Book Reviews

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

This book compiles 18 papers of which 17 were presented in an international conference held on November 2012 by the Draupadi Dream Trust. The American contributors are Alf Hiltebeitel, the most prolific of Mahabharata (MBH) scholars, and his student Vishva Adluri. The first such study of the epic’s date and reality was in “Mahabharata: Myth or Reality—Differing Views” by S.P. Gupta and K.S. Ramachandran in 1976 (Agam Kala Prakshan, New Delhi).

There are four papers on archaeology, led by B.B. Lal who, in 3 pages, repeats his well-known findings regarding Hastinapura near Meerut with evidence of its abandonment due to floods and the shift to Kaushambi where the same Painted Grey Ware (PGW) has turned up in its lowest level. Udayana ruled in Kaushambi (c. 500 BCE, contemporaneous with Buddha). 24 rulers preceded Udayana till Parikshit, yielding a date of 860 BCE. So, the Kurukshetra war may be dated c. 900 BCE, which falls in the PGW period. The paper is valuable for 13 plates of the findings. Surprisingly, Lal commits the common error that the text began with 8,800 slokas whereas that is the number of riddling verses. The original was 24,000 verses. Why his 1952 findings were not pursued is a mystery. The editors could have clarified this in their introduction.

Dilip Chakrabarti briefly outlines geographical data. Reference to Chinas, Shakas, Yavanas, Hunas and Parasikas along with Ashokan knowledge of the Mediterranean area suggests a period pre 300 BCE. He feels a beginning around 1000 BCE for the composition is not unreasonable.

B.R.Mani deals with the Rajgir region, believing A.D.Pusalkar’s date of 1400 BCE for the war. Rajgir reveals a cyclopean wall as in Mycenae and Tiryns which are dated 1400-1300 BCE. However, excavations at Rajgir, Juafaradih near Nalanda and Ghorakatora near Giyak take us back to 1500 BCE. He urges detailed study at Rajgir for more definite dates.

D.P.Tewari writes on Kampilya (Kampil in Farrukhabad, U.P.), Drupada’s capital, birthplace of Vimala Natha the Jain Tirthankar and of Varahamihir the astronomer, where Charaka also lived. Excavations in 2002-3 dated the earliest of many findings to around 3200 BCE. Rice, barley and grams were grown and amla berries in plenty.

B.N.Narahari Achar’s 56 page paper with 22 illustrations on dating the war through astronomy is very interesting. The text (about 150 references) refers to the war, calamity to the Kuru dynasty, entire armies being destroyed and the population endangered. Each involves different planetary positions. Using Planetarium software he fixes 3067 BCE for the war, agreeing with Raghavan’s 1967 finding. Others, by the same software, have fixed the date as 3022, 2559, 1793, 1478 and 1198 BCE! He rejects these for not considering several planetary references. 3067 BCE is based purely on information in the epic and tallies with Aryabhatta. He pre-dates the Maurya dynasty to 1535-1219 BCE, stressing that Samudragupta is the Priyadarshin of the Rock Edicts III and XIII that mention Antiochus and Ptolemy. He discounts archaeological evidence from Meerut (c.950 BCE) and Bet Dwaraka (1500 BCE) as they do not match the epic descriptions. He demolishes at length criticisms of his proposed date.

G.U.Thite deals with differences from Vedic rituals in the epics and puranas to show that the composers were unaware of their technical details, possibly because the transmitting Sutas were not ritual experts. He asserts that the very elaborate, lengthy Ashvamedha-horse-sacrifice described here with many contradictions is fictitious.

Hiltebeitel’s is a fascinating study of what the MBH tells about its tribal and other histories. He places the Northern edition of the epic to 1^st century BCE and the Southern to the beginning of the 3^rd century BCE. The references to Greeks, Chinese and Shakas (but not Pahlavas or Kushanas) shows completion before the end of the BCE by late Shunga or Kanva times, possibly by Brahmins of the Kurukshetra region. Hiltebeitel points out that MBH is the first text to see a regional area, Bharatavarsha, as “a total land and a total people set in a still wider word”. It distinguishes the general populace from “the others”, viz. tribals, barbarians etc who were a special danger to Kuru kings. He argues that Kuru is a MBH invention featureing in no early or late Vedic text. MBH uses only one term for tribals, he asserts, “atavika,” (forest-dweller). Yet, “Nishada” frequently indicates them in both epics. Contesting the propositions of international and Indian scholars, his analysis concludes that MBH is not an oral bardic epic about a Kuru tribe as is mostly supposed.

S.G.Bajpai’s case is that as the Vedas are the gift of the Sarasvati, so the MBH is of Ganga. He deals with the rise of Ganga culture from Shantanu to the end of the dynasty in the 4^th century BCE, with the text spanning a millennium from 800 BCE to 200 CE. The primacy of Ganga among rivers is highlighted with the MBH providing her myth and history.

Michel Danino studies the epics socio-cultural impact. Its retelling in every region, including tribal, is a testament to the cultural integration it brought about along with the Ramayana. He points out the mistake of locating the war in 3000 BCE because that is the Early Harappan phase when cities had not emerged and cultures were Neolithic or Chalcolithic, but nothing like what the epic describes. He prefers a date not before 500 BCE.

V.K.Gupta, one of the editors, describes the Vrishni Cult in the Vraja region around Mathura. Varshaneya is the most frequently used epithet for the clan in the epic. Kautilya (4^th century BCE) speaks of war between Vrishnis and Dvaipayana (Vyasa?). Earlier, the Brahmanas and Panini also mention them. Gupta suggests that Tosha in the Mora well inscprition in Mathura Museum is the village Tosh, mentioned in the Bhagavata Cult. An important site is the Chamunda Tila pillar capital whose symbols indicate the same cult. An ancient structure in Vrindavan on the river front has Mauryan and Shunga/Kushana/Gupta bricks with inscriptions referring to Bhagavata. Another inscription on a carved door-jamb in the museum shows a bhagavata temple in the 1^st century BCE. A late-Kushana period sculpture depicts the four forms (chatur-vyuha) of Vasudeva-Krishna, his elder brother, son and grandson. There is also numismatic evidence from 4^th-3^rd century BCE of the Bhagavata-Vrishni Cult which was popular as far as Afghanistan, Vidisha and Malhar, originating in Vraja. 12 excellent colour plates are provided.

In another paper Gupta describes the 84 krosha (1 krosha = 3 km) circumambulation of Braj (Vraja), the villages of cowherds near Mathura laid out in the Mathura-mandala section of the Varaha Purana, with its own dialect Brajbhasha. This tradition was founded by Narayan Bhatta in 1552 CE identifying 333 spots. A significant insight is that in the Skanda Purana’s Shrimadbhagavata Khanda, Krishna’s great grandson Vajranabha is made king by Arjuna not of Indraprastha, as in the epic, but of Mathura and, at Parikshit’s behest, he re-establishes the places related to Krishna’s life there. The Jaina text Vividhatirthakalpa of Jinaprabhasuri (14^th CE first half) mentions a pilgrimage covering 5 spots and 12 woods.. Archaeology has dated half of the sites to the PGW period (1200 to 400 BCE), most of the rest to early CE. A valuable map of the area is added.

Haripriya Rangarajan deals with Draupadi as the manifestation of the supreme feminine energy and argues that she was the first to fall in the final journey as she had to return to Vaikuntha following Krishna’s death. Being in human form, she had to suffer like humans. The presentation is not convincing.

Nanditha Krishna’s valuable paper deals with MBH in the reliefs of Angkor Vat after surveying the depictions in art since 800 BCE showing the Bhagavata cult, with as many as 51 plates. In Angkor Krishna is the hero as his childhood exploits are depicted. Here his companions are not milkmaids but cowherds. He is not the erotic god but always a warrior and ruler. She claims that the four-faced figure of Angkor Thom is Vishnu. Nowhere is that god described as having four heads except in Cambodian reliefs.

G.D.Bakshi writes on strategy, war and weaponry in the epic. He compares Krishna’s strategy to the British one of making Germany and Russia fight in WW-2. The evolution of the art of warfare is studied in terms of localized revolutions in military affairs (RMA) and the MBH paradigm examined in terms of battle formations, wearing down the foe and rules of fair-fight. He fails to deal with the last concept being consistently violated in the war.

Kavita Sharma’s paper is on P.K.Balakrishnan’s novel, And Now Let Me Sleep which is a series of nightmares, dreams and flashbacks involving mostly Draupadi but also Yudhishthira and Kunti. She fails to note how the novel evades dealing with Karna ordering the stripping of Draupadi, by having her see him reproaching himself for it.  It focuses on glorifying him and making Draupadi imagine her as his consort at the end.

Vishwa Adluri’s is a very significant study of the architecture of the MBH as having a double-beginning with frame settings creating a cyclical narrative accommodating both pravritti and moksha, while holding them apart. He states, but does not explain, that the Gita echoes the lament of Dhritarashtra in the beginning, while the Narayaniya in the Mokshadharma Parva reverses the descending cosmology in the beginning of the Adi Parva. Vishnu is the moksha/nivritti figure while Indra/Bhishma is of pravritti. The Gita teaches living in pravritti serenely. Narayaniya breaks through to Moksha. Adluri is the first to note that Shaunaka refers to Janamejaya’s massacre of snakes as a sacrifice, whereas Ruru, to whom his father tells the tale, calls it “violence”. MBH creates steps beginning with violence, then sacrifice and finally moksha. He presents a new way of seeing how the multiple narrations are related. The outer and inner frames are actually sheaths, where one can add yet another tale. The whole Vaishampayana narrative of the snake massacre is contained in Ugrashrava’s account, all of which is doubled and enclosed in the Pramati-Ruru frame. MBH is an ahimsa text on structural and semantic levels and violent on the aesthetic level. The architectonics is made up of two themes: eternity and time. He argues for going beyond the current literary approach of scholars to an aesthetic one of shared and disputed judgements about how we experience the text. This will not contrast history and myth, but focus on narrative elements common to both.

Savita Gaur’s short paper studies the Shanti Parva as a manual of practical wisdom, noting some significant teaching about principles of governance and harmonious living. There is no clamouring for rights. Instead, a stress on duties of all officials and subjects to benefit society. The qualities emphasised are for all time and all people. Human dignity is stressed as supreme. Gaur states that the epic’s ethics are based on the Upanishads, which raise it to a spiritual plane. Equanimity is the key to successful and blissful living.

Sibesh Bhattacharya’s profound paper discusses literary devices used in the epic “to break free of the time-space constraints.” He subscribes to the tradition that it was orally narrated (still done in parts of India), which Hiltebeitel has challenged forcefully as a fictional trope adopted by the composers to feign antiquity. He adopts the usual diachronic approach to the narrative structure, that Adluri has so significantly departed from, to provide revealing insights. He shows how the placing of Dhritarashtra’s lament at the beginning defies the chronology of events:“The form of this post-factor overview is one of prognosis” dissolving time-space boundaries. It also provides a tragic dimension to the epic from the loser’s viewpoint. The epic’s narrative mode is conversational story-telling, not dialogical except in the Gita. It is very significant that the audience for this very violent saga of Kshatriya massacre is celibate ascetic Brahmans in a peaceful forest ashram. This duality characterises the locales in the epic. Through such devices, the epic breaks out of the conventional boundaries of time and space.

A very impressive collection indeed, well published, with few printer’s devils marring the production. It ought to have had at least a line about each contributor. The insights have not lost their value over the six years it took to publish it.

https://www.boloji.com/articles/51867/the-mahabharata-its-antiquity