Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (90 page)
Read Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling Online
Authors: Carole Satyamurti
“I am Sahadeva!”
“I am Draupadi!”
“I am Dhrishtadyumna!”
“We are the sons of Draupadi!”
Yudhishthira, horrified and bewildered,
could not understand. It seemed to him
that everything he knew, and had believed
throughout his life, had been turned upside down.
“What madness is this?” he asked himself.
“What have these beloved people done
that they should be consigned to hell like this?
It makes no sense at all that Duryodhana
should be enjoying every luxury
while these dear ones, who have been most scrupulous
in observing dharma—and all these months
have been steadfast in yoga—are suffering.
Am I dreaming, perhaps? Is this delusion?”
Yudhishthira began to blaze with anger.
“What kind of beings are the gods we worship
with such devotion? What is dharma worth
if these good souls can be so cruelly treated?”
He spoke to the messenger. “I shall stay here.
How could I enjoy gross privilege
in heaven, having seen what you have shown me?
My presence here seems to bring some relief
to these dear people. Therefore, I shall remain
to comfort them. This is where I belong.”
The messenger went away. But in no time
the gods appeared, with Indra at their head,
and, among them, the lord of righteousness.
Immediately, the scene changed completely.
Dark became light. The dreadful sights and smells
disappeared. A gentle, fragrant breeze
blew all around. There were no tortured beings,
no rotting corpses, no lacerating trees.
“Yudhishthira,” said Indra, “do not be angry.
You will suffer no more of these illusions.
Hell has to be witnessed by every king.
Whoever first encounters heaven will afterward
experience hell. He who endures hell first
will afterward see heaven. Sinful people
enjoy the fruits of their good actions first,
spending some time in heaven before hell.
For those whose lives were mainly virtuous
it is the opposite. Because you tricked Drona
by letting him believe his son was dead,
you, through a trick, had to spend time in hell.
It was the same for your brothers. Illusion
caused them to suffer, just for a short time.
Now that is at an end. Shed grief and anger.
Your brothers and your kinsfolk have now gone
to those realms where they enjoy happiness.”
Lord Dharma spoke. “My son, I am highly pleased.
You have passed all the tests I set for you.
By the Dvaita lake, you answered my riddles.
You showed loyalty even to a dog.
And here, out of compassion, you chose to share
the suffering of others. There is no one
in all the worlds more virtuous than you.
You must now bathe in the celestial Ganga
where you will cast off your human body.”
This Yudhishthira did. And, with his body,
all resentment, grief, hostility
also fell away. Then the gods took him
to the place where everyone he loved,
as well as all the sons of Dhritarashtra,
were enjoying bliss. There he saw Krishna
in his divine form; and each of his brothers
transformed by splendor, yet recognizable,
associating with the gods, their fathers.
He saw Karna, with Surya, the sun god.
He saw Draupadi, radiant with light,
accompanied by all her royal sons.
He saw Abhimanyu. He saw Pandu
reunited with Kunti and Madri.
He saw Bhishma, Drona . . . so many heroes
it would take an eon to name them all.
“Now,” said Ugrashravas, “I have related
the story of the Pandavas and Kauravas
in its entirety.” The bard fell silent.
Then he rose, preparing to take his leave,
but the Naimisha Forest seers detained him,
clamorous for more: “What happened then
at King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice?
What did the king say when Vaishampayana
had finished telling Vyasa’s epic tale?”
“He too wished to know what happened next
(since no one wants a great story to end),
bombarding Vaishampayana with questions:
Did the heroes enjoy heaven for ever?
Did they attain freedom from death and rebirth?
What about those who had not been mentioned—
Ghatotkacha, say, and Jayadratha?
“So, with the approval of Vyasa,
his disciple answered the king’s questions.
‘When a person goes to Indra’s realm,
spending time in heaven and in hell,
not all the fruit of their actions on earth,
their karma, is used up. In the course of time,
they are reborn in whatever body
they deserve, according to the balance
of the good and bad deeds that still cling to them.
Those who have no remaining karma
are not reborn, and reach absolute freedom.
‘For most of the heroes whose earthly deeds
are told in Vyasa’s epic poem—whose names
we do not even know—it is not revealed
what was their journey in the afterlife,
nor what was the nature of their next rebirth.
But some of those whose parts in the great events
were most significant were incarnated
portions of gods and other divine beings.
After their task in this world was accomplished,
they returned and fused with those deities.’
And Vaishampayana listed by name
the demons, rakshasas and deities
associated with each character
in the great narrative.”
The forest seers
urged Ugrashravas to tell them more
(as the king had urged Vaishampayana)
concerning the creation of the cosmos,
and how it happened that the first king, Prithu,
was appointed. What was it that caused
the battle between gods and demons, leading
Vishnu-Narayana to descend to earth?
They asked the bard to tell what he had heard
about the life of Krishna Vasudeva
and his people, the Vrishnis and Andhakas.
Ugrashravas described the early life
of Krishna and Balarama, their childish pranks
among the cowherders, and Krishna’s part
in the Vrishnis’ migration to Dvaraka.
Many tales were told, but at last the bard
turned to leave the forest and travel on.
No one knew where next he might relate
the marvelous story.
These were his parting words:
“What is found in the poem I have recited—
concerning dharma, riches and enjoyment,
as well as the path to final liberation—
may be found elsewhere. But anything
it does not contain will be found nowhere.
“It is sacred, equal to the Vedas.
It should be heard by everyone on earth,
the most exalted as well as the most humble.
To read it brings enormous benefit.
To recite it spreads enlightenment,
for whoever gives voice to these teachings
takes on the mantle of the wise Vyasa.
It is said that the day’s sins may be dissolved
by listening to a part of it at night
in a joyful spirit, with a trustful heart,
with a perfect quality of attention.
“Just as Himavat is a mine of jewels,
the Mahabharata is a fathomless
mine of wisdom, precious gems of knowledge
for anyone receptive to the truth.
“We are born, we live our lives, we die;
happiness and grief arise and fade.
But righteousness is measureless, eternal.”
So ends the matchless Mahabharata,
composed by Vyasa, for the good of all.
The Poetry of the
Mahabharata
VINAY DHARWADKER
Dites, qu’avez vous vu?
Tell us, what have you seen?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE,
Le Voyage
(1857)
ROBERT LOWELL,
Imitations
(1961)
1
O
NE OF THE
pleasures of Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the
Mahabharata
is that it pursues a variety of goals and accomplishes them with seemingly effortless skill. It is a contemporary poem in English that seeks to stand aesthetically on its own, to be valued for its craft, thematic significance, and imaginative scope and depth. At the same time, however, it is overwhelmingly concerned with representing another poem as transparently as possible, even though the latter is remote in time and place as well as language and culture, and embodies a very different set of shaping principles. On a different plane, Satyamurti’s poem sifts through the numerous interwoven stories of the original in order to fashion a cogent storyline, and creates a narrative momentum that will hold our interest continuously. But it also pulls us in other directions, as it flexibly accommodates a mass of material from Sanskrit, and absorbs an abundance of unfamiliar terms, concepts, and qualities. Even as it maintains balance and restraint, the book takes some remarkable risks: adapting iambic pentameter and English blank verse to its practical tasks, it achieves a monumental size of almost 27,000 lines and 200,000 words. More than two and a half times the length of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and over three times the length of Wordsworth’s 1850
Prelude
, it emerges modestly as the longest successful experiment in English narrative poetry in modern times.
Astonishing as Satyamurti’s technical accomplishments are, however, it is her desire to re-narrate an ancient Indian poem that defines her primary purpose in these pages. But what kind of work is the
Mahabharata
itself, and what are its attributes that a modern version ought to represent? How does this English poem actually relate to its largely inaccessible Sanskrit source? And what sort of world do the original
Mahabharata
and this innovative retelling open up for us, as cosmopolitan readers here and now? Wendy Doniger’s Foreword and Satyamurti’s Preface offer two kinds of answer to these and related questions; in this Afterword, I would like to explore a third angle of vision that complements their perspectives.
TEXTUAL FORMATION
2
The
Mahabharata
became a subject of international interest beyond the borders of Asia almost two hundred and fifty years ago, when the typographer and philologist Charles Wilkins, working in Calcutta under the patronage of Warren Hastings, then governor-general of the East India Company’s Indian territories, started to translate it from Sanskrit into English. Like most other translators who have followed him, Wilkins was unable to complete the project, but he did publish his rendering of one part it, the
Bhagavad Gita
, in 1785, which proved to be both popular and influential in Europe.
3
Ever since then, scholars and commentators have been divided into two main camps about the form and classification of the
Mahabharata
, especially in literary terms: one camp essentially views it as a “library,” or a loose-leaf “encyclopedia” at best, whereas the other regards it, first and foremost, as a particular poem in Sanskrit, with a well-defined structure and definite aesthetic properties. It may be difficult to pinpoint the work’s authorship, or to fix its date, place, and process of composition the way we can for modern works, but uncertainties of this kind do not deprive it of specificity as a Sanskrit poem. The poem’s unifying principle does not lie in a “coherent point of view” or a fixed set of themes on the surface, but lies instead, as A. K. Ramanujan also argued in the 1980s, in a multilayered integration of shape and substance, sources and ends, at a deeper level of organization.
4
The aesthetic and imaginative aspects of the
Mahabharata
are vital factors in its reception in world literature today.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Indian and Euro-American scholars came to generally agree that, given the complexity and importance of the
Mahabharata
, it was essential to establish a definitive text in its original Sanskrit form. After some delay, a team of Indian Sanskritists, led mainly by V. S. Sukthankar, took up the task independently at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute at Poona (now Pune). They collated and calibrated 1,259 surviving manuscripts, from different parts of the subcontinent, and rigorously evaluated every word and every line in more than 89,000 verses attributed to the poem, before publishing its critical edition in 21 volumes between 1919 and 1969.
5
In the course of the past eight decades, the international community of Sanskrit scholars has arrived at a clear consensus that the Poona critical edition gives us the best version of the
Mahabharata
as a poem that possibly can be reconstructed in modern times.
AUTHORSHIP
All the information we can gather and all the inferences and assessments we can make indicate that the poem reconstructed in the critical edition was composed collectively in a preclassical variety of Sanskrit by successive generations of poets between about 400 BCE and 400 CE, on the Gangetic plains in north India, mostly under imperial regimes.
6
However, in view of the astonishing connectedness, consistency, and cogency the poem achieves on such a temporal and textual scale, it is conceivable that, at the end of the compositional cycle, the text may well have been assembled, edited, and integrated by a single group of poets, possibly working under one master editor, on the eve of India’s classical age (which runs roughly from 400 to 1200 CE). Given our bias as modern readers—that a poem is “never finished, only abandoned”—it is plausible that the canonical Sanskrit form of the
Mahabharata
that we have today is the form in which that final editor or group of poets “abandoned” it to the future accidents of history some sixteen hundred years ago.
