishna and Shishupala (described by Dhritarashtra in the Udyoga Parva, and at length in Southern recensions of the Sabha Parva), and no miraculous decapitation as is popularly believed. This is accompanied by a host of ill omens, to which the Pandavas, drunk on their new-found wealth and status, remain blind. The deadly riposte this time is not a sugar-coated poison-pill like Varanavata, but full thirteen years of exile in the forests. One suspects that Yudhishthira secretly welcomes the forest exile, glad in his heart of hearts to be free from the burden of kingship. We find him ill at ease in the Sabha Parva and most himself in exile amid the sylvan surroundings of Vana Parva, which we look forward to in the P Lal transcreation.

Notes
[i] http://www.300.years.spb.ru/eng/3_spb_3.html?id=5

[ii] A detailed examination of the entire Adi Parva transcreation is available in P. Bhattacharya, Themes and Structure in the Mahabharata: the Adi Parva (Dasgupta & Co., Calcutta).
[iii] J.L. Fitzgerald, The Mahabharata vol. 7, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. x.

[iv] C. Minkowski: ‘Snakes, Sattras and the Mahabharata’ in Essays on the Mahabharata ed. A. Sharma, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1991, p. 391 and A. Hiltebeitel: Rethinking the Mahabharata (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 188.

[v] Hiltebeitel ibid. pp. 190-191.

[vi] Archna Sahni, personal communication and ‘Unpeeling the layers of Draupadi’ forthcoming.

[vii] Dr. Nrisingha Prasad Bhaduri: ‘Draupadi’, Barttaman, annual number 1396, p.26.

[viii] Pratibha Ray portrays this at length in her novel Yajnaseni: the story of Draupadi (RUPA, New Delhi, 1995, translated by Pradip Bhattacharya). Roopa Ganguli conveyed the anguish dramatically in the Bengali teleserial Draupadi.

[ix] The Hymns of the Rigveda 10.58.40-41, translated by R.T.H. Griffith, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1973. Repeated in the Atharva Veda XIV.2.3. Sayana explains that till sexual desire arises in the girl, Soma enjoys her. When it has arisen, Gandharva has her and transfers her at marriage to Agni from whom man takes her to produce wealth and sons cf. S.D. Singh, Polyandry in Ancient India (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978).

[x] Alf Hiltebeitel: The Cult of Draupadi, Vol. I, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1988 p. 438.

[xi] Hiltebeitel ibid. p. 220, 290. Greek mythology is replete with instances of metamorphoses undergone by virgins to protect themselves against rapists (Daphne, Chloe etc.).

[xii] Three outstanding artistic creations on the predicament of Madhavi are Subodh Ghose’s remarkably insightful Bengali retelling ‘Galav and Madhavi’ in Bharat Prem Katha (translated by Pradip Bhattacharya, RUPA, Calcutta, 1990), Bhisham Sahni’s play Madhavi (translated by Ashok Bhalla, Seagull, Calcutta, 2002) and Dr. Chitra Chaturvedi’s Hindi novel Tanaya (Lokbharti Prakashan, Allahabad, 1989).

[xiii] Mahabharata, V.137.16.

[xiv] Ibid. V.115.11. A. Hiltebeitel: The Ritual of Battle, Cornell University Press, 1976, p. 222-4.

[xv] Vettam Mani: Puranic Encyclopaedia, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1975, p. 549. He does not provide the reference to the source of this story. Also M.V. Subramaniam: The Mahabharata Story: Vyasa & Variations, Higginbothams, Madras, 1967, p. 46-47. The Jaina Nayadhammakahao picks this up and tells of suitorless Sukumarika reborn as a celestial courtesan because of her passion who is born as Draupadi (B.N. Sumitra Bai’s ‘The Jaina Mahabharata’ in Essays on the Mahabharata ed. A. Sharma, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1991, p.253).

[xvi] Dr S.D. Singh describes this as ‘the significant but eloquent silence of Draupadi. She is neither appalled nor outraged by the prospect of Pandava polyandry. She is exceedingly trustful and as willing as a woman could be, if her deportment serves as any guide.’ Polyandry in Ancient India (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978) p. 92-93.

[xvii] Naomi Wolf, best-selling feminist author and advisor to the American President and Vice-President, in Promiscuities quoted in TIME, 8.11.1999, p. 25.

[xviii] Op.cit. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20021027/herworld.htm#1.

[xix] ‘Draupadi’s pride crushed’ by Pradip Bhattacharya www.boloji.com/women/0076.htm