Pradip Bhattacharya

Indologist, Mahabharata scholar

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Insiders on the Decline of the IAS

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The Steel Frame: A History of the IAS by Deepak Gupta. Roli Books, 2019, New Delhi, pp. 354, Rs. 695. ISBN: 978-81-938608-4-7

What ails the IAS and Why it fails to deliver by Naresh Chandra Saxena. Sage, 2019, New Delhi, pp. 245, Rs. 595. ISBN: 978-93-532-8648-4 (PB)

Gupta (IAS 1974) as chairman of the Union Public Service Commission made a signal contribution by building up its archives. Drawing upon that repository, he has written a history of the Indian Administrative Service, calling it, “The Steel Frame,” which was how Lloyd George described the Imperial (later Indian) Civil Service. After all, the Indian administrator was envisaged as the imperial civil servant’s avatar!

Gupta splits his account into nine chapters: the historical context; Indianization; transition from the ICS to the IAS; the District Officer’s role and experiences; character of the ICS and the IAS; IAS transformed; the examination scheme; training the civil servant; reinventing the IAS. There is a good bibliography along with ten appendices, the last two being autobiographical. His target audience is IAS aspirants: “The idea of public service itself has got devalued. We must restore it as a predominant aspiration…This study will be both useful and interesting, not only for those who have been in the services, but also those aspiring to join.” The historical account is punctuated with references to his family, whose members occupied top government posts: father in the Imperial Police, uncles in the ICS and the IFS, two brothers in the IAS. As we read, the impression grows that it is more the history of the ICS than of the IAS. Though chronologically unavoidable, was it necessary to trace so laboriously every step on the way from the East India Company’s covenanted civil service till the first entrance examination in 1855? As the IAS is still evolving after the Kothari Commission’s drastic changes, any survey that concentrates on the post-1980s is of interest. There is too much of the past and not enough of the present.

Gupta unearths quite a few nuggets of information. Clive, as C-in-C of the East India Company’s forces, urged its Directors to be aware of “The evil…of the military…attempt to be independent of (civil) authority.” The Court of Directors’ letter of 21 July 1786 prescribed that in coordination meetings the senior-most civil servant—whatever his rank—would preside. Often the police have jibbed against it, even avoiding meetings convened by district magistrates during the Siddhartha Ray regime in West Bengal. Gupta points out that Pakistan abandoned the principle, “with dramatic consequences for the contrasting development of democracy and the nature of the State in the two countries.” The plain fact remains that rulers favour the weapon-wielding uniformed force over the magistrate, which encourages the police to distance themselves from supervision by civil authorities who, to save themselves from embarrassment, have stopped inspecting police stations.

Another nugget is the Government of India (GOI)’s minute of July 1907 to the Islington Commission on a uniform legal code being essential for ensuring justice in public administration since, from inception, “the young Civilian is in part a lawyer and in part a judge.” A grasp over laws and the development of a discriminating intelligence that knows when to use discretion, remain the foundation of an IAS officer’s personality. Gupta provides the interesting information that Rajendra Prasad was obsessed with sitting for the ICS but was prevented, and that Nehru did not “disfavour the idea of joining the ICS…there was a glamour about it.” N.C. Saxena tells us how the ICS was prized: in 1935 an ICS secretary to GOI earned Rs.6, 666 whereas his counterpart in the USA got half as much! That was revised drastically downwards after 1947.

The major change in recent times is that servicemen’s children are not interested in joining. Gupta writes, “The increasing decline in the authority of the servicemen as political domination through the instruments of control and patronage increased over the service and its members also served as a dis-incentive.” The upper middle-class background of the ICS and the IAS has been replaced by diverse economic and social strata. Liberal education has been largely replaced by candidates from technical, management and medical backgrounds. A civil services survey of 2010 finds that the core motive is getting a prime job providing security, social status and prestige. Add to this the opportunity for extending patronage and making money (through dowry and otherwise), for which many officers have been indicted in recent years. This is why candidates reappear repeatedly, investing significant labour, time and finances.

The watershed in the changing nature of the IAS was Indira Gandhi when she called for a “committed bureaucracy” loyal to her in person. In Rajiv Gandhi’s time, writes Madhav Godbole (who resigned as Home Secretary), civil servants were treated like politicians’ office peons. Subsequent regimes saw businessmen, astrologers, godmen calling the shots. Narasimha Rao granted extensions to retiring Secretaries: “…the rapid downhill journey continued.” The key word describing the civil servant in demand became, “pliable”. This was Indira Gandhi’s criterion for selecting the Director of the National Academy of Administration to replace P.S. Appu, which the UPA government followed too. Gupta pulls no punches in dealing with the scandalous coal block case, pointing out the dubious role of the Prime Minister’s Office and the abandonment of the principle of ministerial responsibility. Against this lies the resignation of Krishnamachari as Finance Minister in the Mundhra case in Nehru’s time. The Finance Secretary, H.M. Patel ICS, also had to resign but then became Morarji Desai’s Finance Minister and Charan Singh’s Home Minister! The swift whittling away of public accountability, the inaction on the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the weakening of the Central Vigilance Commission, the Election Commission, the CBI, all show how ineffective the civil services have become by the ruling party’s cunning use of the carrot-and-stick policy. Moreover, unlike the ICS, today the IAS “is divided by caste, class, age, educational background, state of origin, and increasingly by careerism.” The greatest challenge “is to find its own esprit de corps” which is impossible without a shared sense of purpose and values. Therefore, the recruitment system has to be changed, as also the induction training. Is the IAS officer’s greatest enemy his senior colleague? In the ICS camaraderie existed possibly because of the small numbers.

With Gupta belonging to the Bihar cadre, it is surprising to find no reference to the sterling example set by P. S. Appu, the Chief Secretary during Karpoori Thakur’s time. He was the architect of land reforms in India and an expert on poverty studies. N.C. Saxena notes in his book how, when Thakur asked him to become the CS, he not only wrote to him pointing out that there were others senior to him, but also, when Thakur insisted, put forward several conditions regarding how he and his colleagues would discharge their duties. Finding that the conditions were not met, he left and joined a junior post in GOI. Finally, he resigned from the IAS in protest against the GOI not dismissing a culpable IAS trainee.

Saxena’s book is in eleven chapters, with headline-grabbing headings: tussle for power; officers in headlines; bureaucracy (read, ‘IAS’) responsible for sedimentary development; is the IAS good at designing programmes; is the IAS fair to marginalized groups; the strange case of Bihar; corruption in the IAS; is civil society a substitute for the IAS or just trouble-shooters; IAS unmasked.

Turning to his book from Gupta’s is a refreshing contrast as he writes pithily, hitting hard, punctuating it with wry humour. Because of his style, his criticisms and suggestions never sound like pontification. It is a measure of the type of person Saxena is that he has chosen our student Harsh Mander (who resigned from the IAS after the Gujarat riots) to write the Foreword. Harsh Mander recalls how, led by Saxena, in the LBSNAA (1993-96) the faculty encouraged recruits “to reflect, question, dissent; to imbibe the values of the Constitution and of public service.” For doing exactly this during Appu’s directorship in the early 1980s some of my senior colleagues and I were transferred by GOI.

Saxena puts his finger right on the spot. It is not that officers are not hard-working and honest. “But people are more interested in the outcomes…rather than in their personal qualities.” The officers’ fixation with financial outlays and expenditure neglects the crucial issue of what the funds are meant to achieve. Despite his strenuous efforts, Saxena could not get Vajpayee as the PM to understand this (he simply shut his eyes during a presentation!) and was shifted out. In UP the chief minister was quite frank, explaining that he would lose votes by legislating land rights for women. Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar held up funds released by GOI so as to foster a rule of inequity and exploitation, actively assisted by Mukund Prasad, the chief secretary who was, however, personally honest. Here, subscribing to the politician’s objectives superseded serving the people.

Saxena’s book is peppered with many an interesting tale illustrating the ups-and-downs of the Minister-IAS interaction. Each is retold with a light touch which rams the lesson home all the more soundly. In the early days, seniors would groom and protect juniors, while lately it is “each for oneself”. There is the astonishing account of Saxena as secretary Planning Commission giving the Orissa chief minister Giridhar Gamang an extra Rs. 50 crore to change the anti-tribal law about minor forest produce!

Saxena confesses that despite his many initiatives in land reforms, forestry, minorities commission, rural development, there was no sustained improvement and he was punished as well. Seeking answers, he ponders, “Stand-alone bureaucratic initiatives have little lasting value unless supported by strong political ownership.” The 1972 Task Force on land reforms under P.S. Appu had pinpointed lack of political will as the key factor in failure. As examples of both coalescing, Saxena cites my trainee Parameswaran Iyer’s achievements with the Swacch Bharat Mission, Bihar’s turn-about under Nitish Kumar as CM, Chhattisgarh delivering subsidized rice to the poor, Madhya Pradesh tripling wheat production in a decade. Saxena poses ten questions to his critics (pp.7-8) which will make most officers squirm. One of these is about serving in backward areas. I was much criticised for getting new recruits posted as block development officers—just for three months—in 1975. 30 years later there was the same criticism when I got them posted as subdivisional officers in tribal areas in West Bengal.

One reason Saxena does not mention for why initiatives flounder is that in the IAS nothing succeeds like the successor. Rarely does an officer build upon his predecessor’s initiatives. History must be made anew! S.B. Agnihotri (1980, Orissa) explained to me: “You are all like the Rajputs, each fighting the battle alone. Unless you band together, change will never happen.” Saxena calls it, “the absence of collective will,” and as examples cites the 1988 Forest Policy and the 1999 Sanitation Policy. Very rarely has the IAS stood together as a community. Once was when all the 1980 batch trainees wrote to GOI against accepting P.S. Appu’s resignation. This is all the more unique as they had not been confirmed in service. It is this “nexus of good” that another of my trainees, Anil Swarup, former Education Secretary GOI, has been advocating since retirement. Saxena presents short accounts of officers who have stood up for public service at great cost to themselves: Durga Shakti Nagpal, H.C. Gupta, P.S. Appu, S.R. Sankaran, Armstrong Pame, Ashok Khemka, Arun Bhatia, Harsh Mander. The omission of Aruna Roy, architect of the Right to Information, is surprising as is that of K.B. Saxena, B.D. Sharma and A.R. Bandopadhyaya.

It is a conundrum that the areas of social welfare—health, education, pollution—are not only the least well-funded, but also have the largest number of field-level vacancies next to the police. While politicians cry themselves hoarse over benefits not reaching the deprived, they never provide staff to deliver the benefits. ‘Garibi Hatao’ has become the slogan for anyone in power to siphon off government funds into their pockets. Officers quickly take jobs with business houses without any cooling-off period (e.g. the former HRD Secretary of GOI presented the case of the non-existent JIO University to be recognised as an institute of eminence; Kingfisher Airlines’ board had many retired IAS officers). They also join political parties, casting doubts on their impartiality while in service (e.g. K.J. Alphons and P.L. Punia who is not of the 1970 batch as he states, but 1971). He could have included Yashwant Sinha,[1] who was Karpoori Thakur’s principal secretary.

Corruption “is a low-risk and high-reward activity’ writes Saxena and lists six suggestions on how to reduce corruption—all sound, well known, but never pursued in the absence of political will and accountability. Legislatures never examine whether objectives have been achieved, nor pursue omissions pointed out by the C&AG. Legislators do not educate constituents about rights that new laws provide. Businessmen get elected for advance knowledge of new laws that will affect them. However much an IAS secretary may advise a minister, if that is ignored, there is nothing he can do. He can, at best, refuse to carry out the orders and be transferred. What makes Saxena special is that in such cases he highlighted the matter in the press, disregarding the consequences. Interestingly, Saxena finds neither Manmohan Singh nor Montek Ahluwalia much concerned about the disadvantaged. “It was only Sonia Gandhi who tried to temper hard market fundamentalism with compassion and equity, and this I believe was her most valuable and least acknowledge contribution to Indian public life.”

Much of what is wrong with governance had been highlighted in the Shah Commission Report (1978), e.g. “civil servants felt that they had to show loyalty to the party in power in order to advance their careers.” The UPA government suppressed it. The Modi government conferred the Bharat Ratna on one specifically indicted by it. A wealth of valuable insights is found in books by P.S. Appu,[2] M.N. Buch,[3] and N. Vittal,[4] which neither Gupta nor Saxena draw upon. Nor do they refer to the brutal findings of the N.N. Vohra Committee (1993) regarding the noxious nexus between business, mafia, police, civil services and even the judiciary. Parliament merely “took note” of it; the Supreme Court asked for an action-taken report and forgot about it; so did civil society.

Finally, Saxena points out, “a dilapidated civil service has been a key factor in Africa’s economic decline. Conversely, a strong civil service is one of several reasons” why East Asian countries have done so well. “Kleptocracy,” exploiting national resources for personal benefit, is what plagues India. The IAS can still deliver if it is “more outcome oriented and accountable for results.”

Published in the Oct-Nov 2019 issue of BIBLIO

[1] Relentless—an autobiography, Bloomsbury, 2019.

[2] The Appu Papers; Crisis of Convergence, introductions by J.M. Lyngdoh, A.R. Bandopadhyaya, Sahitya Samsad, Kolkata, 2007, 2008.

[3] When the Harvest Moon is Blue, Haranand, New Delhi, 2010.

[4] The Red Tape Guerrilla, Vikas, New Delhi, 1996.

Kavi Sanjay’s Mahabharata

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MAHABHARATA IN TRANSLATION

The Mahabharata of Kavi Sanjay
PRADIP BHATTACHARYA, trans. from Bengali, The Mahabharata of Kavi Sanjaya, Volumes I & II, Das Gupta & Co., Kolkata, 2019, pp. 637, Rs. 1495/-

While Kaliprasanna Sinha (1841-1870) is the most renowned and popular Bengali translator of Mahabharata in prose, Haridas Siddhantavagish is more known to researchers, and Kashiram Das’s 16th-century retelling, Kashidasi Mahabharata, is the most popular rendering in verse, few know that there had been Kavi Sanjaya in the 15th century, who can be considered the Adi Kavi of Bengal in the Mahabharata genre of translation and retelling. This is surprising given that the Kavi has his place secured in the cultural history of Bengal courtesy Munindra Kumar Ghosh’s edited ‘Kavi Sanjaya Birochito Mahabharata’ published by Calcutta University in 1969, restoring Sanjaya’s Mahabharata written in unique poyar metre (each line of the rhymed couplet consisting of eight syllables followed by a caesura and six syllables) in panchali form. Despite Ghosh’s historic effort, evidently, Sanjaya has not been much in Mahabharata discourse, either academic or popular, until now. After fifty years of his work, Dr. Pradip Bhattacharya resurrects him from slipping into the recesses of cultural memory once again, but to a wider world audience this time through his verse-by-verse English translation, perhaps re-confirming the ironic dictum that Bengalis do not wake up to their glories without the involvement of English.

Bhattacharya’s new venture—a project sanctioned by West Bengal Government’s Higher Education Department through the Netaji Institute of Asian Studies— comes in two hard-bound volumes, beautifully encased in dignified brown overtone, and printed on quality paper. Volume-I contains 7 parvans: Adi (Book 1) to Drona (Book 7), and Volume-II the rest. Kavi Sanjaya has innovations after Shalya Parvan (Book 9): Gada Parvan (10), Daho Parvan (14) and Sthan parvan (16).

Images of terracotta panels depicting Mahabharata episodes as cover design — Arjuna hitting the fish target at Draupadi’s svayamvara on the front cover, sheshashayi Narayana as frontispiece and Arjuna piercing the ground to quench Bhishma’s thirst on the back cover— from terracotta temples of Bankura-Bishnupur (West Bengal) aptly add to the ambience. They also act as Bhattacharya’s hint-commentary on the possible cultural interaction of the literary and terracotta genres, and of Sanjaya’s possible influence on the terracotta sculptor-poets of the 16th-17th centuries. One may even read them symbolically: Arjuna piercing the target as Bhattacharya’s statement of having achieved a gargantuan task, and Arjuna quenching Bhishma’s thirst as his optimism to quench the never waning thirst of Mahabharata lovers for amrita drops from the Mahabharata Ocean.

An appendix of Arjuna’s ten names from Prof. P. Lal’s Virata Parvan transcreation serves the purpose of reference, comparison with Sanjaya’s verses, Bhattacharya’s contextualizing his work and also his tribute to Prof. P. Lal through remembrance.

Bhattacharya has done a very interesting experiment with spellings of nouns and consonant sounds. Bengali, a language with Magadhi Prakrit as her ‘mother’, often has ‘o’ pronunciation of consonants that Sanskrit renders as ‘a’ ; often has a stop at the end-consonant of a word, no difference in pronunciation between ‘v’ and ‘b’, and absence of the sibilant ‘s’ which is pronounced as ‘sh’. Retaining spellings of Sanskrit words as found in the Oxford English Dictionary, Bhattacharya spells proper nouns in tune with Bengali pronunciation. Thus, Mahabharata is Mohabharot, Kavi Sanjaya is Kobi Sonjoy, Vyasa is Byas, Vana Parvan is Bono Porbo, Drona is Dron, Amba is Omba etc. Even his own name on the second title page is Prodeep Bhottacharjyo. This is unique for an English translation. Indeed, he has provided the ‘flavour of the Bengali pronunciation’ as claimed.

Bhattacharya has taken all precautions against any possible confusion from this experimentation. Other than providing footnotes and clarifications for every such usage on every page, he takes care to eliminate any residual confusion with his Bengali ‘flavoured’ spelt nouns by listing them with their corresponding Sanskrit transliteration along with brief explanations in a detailed glossary.

In the Preface, Bhattacharya provides valuable information and analysis on the historicity of Sanjaya and his Mahabharata, as also on interesting aspects of its content like variations from Vyasa’s Mahabharata, complete with a comparative analysis of the variations of Sanjaya’s and Kashiram Das’ Mahabharatas. His observation that ‘some of (Kashiram’s variations) must have been taken from Kobi Sonjoy’ is a clue for future research to situate Sanjaya historically and understand the import of his work.

Locating Sanjaya is important not only to understand his time, but also to understand the significance of modern Mahabharata works and studies including Bhattacharya’s work of reviving him in English. Bhattacharya has rightly pointed out that Mahabharata re-emerged with prominence in cultural discourse through literature in the 15th-16th centuries in a somewhat synchronized fashion in eastern and southern India. Kavi Sanjaya’s venture is paralleled by Kumara Vyasa in Kannada, Sarala Das in Odiya, Rama Sarasvati in Assamese, and Ezhuthachan in Malayalam. Only the last is a complete translation, but all are characterized by free thinking and imagination in incorporating materials from local lore or innovations, and in leaving out most philosophical discourses of Vyasa’s Mahabharata.

Obviously, something happened in the cultural sky of Bengal and India then that Mahabharata needed to be rediscovered. Bhattacharya’s tentative suggestion that it might be the felt need to assert indigenous identity in the context of Muslim invasion holds merit. It definitely ‘calls for further study’ as he suggests, particularly so if we see how the Mahabharata fascination continues in the next centuries and almost dominates the consciousness of all key figures of the Bengal/Indian Renaissance of the 19th century.

Looking back into Indian history, we find how Mahabharata has been remembered during every crucial historical juncture, or ‘golden age’. Starting from Bhasa (4th cent. BCE), through the Satavahana Queen Goutami-Balashri’s Nashik-Prashasti Inscription (149 CE), Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa ( 4th century CE), Gupta Inscriptions, Ravikirti’s Aihole Inscription of Pulakeshin II (610–642 CE), the Indonesian Bharata–Yuddha (1157 CE) of Mpu Sedah and Mpu Panuluh and Emperor Akbar’s commissioned Persian translation Razmnama (three editions 1584-1617) show the great impact of Mahabharata in India and beyond.

Inheriting this brilliant tradition, Sanjaya’s Mahabharata assumes the miniature replica of the melting pot with mingled ingredients of Ramayana and Mahabharata tradition, and influences of Buddhism, Jainism, Vaishnavism and Shaktaism. For example, Sanjaya makes King Nala the grandson of Rama’s son Kusha, thereby bringing together Ramayana and Mahabharata. Here he is in the direct tradition of Vyasa’s Mahabharata where we have Markandeya’s Ramayana, Hanuman’s interaction with Bhima, and Rama’s bloodline Brhadbala dying by Abhimanyu’s hand.

Just as Sanjaya creates and narrates a new parvan (Gada parvan), one is startled to find that Al-Biruni’s India (973–1050 CE) too mentions Gada parvan as Book 9. Could there be any connection between Al-Biruni and Sanjaya’s source despite their distance in space and time (5 centuries), or is it a glorious coincidence?

Again, Sanjaya’s Ashvamedhaparvan, which largely follows the Jaiminiya Mahabharata, provides an interesting variation in that Bokrodonto instead of Baka Dalbhya steals the horse so that he can meet Krishna. In the ancient Jain Sutrakrtanga (1.6), Dantavakra is the best of Kshatriyas as a parallel to Mahavira the best of sages. Whether Sanjaya’s giving such importance to Bokrodonto (Dantavakra) is owing to Jain influence would be an interesting query for researchers. After all, the Jain community known as Saraks, though isolated and separated from the main body of the Jain community following Bakhtiyar Khalji’s invasion, still maintained a significant presence in Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and Jharkhand.

Sanjaya’s Karna is born from Kunti’s ear, thus getting the name Karna. The same narrative is found in the Bheel Bharata and folk narratives in other parts of India.

Sanjaya’s most dramatic innovation is introducing Draupadi as a warrior. In Drona Parvan, following Abhimanyu’s death, Draupadi leads an all-woman army of Yadava women including Subhadra, Uttara, Krishna’s queens and Revati against the Kaurava army at night and routs them, though finally sparing the key figures for their male counterparts to fulfil their vows. In a series of wish-fulfilling dramas, Draupadi defeats Drona, Ashvatthama and Duryodhana, and whirls about Duhshasana by his hair, avenging her similar humiliation at his hands in the Kuru Sabha. Similarly, Subhadra ties up Jayadratha’s hands and feet and has him kicked unconscious by maids. Jayadratha seems to be at the worst receiving end from Sanjaya. Earlier too, in Vana Parvan, after Bhima had rescued Draupadi from Jayadratha, Draupadi’s maids had kicked him. Uttara beheads Duhshasana’s son Rudradev who killed Abhimanyu. Here, Sanjaya is undoubtedly influenced by the Shakta tradition and represents women as Shakti evoking the imagery of Mahishasuramardini. Or, he might be remembering two marginalized episodes of Vyasa’s Mahabharata in which Draupadi exerts physical prowess and hurls her molesters Jayadratha and Kicaka to the ground. While Vyasa does not name Duhshasana’s son, Sanjaya’s naming him Rudradev gives a face to the faceless killer of Abhimanyu and has an ironic humanitarian dimension.

Sanjaya’s Adi Parvan has Janamejaya charging Vyasa with failure to prevent the fratricidal battle. This dramatic situation of Vyasa-Janamejaya interaction as the narrative frame has a curious parallel in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1989) which begins with Janamejaya and Vyasa interacting. Peter Brook introduced folk elements in his Mahabharata. It seems, the ‘folk mind frame’ of creative artists, perhaps, visualizes dramatic situations in similar ways.

Kavi Sanjaya, of Bharadvaja Gotra, was a resident of Laur village in present Bangladesh. While in Vyasa’s Mahabharata, Pandu and Indra’s friend Bhagadatta is ruler of Pragjyotishpur, Sanjaya hails him as him as ruler of Vanga-Desh including Laur. The exalted place accorded to him might point to a Bhagadatta cult in the region covering present day Assam and Bangladesh because, as evident from the Nidhanpur copperplate inscription, the Kamarupa king Bhaskaravarman (7th century CE) eulogized Bhagadatta as Deva and traced his ancestry to Bhagadatta’s successors.

Like the character Ahiravana in Krittibas’ Ramayana, Sanjaya creates a character named Viveka, Sudhanva’s infant son, who vanquishes Krishna, Pandavas and Hanuman. Finally, on his grandfather Hongshodhvoj’s request, Viveka surrenders to Krishna. In Bengali, ‘bibek’ connotes conscience. Besides, in the Yatra (folk-theatre) tradition, there is a character called ‘Bibek’, conscience-personified. Given that the fratricidal Kurukshetra War did not bring peace and joy to Yudhishṭhira’s mind owing to qualms of conscience, whether Sanjaya’s introduction of Viveka is an echo-metaphor for Viveka-conscience, or Bibek of Yatra tradition with the role of conscience might be another interesting point of query.

In the same Ashvamedhaparvan, Sanjaya introduces the story of King Niladhavaja’s wife Jana (Jvala in Jaimini) who, failing to incite his brother against Arjuna for avenging her son Prabir’s death, immolates herself, transforms into an arrow and enters Babhruvahana’s quiver. Later Babhruvahana kills Arjuna with that arrow, and Jana’s revenge is accomplished. Girish Chandra Ghosh, the father of Bengali theatre, wrote a powerful play ‘Jana’ in 1894 with her as the central character.

The cultural interaction of early Bengali literature and Yatra is quite evident in that, the Krishna Jatra genre, evolved through the devotional singing and dancing of the followers of the Krishna Bhakti movement, was inspired by Rasa-lila and dramatic poetry like Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda (12th century), Chandidas’ Srikrishna Kirtan15th century) and later further propelled by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mystic Krishnaism. There is also Nata Gita, an operatic folk drama form in medieval Bengal, filled with singing, dancing and music sans dialogue, which provided an early model for the Krishna Jatra.

One unique aspect of Sanjaya’s Mahabharata pointed out by Bhattacharya is that his narration is interspersed with Lachadi couplets of twenty syllables accompanied by dance, to be sung in various ragas and raginis such as Basant, Kamod, Bhatiyal, Shri, Barari and Pathamanjari. Obviously, dramatic elements abound in Sanjaya’s Mahabharata. This is further evident from the narrative twists. In Mausala Parvan, Kavi Sanjaya has Arjuna accompany Krishna at the end, and true to Yatra appeal and high drama, Sanjaya’s Krishna breathes his last while resting his head on his best friend Arjuna’s lap.

Bhattacharya’s easy flowing English, constantly reminding us of the richness of Bengal’s culture, makes a pleasant and illuminating read.

At the end, one would certainly agree that Bhattacharya’s translated volumes merit an imperative place in libraries and collections for serious researchers of Indian and Bengal history and for Mahabharata-lovers and lay readers alike.

Indrajit Bandyopadhyay

Associate Professor

Department of English

Kalyani Mahavidyalaya

West Bengal

The First Bengali Mahabharata

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My English translation in free verse line-by-line of Bengal’s Adi Kavi, Sanjay’s Bengali version of the Mahabharata has been published by Dasgupta & Co., 54/3, College Street, Kolkata-700073, boiwala.dasgupta@gmail.com, in 2 volumes, A-4 size. Sanjay created fascinating tales, the most striking of which is his account of Draupadi and the Yadava ladies attacking the Kaurava army after Abhimanyu was slaughtered and utterly routing them, including Drona, Karna, Duhshasana, Duryodhana!

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/scholar-brings-back-oldest-bengali-mahabharata-to-life/articleshow/72931293.cms

KOLKATA: Most of us think that the Mahabharata translated in ..

Brilliant Translation of Mokshadharma Parva: review by Prof. Satya Chaitanya

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https://www.boloji.com/articles/51356/brilliant-translation-of-mokshadharma-parva

The Mahabharata of Vyasa: Book XII, The Complete Shanti Parva. Part 2: Moksha-Dharma
Translated From Sanskrit by Pradip Bhattacharya. Writers Workshop, Kolkata. 2015

All human pursuits have for their end, said ancient India, either one or a combination of the four ultimate human goals: the common good [dharma], wealth [artha], pleasure [kama] and spiritual freedom [moksha]. The Mahabharata is an enquiry into these four human goals in the context of the grand family saga of the Bharatas. While in general the focus of the other parvas of the epic is on the narration of the story with sagely and worldly wisdom thrown in here and there, the Shanti Parva focuses almost entirely on philosophical enquiries into the human condition and discusses how life could be lived happily and meaningfully both as an ordinary individual and as a person responsible for the welfare of others, such as a king, keeping dharma as the guiding light.

The Shanti Parva is voluminous and consists of nearly fourteen thousand verses of which the biggest chunk is the Mokshadharma Parva, which centrally concerns itself with the highest of the four dharmas, moksha. It is this parva that Dr Pradip Bhattacharya has brilliantly translated into English.

Dr Bhattacharya’s is the first ever verse to verse translation of the Mokshadharma Parva and forms a huge volume of 1077 pages, excluding the appendixes.

Mokshadharma Parva has devotion, yoga, meditation, dispassion, the ascetic way of life and other forms of spirituality for its subject matter. We would expect the spirituality that a book like the Mahabharata teaches us to be conventional. But far from it! One of the most fascinating aspects of the parva is that, while it does speak of conventional spirituality, much of its teaching is irreverent to tradition and takes very unconventional stands. The very second chapter has a son teaching spirituality to his father! Later the brahmana Jajali who has become proud of the frightful asceticism he has performed for years is sent to the merchant Tuladhara to learn from him, reversing traditional roles completely!

We have another story of role reversal in the Mokshadharma Parva in which a woman teaches the highest spirituality to a man – a story that introduces to us one of the most fascinating spiritual teachers in the entire Indian spiritual lore: the great yogini Sulabha. This great master of yoga arrives at the court of King Dharmadhvaja Janaka, reputed to be an awakened man, and using her yogic powers enters the king’s head to debate with him about what true yoga is from within him. Towards the end of the discussion the yogini explains why she did not engage him in the debate in the open court in the presence of his ministers and courtiers: so that the king would not shamed before them!

The king begins the discussion and claims, giving numerous reasons, that he is an enlightened man. Sulabha counters all his arguments and ends the debate by declaring bluntly that he is no master but just a pretender.

You are not liberated
yet you are proud of being
liberated, O King! You should be prevented
by your well-wishers, as
the unconscious indeed is from drugs.

She also tells him:

You have heard, but not listened to the scriptures,
I think, or else
heard false scriptures, or you heard what seems like
scriptures, or heard otherwise.

Sulabha’s main argument is that Dharmadhvaja has not developed anasakti, detachment while being engaged, the true mark of enlightenment, something the Bhagavad Gita would completely agree with. Sulabha points out to Janaka that he is still attached to his body, his gender, caste, position as king and so on. How can such a man be liberated, she asks?

She tells him:

Fallen from the householder’s order, you
have not obtained
hard-to-reach moksha and stay in between
the two, merely
talking about moksha.

Yogini Sulabha would be an ideal teacher for our age of Kali when in the world of spirituality pretentions are more common than true achievements and knowledge of books is considered enlightenment!

We have several Gitas in the Mokshadharma Parva. In the short sparkling Bodhya Gita, a great sage in another role reversal declares that his gurus are a prostitute, an arrow smith, a young girl and so on:

Pingala, the osprey, the snake, the bee
searching in the woods,
the arrow-maker and the virgin, these six
are my gurus.

Apart from the Bodhya Gita, the Parva has other Gitas like the Manki Gita, Parashara Gita, Hamsa Gita, Sampaka Gita, Harita Gita, Vritra Gita and so on, each enriching the Parva in its own way.

As the Upanishads do, the spirituality of the Parva holds heaven in contempt. Rejecting heaven, the Parva equates it to hell in comparison with moksha, spiritual liberation. All acts leading to heaven are declared as ultimately worthless because they only keep you wandering within the world of bondage.

The Parva rejects animal sacrifice. Though hermit spirituality too is discussed, the stress is on what can be practiced living the family way of life. In fact, one of the questions Yudhishthira asks is if a man living with his wife at home can climb to the highest peaks of spirituality – a question that is very pertinent to himself and to all of us. In response, we are told the fascinating story of Suvarchala who asks her father to find a husband for her who is both ‘blind and not blind’ at the same so that she can live with him a life of the highest spirituality.

We have in the Parva a Brahmin svayamvara, the self-choice ceremony in which a woman chooses a husband for herself, usually limited to royal families!

The women of the Parva are all brilliant, be it Suvarchala who tells her father she would choose her husband by herself, Yogini Sulabha who using her yogic powers enters Janaka’s head to debate with him, the wife of Nagaraja who teaches her anger-prone husband the importance of managing anger, or anyone else.

Among the numerous rare gems we can find in the Mokshadharma Parva is the story of Gautama’s and Ahalya’s son who is only mentioned by the name Chirakari, Slow-to-Act, who has been asked by his father to chop off the head of his mother as a punishment for committing adultery, a story in which reversing convention, slowness is praised rather than speed in action. Reflecting on his father’s order, Chirakari says to himself:

No shade is there like the mother, no refuge
is there like the mother,
no protection is there like the mother,
no beloved
is there like the mother.

The chapter has Chirakari telling us:

There is no offence in women. Man indeed
offends. Held guilty of
offence in every work, a woman
does not commit offence.

This first ever complete verse translation of the Mokshadharma Parva by Bhattacharya is an invaluable contribution to Indological studies in general and Mahabharata studies in particular. As translation, it is a monumental piece of work as well as a superb literary achievement. For Bhattacharya, though, it is more than these: it is his gurudakshina, his sacred offering to his guru, Prof. P. Lal, who had over a period of several decades ‘transcreated’ in a unique verse form and self-published the entire Mahabharata except the Mokshadharma Parva before he passed away. With this volume, the transcreation is complete – though Bhattacharya claims he has not trascreated it but has only translated it, following as closely as possible the master’s style.

A unique aspect of the translation is the retention of Sanskrit words that are in the Oxford English Dictionary. An example for this could be found in the parva-opening question itself in which Yudhishthira asks, “O Pitamaha-Grandfather, you have….” A new reader would find this as somewhat unsettling, but once you are used to it, you discover it has a charm of its own, giving the entire work a surreal quality. And of course, it avoids, as the translator points out, the need for annotations, colophons and dovetailing explanations. The rest of the Mahabharata transcreated by Prof. P. Lal follows this style and for that reason it is appropriate that Bhattacharya too follows the style.

While no disrespect is meant to the existing, time-honoured monumental complete prose translation of the epic, for which the entire world should forever be indebted to K.M. Ganguli, for the purpose of bringing out the precision, beauty and brilliance of Bhattacharya’s translation, I would like to compare one verse in the two translations.

Death is that by which the world is assailed. Decrepitude encompasses it. Those irresistible things that come and go away are the nights (that are continually lessening the period of human life). When I know that Death tarries for none (but approaches steadily towards every creature), how can I pass my time without covering myself with the garb of knowledge? – K.M. Ganguli

Death wounds the world,
Decay besieges it,
Days and nights fall away,
How do you not understand this? – Pradip Bhattacharya

Incidentally, Bhattacharya’s translation is not only much more poetic, it is also closer to the original Sanskrit.

While Bhattacharya has tried to walk in the footsteps of his revered guru and inspiration Prof. P. Lal whose monumental work of transcreating the Mahabharata into verse he is continuing in the Mokshadharma Parva, he explains in the Preface to the book why he has “tried to translate rather than transcreate, keeping to the original syntax as far as possible without making the reading too awkward”: He is not a poet like Prof. Lal. I believe this is the translator’s humility speaking – I found the poetry of the translation splendid. It constantly reminded me of Kimon Friar’s superb English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 33,333-lines magnum opus Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.

Following Prof. Lal who chose to give no list of contents and no section headings to his Mahabharata transcreation work saying ‘the suta does not need them,” Dr Bhattacharya in the Mokshadharma translation too gives no list of contents or section headings.

Memorable verses of the parva have been reproduced in Sanskrit – which I found very useful and felt added great value to the book partly because of my love for Sanskrit, partly because the original Sanskrit verses reproduced are such that they register practically on their own in your memory. Besides, several of these verses are already widely known and are either in full or in part integral parts of all Indian languages.

The thoroughness of Bhattacharya’s work and the immense depth of his research deserve appreciation by all Mahabharata lovers. Such thoroughness and depth would not have been possible without the translator’s profound love for the Mahabharata which could be guessed from the fact that he has authored several books on the epic, each a major contribution to understanding the beauty of the Mahabharata, each bringing out the rarest gems lying on the bed of the vast ocean that the epic is. Rather than just picking up any one particular text of the Mokshadharma Parva and translating it, what he has done, as he himself explains, is to collate the editions published by the Gita Press [Gorakhpur, 9th edition,1980] , Aryasastra [Calcutta, 1973] and that edited by Haridasa Siddhantavagisa Bhattacharya with the Bharatakaumudi and cross checked with Nilakantha’s Bharatabhavadipa annotations [Bishwabani Prakashani, Calcutta 1939] cross-checked with Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Bengali translation [Hitavadi Karyalaya, Calcutta 1866], the first English translation by K.M. Ganguli [1883-1896] and the shorter Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute edition. As a result of the inclusion of passages from Siddhantavagisa Bhattacharya and the collation with the other works just mentioned Dr Bhattacharya’s work makes this the most complete translation of the Mokshadharma Parva ever.

Two maps have been appended to the translation, one of Aryavarta at the time of the Mahabharata and the other of the India of that time, both helpful in correlating the events of the epic with their geographical locales, particularly for those not sure of them. Also appended are three reviews of Prof Lal’s transcreations of three parvas of the epic: the Karna Parva, the Stri Parva and Shanti Parva Part 1 [Rajadharma]. The long review of Karna Parva brings out the excellence of the transcreation of the parva. In his review of Prof. Lal’s Stri Parva, The Book of Women, appended to the book, Dr Bhattacharya points out how Prof Lal’s poetic transcreation of the parva succeeds in capturing the screaming anguish of the original text whereas earlier prose translations fail to do so. The appended review is also noteworthy for correlating the Stri Parva with Euripides’ Trojan Women. I found the third appendix of special interest since it is a review of the Rajadharma, Principles of Governance, section of the Shanti Parva, the Sanskrit text of which I have been using extensively for years in business schools where I have been teaching Indian leadership philosophy to Management students, corporate officers and bureaucrats.

I first came across Writers Workshop books in the Public Library in Chennai in 1975 and was immediately captured by their uniqueness, superiority and distinct appearance. They were all hardbound, had a distinctively Indian touch to them, and, as I later learnt, they were printed in small hand-operated presses and manually bound. Mokshadharma Parva published in 2015, forty years later, follows the same admirable tradition which sets it apart from mass-produced, commercially marketed, books.

Bhattacharya’s mastery of the English language is astounding. With amazing fluidity, the mighty torrent of the translation flows on for nearly eleven hundred pages, carrying you with it effortlessly, making you realize what the boundless ocean called the Mahabharata truly is and revealing the rare jewels lying in its profound depths.

Dr Bhattacharya’s translation is a superb example for what encyclopedic knowledge, hard work, superb literary talent, total commitment and tireless energy can achieve. The work is a masterpiece of Sanskrit translation, an inspiration for all translators not only from Sanskrit to English but from any language to any other language. As a translator Bhattacharya eminently succeeds in achieving all the aims he sets for himself and gives the English reading world that cannot read the Mahabharata in original Sanskrit a wonderful gift that that is as close to the original as is possible.

Dharma Rejected in the Mahabharata!

By

Re-ending the Mahabharata

Naama Shalom, Re-ending the Mahabharata: The Rejection of Dharma in the Sanskrit Epic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 266 pages.

 

This is an important work, being the first study to focus solely on how the Mahabharata ends. Naama Shalom’s thesis is that instead of extolling Dharma—the general presumption—the last book actually denounces it in the persona of Yudhishthira. She uses the word garh (condemn) as a “Mahabharata search engine” to achieve three goals: unravel the thematic structure; survey its doubts about dharma; and define how dharma operates in different contexts. Exploring the paradox of dharma’s “garhification” (denunciation) is the agenda.

Shalom shows how re-tellers of the epic altered the ending to provide a pleasant closure. Of them, only three epitomes, all medieval, deal with the ascent to heaven: Kshemendra, Amarachandra, and Agastya in the eleventh, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries CE. Earlier adaptations neglect the last book, possibly because it is deemed too unsettling. She analyzes the stance adopted by the three Kashmiri Sanskrit aestheticians Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and Kuntaka (ninth to eleventh centuries CE). The first two stress that the ending creates the rasa (emotional experience) of shanti through rejection of the rasas of heroism, wonder, and horror created earlier, thus dissociating it from the rest of the epic. Kuntaka condemns the ending as a prime example of a faulty conclusion that future poets should alter.

Dharma is referred to by both Bhıshma the patriarch and Yudhishthira the son of Dharma as very subtle, as secreted within a cave, hence difficult to determine. At crucial junctures there is doubt about what it is. Shalom does not explore the fact that only three persons are never troubled by such doubts: Krishna, Dharma’s avatar Vidura, and Bhıma. The first two die miserable deaths. Yudhishthira abandons dying Bhıma but will not abandon a dog. Then he rejects Svarga, electing to stay in horrific Naraka with the siblings and the wife he had abandoned. The confusion this ending creates, Shalom argues, has to date not been explored.

Reviewing the research, she concludes that the ending formed part of the epic from at least the third century CE as in the damaged Spitzer Manuscript where the seventeenth and eighteenth serials in the parva-list are intact, though the Mahāprasthānika and Svargārohaṇa parvas are not mentioned. Here she refers to the initial Jaya epic of 8,800 verses, while in fact this is the number of riddling slokas.

She claims to have discovered “a hitherto unknown retelling” entitled Bhārataprabandha by the Malayali poet Melputtur Narayana Bhatta (ca. 1550–1650 CE), which includes the Svargārohaṇa. However, Kalamandalam Eswaranunni, A.Harindranath and A.Purushothaman have edited scholarly editions with detailed explanations and introductions, self-published from 2014 to the present. Bhatta is the only re-teller who has Yudhishthira denounce Indra, Dharma, and the other gods for the illusion of hell.

Shalom concludes that the epic does in fact reach an organic resolution, being a tapestry into which many “garh” episodes are interwoven. Part of this tapestry is the disrupted sacrifice motif introduced in the beginning. The core of the thematic matrix is the examination of what constitutes right action through experimentation with the concept of dharma. She argues that finally Dharma turns in on itself through self-denunciation (Dharma’s son condemns Dharma) voiced by its protagonist Yudhishthira, which scholars have previously overlooked.

Is a later, more “sophisticated” audience uncomfortable with the unabashed existential stance of Vyasa instead of appreciating its nuances, as Shalom claims? Perhaps not. Her study is heavily influenced by Emily T. Hudson’s one-sided Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahabharata (Oxford University Press, 2013), showing no awareness of James Hegarty’s balanced exploration of the topic in Religion, Narrative and Public Imagination in South Asia: Past and Place in the Sanskrit Mahabharata (Routledge, 2012).

Being so focused on validating her claim, Shalom overlooks the Bhārata Sāvitrī of four slokas at the end containing Vyasa’s final message. Is he a voice in the wilderness, ignored by all, shouting aloud with upraised arms “From Dharma flow Profit and Pleasure; why is dharma not practised?” In the very next verse he stresses that dharma must not be discarded; for, while joy and sorrow are fleeting, dharma and the jīva–ātman alone are eternal, not the body. The composer himself thus reasserts Dharma’s validity after its “garhification.” And a host of phantom listeners are listening, their stillness answering his cry.

This compelling work needed a good editor. The argument running to 174 pages is supplemented by 50 pages of elaborate endnotes, much of which should have been included in the text. The reader is irritated having to flip back and forth frequently between them. Moreover, there is avoidable repetition: each chapter begins with a summary and ends with a conclusion, both repeating in brief what will be/has been stated. However, Shalom’s book will stimulate fresh thinking about the enigmatic ending of the Mahabharata and as such open up fresh avenues of research.

International Journal of Hindu Studies (2019) 23:355, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-019-09268-x