Pradip Bhattacharya

Indologist, Mahabharata scholar

Mahabharata

THE EPIC AND THE NATION

By

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 8th 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

The Anushasana Parva: The Book of Instructions

By

This is Book 13 of the Mahabharata, and the most complete English translation, in verse and in prose carefully following the original, published on 5th October 2023 by Dr. Ananda Lal from www.writersworkshopindia.com

The project that Prof. P. Lal began in 1968 and was unable to complete (he could publish only 16 of the 18 books before passing away) is now complete. My translation of the complete Mokshadharma Parva came out in 2016.

My guru-dakshina to my Acharya is complete.

https://www.facebook.com/553071972/videos/837756184467669/

APPROACHING THE ADI-KAVI

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APPROACHING ADI-KAVI VALMIKI[i]

Pradip Bhattacharya

The Department of Comparative Literature of Jadavpur University founded by the litterateur Buddhadeb Bose in 1956 was the first such in India.  It has now embarked upon an ambitious project: a series of research publications in four categories, viz. Texts, Contexts, Methods; Indian and Asian Contexts; Literature and Other Knowledge Systems; and Lecture Series. The overpriced slim volume under review belongs to the last category. From the editors’ Introduction it seems that Goldman did not deliver this lecture but sent it as a written contribution. This is a pity, because documented interaction with an audience would have made it a far more significant publication. This extremely well-written “lecture” is not much more than an introduction for beginners, albeit a very competent one, to Valmiki’s work and hardly falls under the rubric of “research”.

The Ramayana (R) presents specific hurdles before the modern reader: it depicts a civilization of circa the first millennium BCE far removed from us; its language is ancient Sanskrit, which is not easily accessible. Further, Sanskrit did not have a principal script universally used. The R has spawned widely varying versions in almost all languages and different scripts of South and Southeast Asia “from Afghanistan to Bali” and is depicted in varied media. Surprisingly, Goldman makes no reference to the Belgian priest Camille Bulcke’s encyclopaedic Hindi study of these variations.[ii]

Adopting the linguist Kenneth Pike’s terms emic (subjective) and etic (objective), Goldman identifies two types of group-approaches to the R. In the former, fall variations in Indian languages and media. The latter is consists of scholarly studies in various disciplines world-wide, including translations in non-Indian languages.

Goldman asserts that the presumption of a single divinely inspired composer disseminating his composition through twin rhapsodes who recited it in toto before the public is a myth. The text would have undergone changes on the lips of differing bards and redacteurs owing to lapses in memory and improvisations responding to the changing audience and place. We can witness this phenomenon today in the “Pandavani” folk retellings of the Mahabharata (M) in Central India. Those Ramayana rhapsodes were given the collective name, “Valmiki”. Thus, like many Western Mahabharata scholars who dismiss Vyasa as a myth, Goldman denies the existence of Valmiki.

Further, he denies the possibility of so bulky a work being transmitted orally from Afghanistan to Bali without being reduced to writing, as evinced by innumerable manuscripts in circulation through South and Southeast Asia from about the end of the first millennium CE. Errors and changes occurred while copying a manuscript into different scripts. Thus, between the Northern and the Southern Indian script recensions only about one third are identical. Moreover, within each recension there are regional variations depending on the script in which the copies have been made.

A very important clarification Goldman provides is that the Baroda critical edition of “India’s National Epic” does not represent the original, but seeks to present an archetype constructed out of the best manuscripts that would be nearest to the period of the oldest available manuscripts. The abundance of textual variants poses a major problem in trying to assess the poem’s original form. Goldman hazards a guess that the R was produced around 500-100 BCE, while its oldest manuscripts go back only to the 12th or 13th centuries CE. So we have over 1700 years of no written record of the R. Therefore, “the etic reconstruction of the Ramayana’s genetic history is naturally going to be at odds with its emic receptive history of the work.” While to scholars it is a bardic poem orally performed and transmitted, to its audience it is the work of a single composer, the first poet (adi–kavi), who was a contemporary of Rama in mythical times. An avatar of Vishnu, he descended on earth to destroy demonic oppressors of sages and establish a golden age lasting millennia. Thus, according to the emic view, “it is a chapter of divine history rendered in a new form, that of poetry.” Raising the stimulating question, is the R “a poetic history or a historical poem”, Goldman leaves it hanging in the air. It would have been very interesting to study the reactions of the audience, had this been a live lecture.

Looking into the nature of the R vis-à-vis the M, Goldman notes that the former is far more poetic and emotional than the latter. The predominant emotion of the R is “karuna rasa”, pathos, whereas for the M a new emotion was added by the critic Anandavardhana (c. 9th century CE), “shanta rasa”, worldly-detachment or serenity. Earlier, the poet Bhavabhuti (c. 8th century CE), had asserted that “karuna” is the only rasa. However, in his last work Alf Hiltebeitel has argued very persuasively that the M’s rasa is “adbhuta-wonder”. Where the R holds up a mirror for rulers and families, the M portrays the incredibly complex ramifications of dharma in society and the individual.

Besides ignoring the story of Rama recounted in the M, Goldman has not noticed another structural similarity between the two mahakavyas that young Ramayana aficionado Saikat Mandal has pointed out. The Tilaka commentary on R by Nagoji Bhatta or Ramavarma (1730-1810) glosses the Uttarakanda as the “khila” (supplement) of the R just as the Harivamsha is of the M. The significance of this needs exploration.

Goldman expatiates at length on how the R records the inception of Valmiki’s composition, which is “a later addition to the fully developed work” for establishing it as the divinely inspired first poem. Its list of seven of the eight “rasas” shows it to be later than Bharata’s treatise, Natyashastra. Goldman goes on to show how the R differs from the Homeric epics in characteristics such as rapidity, being plain and direct in syntax, language and thought. He finds Valmiki hyperbolic, using rhetorical figuration aplenty, highly formulaic and repetitive, unlike Homer’s directness. The literary quality of the R is complicated, being a poem to delight while also being a chronicle. Goldman could have noted how, in all these features, the R is similar to the M and also different, as discussed at length by Sri Aurobindo in “Vyasa and Valmiki”.

Further, the R has grammatical forms that violate Panini’s rules and could be seen as poetic flaws. Its first and seventh books are of a later date, in less refined language. Goldman quotes at length from Homer and Valmiki to exemplify his arguments and to show how adept the latter is in portraying beauty in persons and in nature, including the frightful. Pursuing Abhinavagupta’s view of rasadhvani, Goldman analyses how the raw emotion of grief is sublimated by Valmiki to make karuna rasa the major aesthetic flavour of poetic composition, transmuting shoka (grief) to shloka (verse). The climax is reached in ending with Sita’s descent into the depths of the earth, leaving Rama desolate.

[i] Robert P. Goldman: Reading with the Rsi—a cross-cultural and comparative literary approach to Valmiki’s Ramayana. Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2023, pp. xvii+54, Rs.385/-

[ii] English translation The Rama Story by Pradip Bhattacharya published in 2022 by the Sahitya Akademi.

An Epic of Wonder, not of War and Peace

By

Alf Hiltebeitel: World of Wonders: The work of Adhbutarasa in the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa. Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 343.

When Akbar commissioned a Persian rendering of the Mahabharata (MB), he named it Razmnama, the Book of War. Centuries earlier, however, the Kashmiri aestheticians had argued that the dominant flavour (“rasa”) of MB is shanti, peace, with its stable emotion (“sthayi bhava”) of “vairagya”, detachment. Alf Hiltebeitel, the most prolific scholar on MB, who passed away in January 2023, presents a challenging thesis in his most recent foray, namely that neither the heroic (“vira”), as generally presumed, nor peace (shanti), but rather wonder (“adhbhutam, ashcarya”) is the primary flavour along with its stable emotion of surprise (“vismaya”). He is building on a realisation recorded in the last chapter of his earlier book, Freud’s Mahabharata, about the replenishing of Draupadi’s garment (referring to it anachronistically as “sari” repeatedly) being termed the greatest wonder in the world, “adhbhutatamam loke”. His search of the electronic text for the cluster “adbhutam-ashcharya-vismaya,” in MB and the Harivamsha (HV) confirmed the preponderance of the wondrous and showed that HV is part of the epic, not a mere appendix. He finds roughly 592 occurrences of “adbhutam-ashcharya” and 339 of “vismaya-vismita” distributed fairly evenly across both HV and MB. It is this dominant “rasa” that makes for the unity of the epic.

Hiltebeitel points out that the last three books of MB, with a total of eighteen chapters (like the Gita’s and the 18 books ot the epic), expose us to a series of rude shocks, presenting “unexpected outcomes”. The deaths of Krishna and Balarama, the submergence of Dvaraka, the looting of Arjuna’s caravan that destroys his heroism, Yudhishthira’s condemnation of dharma and the gods after his vision of hell and Janamejaya’s last question are analysed in detail. After Vaishampayana has explained that every hero (the women are not mentioned) merged into his original identity, Janamejaya was highly astonished (“vismito ‘bhavad atyartham”). The dominant flavour “wonder” and its stable emotion “surprise” are repeatedly evoked. The epic ends with the “Bharata Savitri” of the concluding statement by Vyasa “of wondrous deeds” to his son Shuka.

Varying perceptions about MB existed contemporaneously with the Kashmiri aestheticians of the 9th and 10 centuries CE. The first regional retelling of MB saw it as a heroic narrative, which is why Peruntevanar made Krishna his hero in the Tamil Paratavenpa (9th century CE) and Pampa had Arjuna crowned king at the end after Yudhishthira’s abdication in the Kannada Vikramarjunavijaya (10th century CE). Hiltebeitel finds that the “adbhutam” clusters are fairly evenly distributed in both MB and HV, missing only from Book 17 (the Great Departure). He concludes that the element of surprise is as evident as the didactic and other elements like Krishna and the divine plan, Vyasa’s role, the snake sacrifice, the ending of Janamejaya’s tale, Sauti and Shaunaka.

The two lists of contents identify sections as “wondrous”, not referring to any other “rasa”. Vyasa’s miraculous summoning of the dead in Book 15 is described as exceptionally and uniquely wondrous, while Books 5, 8 and 4 are called particularly “adbhutam”. Before Hiltebeitel, no had one noted these. Analysing the occurrences in each book he finds that Book 3 (Forest Exile), is the most wonder-laden book. Among the four war books, the largest wonder-cluster occurs in the Book of Drona while the Book of Karna is the only one of them to be described in the list of contents as “full of meanings and wonders” and to devote an adbhutam-cluster to Karna. In the Bhishma Parvan they are applied to Arjuna; in the Mokshadharmaparvan they occur in the Shuka story and the Narayaniya, and in the Anushasana Parvan in the Uma-Maheshvara dialogue.

In most of the wonder passages the focus is mostly on the three Krishnas: Krishna (Books 5-9), Vyasa (Book 1, alternating with Krishna in Books 10-13 and dominating in 14-15, 17-18), Krishna (Book 16) and Draupadi (end of Book 1 to Book 4). The others focussed upon are Arjuna, Karna, Bhima and Shiva. It is the three dark Krishnas who represent, writes James Fitzgerald, “wondrous realities of the world.”

Most episodes in Book 14 (the horse-sacrifice) have the wondrous quality. Vyasa’s pupil Jaimini’s version of the book is chock-full of magic and marvels, which is possibly why Akbar chose this to be translated into Persian for his Razmnama instead of Vyasa’s original composition and why regional Mahabharatas often do the same. This book culminates in the utterly surprising debunking of the horse-sacrifice by the episode of the mongoose. This Ashvamedha Parva is surpassed by the “very great wonder” of Book 15, as the list of contents describes the Forest Ashram. Here Vyasa not only conjures up all the dead heroes, but also gets all the widows to commit suicide in the river to meet their husbands, ridding the new monarchy of the sound of endless lamentation Much earlier he had made his mother and two sisters-in-law leave the world too. Nowhere in any epic world does the epic’s composer kill off so many of his characters himself.

Hiltebeitel commits a major mistake in glossing Satyabhama as Kamsa’s sister (p. 259). On p. 289 the printer’s gremlin is very much in evidence (“Virad”, “Vior”, “vita”, “Vi”, “amring the en”, “Vieap’s” etc.), p. 292 (“amatamanthana”) and footnotes 161 (“collerium”) and 162 (“Markakrsnadeya”). Footnote 191 refers to “Haberman” who is missing from the references.

At the very beginning of HV Shaunaka praises the MB for its extremely wondrous deeds and amazing discourses. HV is replete with amazing revelations of Krishna’s divinity to Akrura et.al. that tie-up with Narada’s visions in MB’s Narayaniya. Hiltebeitel notes that the 36 clusters of surprise and wonder in HV “speak the same language as the MB”, not that of bhakti rasa. Both works stress “devotion to the vigorous heroic deity in the same world of wonders and not on his being at the centre of the devotions of his parents, sons, friends, lovers, or admiring sages.” It is by looking at MB and HV as works of literature and not primarily as theological and ethical texts that their wonders and surprises work, hinting at “a below-the-surface sense of sacrificial beauty.”

Hiltebeitel explores this aspect through the conflagration set off by Krishna’s Vaishnava energy during his ascesis and by that of Shiva when Uma covers his eyes, that consume life on the Himalayas. The same Vaishnava tejas decapitates Shishupala, whose energy merges into Krishna. The production of amrita by churning the ocean that destroys all life on Mount Mandara, mingling their “rasas” and by the Nara-Narayana duo killing asuras is analogous to this. In HV the acme is Krishna uplifting Mount Govardhana and simultaneously becoming the mountain as Indra drenches it, just as he did Mount Mandara. The Govardhana incident would have been a far more appropriate cover than the Kalighat painting depicting Krishna with Yashoda milking a cow. Hiltebeitel shows how HV is original in “thematizing an aesthetic of sacrifice” in which the Earth becomes “sacrificially beautiful…it is through her that all forms of life and death flow meaningfully together.” The Harivamsha Parva closes emphasizing that Krishna is the sole wonder and that all wonders emerge from Vishnu, the most blessed. HV is as much an adbhutarasa text as MB and is part and parcel of the epic.

DRAUPADI THE GODDESS VIRA-SHAKTI

By

Alf Hiltebeitel: The Cult of Draupadi: Mythologies from Gingee to Kurukshetra Vol.1 (Motilal Banarasidass, Delhi, pp.487, Rs.200/-)

The 1980s witnessed a remarkable resurgence of Indian mythology in literary, theatrical and academic spheres. If in literature we saw the gripping Hindi dodecalogy of Ram Kumar Bhramar on the Mahabharata while novels on the epic came in Bengali from Kalkut and Dipak Chandra, in Oriya from Pratibha Ray, in Kannada from S.L. Bhyrappa, and in English from Maggi Lidchi Grassi and Elaine Aron, on the stage the agony of Draupadi, five-husbanded-yet-husbandless, was unforgettably brought home in Shaoli Mitra’s one-woman performance, Nathavati anathavat. In academia, Dr. Alf Hiltebeitel produced the first volume of his profound study of the cult of Draupadi in 1988 which is now finally available in an Indian edition from Motilal Banarsidass.

Tracing the South Indian cult of Draupadi to Gingee (it also exists in Sri Lanka, Fiji and Singapore), Hiltebeitel launches an elaborate investigation into how it incorporates dimensions of a multiplicity of cults relating to village goddesses, heroes, lineage/caste/boundary deities, possession and even those of the supreme triad of the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. The Draupadi cult is a fascinating combination of the folk and the classical traditions, which the scholar investigates chiefly through the Terukkuttu dramas (street plays) reaching out to the classical and vernacular epic traditions as well as analogous cults for further insights. To provide a focus for this considerably involved phenomenon Hiltebeitel inspiredly seizes upon an 18 verse invocatory song sung at the beginning and the end of Draupadi festivals. It is the ramifications of these 18 verses that are brought out painstakingly in the study, of which this is only the first volume.  

Hiltebeitel finds that Draupadi is actually a multi-form of Durga and Kali as Vira Shakti/Vira Panchali with her virginity repeatedly stressed. In this aspect, her power is destructive and dangerous even to her husbands. Her children are born out of drops of blood pierced out of Bhima’s hand with her nails as she returns after nocturnal foraging. Like her sister-goddess Ankalamman, whose cult shares the same region, Draupadi roams Kali-like in forests and crematoria. The Telegu tradition has Krishna explain to Bhima that Draupadi is the primal Shakti whom he had promised to satiate with human flesh and that is why he has arranged the Kurukshetra War, during which she roams the battlefield at night consuming corpses. Sensing that Krishna has lent part of his energy to Bhima to solve his problem of satisfying her sexually, Draupadi demands that Krishna now marry her, which he promises to do in future as Jagannatha of Puri. To Hiltebeitel it remains a mystery how this promise is kept.

However, the answer is available in Charolette Vaudeville’s 1982 paper on ‘Krishna and the Great Goddess’ in The Divine Consort  which notes that Ekanamsa/Subhadra/Durga is found in the consort’s position, that is the left side, of Jagannatha when the icon of Baladeva is absent, and that the original temple in Puri was occupied by Maha-bhairavi Adishakti under the name Vimala-devi. Draupadi’s Shakti aspect is conclusively established at the end of the Terukkuttu cycle in the stance Draupadi takes atop Duryodhana’s thigh or chest, like Durga atop Mahishasura, pulling out his intestines while Krishna braids her hair. The 18-day war covered by the Terukkuttu cycle marks the end of a festival that can, therefore, be said to recapitulate the Navaratri or Vijayadashami festival of Durga. 

In Draupadi’s victory a critical role is played by the folk-figure of Pottu Raja/Pormannan, the Buffalo-demon/king turned devotee, who brings her the five instruments required for her victory. A unique feature of the cult is the icon of the Muslim devotee Muttal Ravuttan who is analogous to the Marathi Khandoba. Draupadi defeats Muttal is after he has imprisoned the Pandavas and becomes the guardian of the north. Another fascinating instance of local myth-making is the second birth of Draupadi invoked by King Cunitan (Sunitha), a descendant of the Pandavas, to save the kingdom from the hundred-headed demon Rochakan/Acalamman. As the demon has the boon that whoever cuts off his hundredth head will die if it touches the ground, Pottu Raja agrees to hold it forever. At the spot where Draupadi disappeared after killing the demon, the Gingee temple was built with a figure of Pottu Raja before it holding the demon’s head. Hiltebeitel perceptively notes how the cult splits into two the functions of Bhairava: the role of the dog who keeps the blood of Brahma’s head from touching the ground and the position of kshetrapala go to Muttal Ravuttan; the all-destroying Brahmic head stuck to his hand goes to Pottu Raja, keeping in hold the destructive power and reminding us of the severed head of the buffalo-demon Mahisha.  

The Terukkuttu cycle also reveals a different facet of Krishna. His overwhelming concern is that the Pandavas fulfil their war vows without being upstaged by their sons who are seen as rakshasic. Hence, he brings about the deaths of Aravan (Iravan), Ghatotkacha, Abhimanyu ‘ each of whom would have destroyed the Kaurava army in a day ‘ and of Draupadi’s five sons.

There are a couple of issues that remain unresolved in Hiltebeitel’s thesis. On page 323, he speaks of the coalescence of serpent and elephant in Aravan’s ancestry by making out that Ulupi belongs to the line of Airavata ‘the elephant mount of Indra.’ This is incorrect. This Airavata is the name of a serpent and is not identical with Indra’s mount, as the Adi Parva of the epic makes abundantly clear while listing the major serpents. On page 397, he expatiates on the theme of flawed caste-character of the five Kaurava generals, which certainly cannot apply to Bhishma and Shalya. He does not provide any evidence for the alleged rakshasic nature of Draupadi’s sons. Again, on page 288 he states that only Villi has the nelli (myrobalan) episode in which Draupadi’s desire for a sixth husband is exposed. However, this occurs also in the Bengali Mahabharata composed by Kashiram Das where, using a mango, Krishna gets Draupadi to confess her desire for Karna as her sixth husband. While elaborating the South Indian myths about Krishna’s role in Karna’s death he does not take into account the rich myths regarding the last moments of Karna prevalent in the vernacular traditions in western and eastern India which enhance his nobility to sublime heights as in the Bengali play Nara Narayana by Kshirodeprasad Bidyabinode and in Shivaji Sawant’s epic Marathi novel Mrityunjay. 

These, however, hardly detract from the major contribution made by Dr. Hiltebeitel to the understanding of our own mythic traditions ‘about which our own intelligentsia are criminally insouciant’, as kept alive even in the twenty first century through the folk theatre, which is swiftly dying out in the absence of financial support. Enriched with 34 invaluable plates recording key events in Terukkuttu performances and a number of maps laying out the cult territory, this thesis ought to awaken the South Zone Cultural Centre to the need of reviving our dying tradition by providing the necessary support. Otherwise Draupadi the goddess might again have to bewail her fate as nathavati anathavat, ‘many-husbanded yet husbandless’!

Freud, Bose and the Mahabharata

By

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 2nd 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 (16th to 11th century BCE) into the ritualistic three other Vedas (11th to 9th century BCE) and then their branches (8th to 3rd century BCE) climaxing in the encyclopaedic MB in the fourth stage in the 2nd 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