BOOKS

G.N. Devy: Mahabharata: The Epic And The Nation. Aleph, New Delhi, 2022, pp.142, Rs.499.

It is a testimony to the firm foundations upon which the Mahabharata (MB) rests in India that the traumatic Covid pandemic, which generated so many new phenomena, led Professor G.N. Devy to ruminate on the significance of Vyasa’s mahakavya for the country. His proposition: while the myths we live by lie in the Ramayana and the MB, the West draws upon religious texts, not epics. He asks, why has the caste-split land yet to become anation, “a substantially homogeneous people, despite its exposure to the epic for thousands of years?”

Devy covers an extensive expanse from genetics (David Reich’s Who We are and How We Got Here) to linguistics (David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, Maheswar Neog’s Essays on Assamese Literatures) to literary theory. For him, Indo-Iranians entered the subcontinent with the horse-and-chariot and mingled with Out-of-Africa southerners to produce the MB culture, shifting from pastoral to agrarian, urban and feudal society. MB combined the mythic and historical pasts as a history marked by “assimilation, synthesis, combination, acceptance and moving forward without exclusions (p.72).” Its great success lies in “making alive two powerful symbols, the wheel and the horse…for future generations.” (p.93). “Its mesmerising appeal is its ability to use history to enliven myth…a veritable mine of ideals of courage, moral truth and liberation.”

Devy’s dissertation rises to several peaks. He is one of the few who realise that the MB was a watershed in socio-political thought. Wandering rhapsodes (sutas) brought to the general public, including the depressed classes and women, scriptural ideas, mystic insights and philosophical ruminations that had been the privilege of priesthood and royalty so that “It became the non-Brahmin’s book of religion (p.106).” To Devy the MB embodies our civilization’s “great negative capability” (p.109), comfortable with multiple beginnings, no definite end, many diverse strands of life and thought, no rigidity of caste structure. We meet bloody Brahmins (Parashurama, Drona, Kripa, Ashvatthama); Kshatriya Vishvamitra becomes a Brahmin, creates new celestial bodies, has Vasishtha’s son killed by turning a raja into a rakshasa, even steals a dog’s haunch from an untouchable for food. None of the protagonists are true-blooded Kshatriyas. After Parashurama’s massacres of Kshatriyas, the class was regenerated by Kshatriya women approaching Brahmins. The Lunar Dynasty itself progresses through Raja Yayati’s sons by Brahmin Devayani and Asura Sharmishtha. Vyasa, born of sage Parashara forcing himself on a fisher-girl, engenders Dhritarashtra and Pandu. The Pandavas’ fathers are unknown, as Duryodhana scoffs publicly. Therefore, Arjuna’s quandary over engaging in a war leading to miscegenation is entirely questionable and ought not to need elaborate philosophical discourse to be dispelled. Devy feels this concern was inserted later because the story brings together tribes, cultivators, herdsmen, “descendants of the society that had created Sindhu culture…a new language, better methods of warfare, and a different pastoral culture.” He refers to the Andhra “Vyasa community that has preserved its genetic identity through strict endogamy over the last 3000 years” as an example of the obsession with avoiding caste-intermixing. His claim about the Gita being “seamlessly woven into the epic-text” is questionable because at its end the Bhishma Parva continues seamlessly from where the text was interrupted by the Gita.

The MB did not avoid contemporary philosophical debates as Devy claims (p.78). Gleaning is explicitly extolled over Vedic yajna, a righteous meat-seller and a housewife over an ascetic Brahmin. Character, not birth, makes a Brahmin. Preservation of life and social order is preferred to blind adherence to truth. The eight-fold path of moderation is voiced and there are references to Jains and Charvakas too. Yudhishthira’s grand horse-sacrifice is shamed by a mongoose who glorifies a gleaner’s gift instead. To cap it all, in a supreme tour-de-force, Yudhishthira himself reviles the gods as well as Dharma itself in the final book.

A peak insight of Devy’s is that Kunti is an unparalleled heroine in the literary world. Kunti, her abandoned son Karna and her nephew Krishna occupy the heart of the story. She ushers Vedic gods into the Mbh (p.60). However, Devy overlooks how it is Kunti’s Yadava blood that rules after the Kurukshetra War, not the Kuru dynasty. Parikshit, grandson of Arjuna and his maternal Yadava cousin Subhadra, rules in the Kuru capital Hastinapura, not the elder Yudhishthira’s son Yaudheya or Bhima’s Sarvaga. Vajra, Krishna’s great-grandson, rules in Indraprastha of the Pandavas. Satyaki’s grandson Yugandhara rules near the Sarasvati and Kritavarma’s son in Martikavat, both Yadavas. So, was Krishna’s game-plan to replace Kuru by Yadava hegemony?

Devy points out that Arjuna alone, Rama-like, strings the Kindhura bow Shiva gave Drupada (vide the Southern recension). As Brihannada he parallels Shiva’s Ardhanarishvara (male-female) form as well as his dancer role. Not only does he become a eunuch, but he also hides behind trans-gender Shikhandi to kill Bhishma. Arjuna sees the trident-wielder preceding his arrows and felling the targets in Kurukshetra. Actually, Shiva’s presence is heralded early when Indra insults Shiva and Parvati playing dice and is condemned to take human birth along with four previous Indras.

Devy provides an important insight: the two towering figures on either side, Bhishma and Krishna, both 8^th sons, do not fight for themselves but for the Dhartarashtras and the Pandavas respectively. Further, blessings, curses and supernatural interventions are used as devices (deus ex machina) to move the plot along. Even demons intervene to dissuade Duryodhana from committing suicide. Vyasa himself intervenes often in person to change the course of events.

Devy does sink into some troughs though. Ganesha snapping off a tusk to transcribe Vyasa’s dictation is not in the MB (p.10), nor is Gandhari making Duryodhana’s body invulnerable (p.68). What the MB does have is Shiva making Duryodhana’s torso adamantine and Parvati making his lower part lovely and delicate as flowers. Satyavati’s son by Shantanu was Chitrangad, not Chitravirya. Kunti is not chosen to wed Pandu but chooses him (p.59) and is not born because of any blessing (p.71). Jayadratha did not expose himself to Draupadi in the dice-game-hall (fn p.70); that was Duryodhana. Bhrigus are not Kshatriyas but Brahmins (p.61). Nowhere does the MB state that Varuna as Vayu became Bhima (p.60). How is Saranyu equated with Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding hell (p.35)? Saranyu is not the dark, as Devy writes in one place, but the dawn as he correctly states elsewhere. It is not that no attempts have been made to collect regional translations for comparison (p.21). In 1967 M.V. Subramanian ICS documented variations from Vyasa in the South Indian languages plus Bhasa, Bhatta Narayana, Magha and Bharavi. The IGNCAshould now cover all regional languages. The 11 pages long genealogy at the end fails to engender a sense of “a seamless combination of myth and history” as claimed.

Devy overlooks the remarkable motif of the Yadavas, descendants of the disinherited eldest son Yadu, ultimately regaining dominion. Nahusha’s eldest son Yati turns sanyasi, so the younger Yayati inherits Khandavaprastha. He disinherits four elder sons (Yadu etc.) in favour of the youngest Puru. In Hastinapura, Pratipa’s eldest son Devapi is disinherited because of a skin ailment.The younger Shantanu is enthroned. He bypasses his eldest son Bhishma for the younger stepbrothers. The elder Dhritarashtra being blind loses the throne to his step-brother Pandu. Yudhishthira, the eldest, is tricked into exile by his younger cousin Duryodhana who rules. Another key feature missed is the theme of parricide and fratricide is—a reason for the narrative’s continuing appeal through the ages.

Devy accepts Abhinavagupta’s assertion that the MB’s prevailing emotion is “shanta, empathetic detachment”. In World of Wonders (2022) Hiltebeitel argued convincingly that it is an epic of wonder, adbhuta being the rasa mentioned most frequently. Devy’s identification of Yama with Dharma is questionable. Kunti does not summon Yama for a son, as he claims (p.51), but Dharma as Pandu wants his first son to be beyond reproach. All of Yudhishthira’s interactions are with Dharma, not Yama. It is Dharma whom Animandavya curses to be born as a Shudra (Vidura). Yama as god of death first appears in section 199 of the Adi Parva as the butcher-priest in a yajna of the gods, because of which humans do not die. Only in section 9 is Dharma called the god of death who resurrects Ruru’s snake-bitten wife Pramadvara, raising the speculation that he got identified with Yama.

Devy misses the backdrop of the divine plan (as in the Trojan War) to rescue earth from proliferating demonic rulers. Gods take human birth to engineer a massively destructive war whereafter they merge into their original selves. There is no cycle of rebirth here, which distinguishes the MB from religious texts.The MB articulates the concept of four “yugas” (like the Hellenistic four ages) of which Vyasa calls Kali the best when bhakti fetches swift salvation, without the intensive ascesis and elaborate sacrificial rituals of earlier eras. Devy proposes that the MB war keeps the kala-chakra, wheel of time, in perpetual motion. It is not a war to preserve ritualistic dharma. Balarama’s strange aloofness from the fratricide at Kurukshetra and Prabhasa, despite being the avatar of Shesha and a white hair of Vishnu’s, goes unnoticed.

With the expanse and depth of Devy’s reading, not mentioning Sukthankar’s profound insights in On the Meaning of the Mahabharata is strange. Further, as Devy pinpoints Yudhishthira and Yama as the composition’s main focus, the omission of Buddhadeb Bose’s masterly portrayal of Yudhishthira as the true hero in The Book of Yudhishthira is puzzling.

Devy concludes that the MB “unites us as a nation through a similarly perceived past, not through a similarly perceived collective self…not in any imagined territorial national space…(but) in Time…the never-stopping kala chakra…a great spirit of acceptance of all that is.” Vishnu’s couch, the infinite coils of Shesha, and Krishna’s discus, both symbolise Cosmic Time and its endless revolutions.

The appeal of the MB, however, is not limited to India. Even when shells and bombs were exploding in the streets during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, Vladimir Kalyanov was translating the MB into Russian in the Academy of Sciences on the Neva River embankment by the dim light of wick lamps, with no light, no fuel and no bread in the city. Nehru admired that nothing interrupted the work even during the hardest of times.

[This was published in a slightly altered form in The Book Review issue of October 2023, pages 21 to 23

Alf Hiltebeitel: Freud’s Mahabharata. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. xxiii+298, Rs. 650.

The cover of Hiltebeitel’s “Freud’s Mahabharata” has an interesting personal involvement on my part. Alf had emailed me in desperation having failed to trace this sketch drawn from a portrait of Freud (sent by Freud to Bose in 1926) by a Bengali artist Jatindra Kumar Sen commissioned by Dr. Girindrashekhar Bose which he used as the cover of the first edition of his Bengali work, “Swapna” (1928). With some difficulty Smt. Sunita Arora of the National Library (who had been put on the job by my young colleague Shri Raghavendra Singh IAS, its Director) traced it to a very fragile copy, repaired their high-resolution camera for taking a good photograph and sent that to me which I emailed Alf. That is how a Bengali artist’s sketch ended up on a work published abroad and in India. Bose removed the sketch from subsequent editions of “Swapna” possibly because he fell out with Freud around 1931. Dr Bose had sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on Ananta which Freud kept on his desk. This features as the cover of Hiltebeitel’s “Freud’s India”.

Hiltebeitel’s new work follows up on his “Freud’s India” where he explored personal experiences following his father’s death and his divorce that recalled Freud’s life. The cover of the book has an interesting story. Hiltebeitel had emailed me for help having failed to trace this sketch drawn from a portrait of Freud by a Bengali artist, Jatindra Kumar Sen commissioned by Dr. Girindrashekhar Bose, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, from a portrait Freud had sent him in 1926. Bose used it as the cover of the first edition of his Bengali work, “Swapna” (1928). With some difficulty Smt. Sunita Arora of the National Library (who had been put on the job by its Director, my young colleague Shri Raghavendra Singh IAS) traced it to a very fragile copy, repaired their high-resolution camera and sent me a photograph which I emailed Hiltebeitel. Bose had sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on the serpent Ananta, which Freud kept on his desk. This features as the cover of Hiltebeitel’s book, “Freud’s India”. Bose removed the sketch of Freud from subsequent editions of “Swapna” possibly because he fell out with Freud around 1931. Freud had referred to Bose in 1922 as an extraordinary professor who had founded a local psychoanalytic group in Calcutta.

The book immediately stimulates interest by its intriguing title since Freud never mentions the Mahabharata (MB). Dipping into it we find that it is in three parts of which the middle portion consists of chapters 2 through 5. Chapters one and six are the first and third parts. Beginning with Freud’s essay, “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny, as translated by James Strachey), Hiltebeitel links the MB by arguing that its dominant flavor (“rasa”) is the uncanny, as Sheldon Pollock translates “adbhuta”, and not the heroic (“vira”). He interprets the story of the five Indras immured in a cave as a pre-Oedipal intra-uterine fantasy of being buried alive, which Freud called “the most uncanny thing of all”. Hiltebeitel misses out Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying take on this in “Tomb of Ligeia”.

In an elaborate examination of the myth of Aravan/Iravat/Kuttantavar, Hiltebeitel links his overhearing in the womb about Krishna’s wish to kill him and then emerging feet first to kick Krishna into the ocean with Freud’s theory about the return to the womb in sleep. Hiltebeitel sees in this ocean a reflection of “the oceanic feeling” that Romain Rolland wrote to Freud about, troubling him no end. There are analogous stories about Ahiravana in the Bengali Ramayana of Krittibas and Vivek in the Bengali Mahabharata of Kavi Sanjay which would have added grist to Hiltebeitel’s mill.

Influenced by Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”, Hiltebeitel theorizes that the MB’s core myth of the divine plan to unburden the Earth reflects the trauma experienced by rural Vedic Brahmin communities of foreign invasions and the impact of “India’s second urbanization” after 500 BCE in the Gangetic plain, the first having been the Harappan civilization. This is the “urban unconscious” of Brahmanism, like Freud’s Judaism. Interestingly, the demons-on-earth (Jarasandha, Kamsa etc.) occupy the chief cities (Rajagriha, Mathura etc.). Hence, the extolling of forest-living gleaners.

It is surprising to find Hiltebeitel supporting the long discredited theory, revived by F. Wulff Alonso, of Indian epics drawing upon the Greek mythic corpus for their matter of the divine plan to relieve Earth’s burden. He does admit, however, that the MB’s myth is apocalyptic unlike the Homeric. This myth that is practically the frame story is repeated five times. First by Vaishampayana in his genealogical account, next twice by Vyasa narrating the five Indras myth and while consoling Dhritarashtra after the war, the fourth time by Narada during the rajasuya yajna and finally at the end by Vaishampayana.

Hiltebeitel finds a parallel to Freud’s “phylogenetic myth-making” with the MB’s combining myths of genealogy, cosmology, sacrifice and war in the ontogenesis of its divine plan. Freud’s assertion that the primal patriarch drove his sons out when they came of age, virtually castrating them, whereafter they could remain in the horde as harmless labourers (a stage corresponding to dementia praecox), is paralleled in the MB’s myth of Yayati disinheriting and banishing all but one of his sons. Hiltebeitel even suggests that at 23 volumes Freud’s work is larger than the MB, both texts looking to forge a new consciousness of a civilization, both heterogenous in relating myth to narrative, stylistically varied , dialogical, propounding a heroic persona with a prominent role for women.

Hiltebeitel juxtaposes the MB’s three tales about dead mothers (Madri, the Nishada woman, the corpse supposedly of their 180 year old mother strung up on a tree by the Pandavas) with Freud’s three texts dealing with the dead mother complex. Kunti is seen in the role of a dead mother to Yudhishthira, staying aloof from him and finally abandoning her sons, just as Gandhari never looks upon her children and finds Duryodhana rejecting her in open court. Hiltebeitel posits that it is Satyavati or even her fishy mother Adrika (Acchoda in the Harivamsha) to whom the Pandavas refer, as the corpse of their 180 year old “mother”, its stink being linked to her fishy birth. The dead mothers stack up over five generations (5 x 36 years per generation = 180) beginning with Satyavati (from the Yamuna) and Ganga, ending with Draupadi’s ultimate sonlessness. Satyavati is known by her fishy odour inherited by Vyasa. She is dark like the river Yamuna across which she plies a ferry, as contrasted with the pellucid celestial river, the Ganga. That she is originally called “Kali” is very significant. In iconography, Vishnu’s two wives are the Earth goddess and Shri-Lakshmi, both of whom are at the core of the MB’s divine plan.

Hiltebeitel devotes considerable space to examining how Freud’s interests are paralleled by the knowledge about Indian goddesses of Dr. Girindrashekhar Bose (who sent Freud an icon of Vishnu and had his portrait sketched which forms the cover of this book). Differing from Freud, Bose said that in India the wish for castration occurs early in childhood when, identifying with the mother, he wishes to be female. Dread of castration comes later in the Oedipal identification with the father. Hiltebeitel posits that Kali fits the profile of Bose’s “Oedipus mother”. Issues of castration come up in the cult of Aravan/Kuttantavar who sacrifices himself to Kali before the MB war.

Bose theorized that the wish to be hit always accompanies a wish to hit. In “Freud’s India” Hiltebeitel had wondered whether this wish to be struck characterizes snakes. Aravan’s mother is the female serpent Ulupi. Snakes who “infest the MB”, argues Hiltebeitel, largely represent not tribals but the unconscious, “basic raw wishes, hostilities, or desires” of the unconscious. Analysing three versions of the Aravan/Iravat/Kuttantavar tale, Hiltebeitel finally admits that his self-sacrifice before the war (“kalappali”) cannot be said to involve a wish to be struck. However, this Tamil cult, much celebrated by Hijras, has evidence of a link between the castration wish and a desire to be female that Bose posited as occurring in the pre-Oedipal stage. In this phase the “Oedipus mother” has a powerful role, as seen in Aravan’s multiple mother figures (Ulupi, Draupadi, Kali). Hiltebeitel concludes that Bose’s theory explains these Indian cults which Freud’s does not.

Examining Freud’s work on Moses and on Jokes, Hiltebeitel links the discussion to the tales of gleaners in MB, claiming that the epic was the composition of “a committee of ‘out of sorts Brahmins’” (hence the extolling of gleaners) in the 2^nd century BCE in Kurukshetra. Vyasa’s stink and disagreeable appearance makes him “the consummate out-of-sorts Brahmin.” This period of second urbanization (600-300 BCE) saw the rise of towns vis-à-vis forest life. Gleaners in the Naimisheya grove near Kurukshetra complete a twelve-year yajna during which, because of the numerous rishis, the tirthas got urbanized (“tirthani nagarayante”). Hiltebeitel imagines them traumatized by foreign invasions (hence the prominence of the north-west in MB) and the challenge of heterodox movements backed by royal patronage (Chandragupta and Jainism, Bimbisara and Ajivikas, Ashoka and Buddhism). He argues that they “projected features of current second-or first-century urban architecture back into” the Vedic world whose memories lay in their subconscious. They developed the Rig Veda’s ten mandalas (16^th to 11^th century BCE) into the ritualistic three other Vedas (11^th to 9^th century BCE) and then their branches (8^th to 3^rd century BCE) climaxing in the encyclopaedic MB in the fourth stage in the 2^nd century BCE. The references in MB to Greeks, Chinese and Shakas, but not the Pahlavas or Kushanas, indicates a completion of composition before the end of the pre-Common Era, by the late Shunga or Kanva times. Support is found in the MB’s reference to the land being dotted with “edukas” (Buddhist mounds of relics). In the Book of the Forest, one Shaunaka discourses to the Pandavas on the Buddhist eight-fold path; a butcher speaks the Jain version of ahimsa and in the Shanti Parva Bali lays out the Jain doctrine of six “leshyas” (colours) of matter.

Seeking to find correspondences in MB with Freud’s theory about jokes, Hiltebeitel makes a laboured argument that Vyasa’s levirate episode with Ambika and Ambalika contains an innuendo: the two “mahishis” (chief queens/female buffaloes) unite with the smelly, unkempt Vyasa in the role of the horse of the ashvamedha rite. In the “Narayaniya” narrative Vyasa reveals that he is born of Harimedhas, the essence of the Horse-headed avatar. The year-long vow Vyasa wanted them to observe parallels the horse-sacrifice’s prescription of abstinence for a year. By rejecting this, Satyavati renders the queens impure for the rite. Hiltebeitel hazards a bad joke of his own: “Vyasa’s shaggy-dog story has turned out to be a shaggy-horse or a talking-horse story.”

A very rewarding read is Hiltebeitel’s analysis of the narrative structure of the “Narayaniya” identifying how the dialogue level shifts thrice from the inner frame (Janamejaya querying Vaishampayana, within which Vyasa speaks to the former too across six generations) to the outermost (Vyasa discoursing to his five pupils) through the outer frame (Rishi Shaunaka querying Ugrashravas Sauti) via the intermediate dialogues (Yudhishthira querying Bhishma). Ultimately, Hiltebeitel sees the MB as “the recovered memory” of a Vedic past replete with “partially unconscious and forgotten meanings about that past”. —Pradip Bhattacharya