What do these contradictory exegeses suggest about the message of the Mahabharata in today's India? They reflect, certainly, the undeniable fact that the great epic, like many great epics, has the capacity to be all things to all men. The hubristic claim for the epic, in its own words — “What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere” — was thus quite literally true, at least over the thousand years the epic took to arrive at its settled shape in around a.d. 500. Whereas the classical Indian sastras were treatises on artha (wealth), dharma (faith), kama (pleasure), or moksha (salvation), the Mahabharata, uniquely, is simultaneously arthasastra, dharmasastra, kamasastra, and mokshasastra — a “fifth Veda,” as it has been called, of material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical, life, but unlike the other four a secular rather than religious work, a Veda of the Indian masses. Some scholars consider the eclecticism of the epic valuable: Father Robert Antoine, that remarkable Jesuit Sanskritist, saw in the Mahabharata “a mirror of Indian life throughout several centuries, a mirror in which popular beliefs, social customs, religious practice and speculation, folklore, civil and criminal law are reflected.” Others, like R. C. Dutt, were less charmed, seeing the congeries of elements as an unattractive jumble. Either way, to distill a single absolute message from the epic as a whole seems to me a disingenuous exercise. The Mahabharata offers enough textual evidence for practically any conclusion you wish to derive from it.
Look at some of the issues the epic has been cited on in recent years. The great climax of Kurukshetra and its aftermath have given the Mahabharata its standing as the great tale of war and destruction, an urgent reminder of the perils of the nuclear age. The discussion between Krishna and Arjun in the Bhagavad Gita has been seen variously as upholding righteous war, rejecting pacifism, underlining compassion, articulating an ethic of action, and stressing the importance of duty, including caste duty. Draupadi's challenge to the male elders when she is “lost” by Yudhishtira in the game of dice has been hailed as a spirited battle cry for women's rights; but others have recalled that the epic, at least in its southern recension, demeans and belittles women (in C. R. Deshpande's words, the Mahabharata claims that “if a man has one thousand tongues, lives for a hundred years, and does nothing except describe the faults of woman, he will die without finishing the job”). Many of the values and mores of the epic would be seen as illegal, immoral, or impractical today. Controversy still rages in the popular press over whether Draupadi “really” had five husbands; the text can be read to mean that she was married to all of them, but also to support the conservative view that she was only married to the eldest, Yudhishtira (the only one whose freedom she asked for when Dhritarashtra offered her a boon). Before any inferences are drawn from that for contemporary society, there is the fact that polyandry is still practiced in the Jaunsar Babar region of Uttar Pradesh. On the grander questions, the Mahabharata offers a variety of thoughts on the meaning of life and death: episodes like Bhishma's death and Yudhishtira's vision of hell offer rich material, not all of it internally consistent.
Which brings me to my point: the Mahabharata is what you make of it. Its relevance to today's India is the relevance that today's Indians want to see in it. After all, the epic has, throughout the ages, been the object of adaptation, interpolation, reinterpretation, and expurgation by a number of re-tellers, each seeking to reflect what he saw as relevant to his time. Its contemporary retellings — whether B. R. Chopra's soap-operatic version on television or mine in satirical fiction — merely confirm the Mahabharata's traditional status as the repository of the national myth. This includes the stories, the ideas, the social and political customs and practices, the prescriptions and values, that the reteller considers significant to his retelling.
In this sense, to retell the Mahabharata is simply to recall the kind of stories Indian society tells about itself. In many cultures, myths and epics both contribute to and reflect the national consciousness. India's has inevitably changed in the two thousand years since the original Mahabharata was composed. What, I asked myself, would a twentieth-century Ved Vyas tell about his India, about the great events of his times? So I used the great epic as the framework for a satirical reworking of the major Indian political events of this century, from the days of British colonial rule to the struggle for freedom and the triumphs and disappointments of independence. In the process, I tried to reject some old assumptions, derived as much from the colonial view of India as from India's own uncritically accepted versions of our past. In my story I have set out to explore what has made India and nearly unmade it, and to consider the nature of truth in life as in fiction, in tradition as in history.
The choice of historical events to portray was easily made. The mode of their portrayal was another matter. That the Mahabharata characters and episodes mean something to most Indians added a dimension to the fiction that the novelist's craft alone could not convey. In applying the story of Gandhari (the epic heroine who tied a blindfold over her eyes in order not to see more of the world than her blind husband) to the much-sacrificing, neglected wife of a visionary nationalist, or in changing the outcome of the fight with the demon Bakasura to mirror the nature of the Sino-Indian War, I am borrowing from ancient tradition to make a point about recent history.
At the same time I did not want to descend to the national tendency of hagiology: dealing with subjects as sensitive as tradition and history, I judged a degree of irreverence to be essential in the telling. All the more so, indeed, since I would be exploring potentially portentous themes. I took heart from the conviction that irreverence in the Indian tradition is not sacrilege: as the Mahabharata amply demonstrates, the epics themselves ascribe human qualities, imperfections, base motives, and feet of clay even to the gods.
Of course my irreverence is not an end in itself. In the area of style, for instance, I frequently broke into light verse, and not merely for amusement; I was deliberately recalling the fact that many translators of the Mahabharata, defeated in their attempts to convey the special quality of the world's longest epic poem, have tried to combine prose and poetry in their renditions, with varying degrees of success. My various literary and less-than-literary devices serve an attempt to look at Indian political history through the refraction of two different kinds of light. One is, of course, the light cast by the past, by the values taught to us in our mythology, by the examples set by the Mahabharata. The other is the light cast by a satirical view of the present, which by deliberate simplification and fictionalization (one might even say conscious distortion) throws certain trends and issues into sharper relief than history makes possible. This certainly applies to the real-life “parallels” with the Mahabharata that reviewers have been quick to seize upon, but it is also valid where no parallel exists. To me, for instance, the upright Yudhishtir's smugness and hypocrisy found a contemporary echo in a recent political figure, while the Ekalavya story (where the lower-caste boy, who has mastered archery by eavesdropping on Drona's classes, cuts off his thumb on Drona's demand) had to be changed to make a twentieth-century point.
At the same time the yoking of the Mahabharata to modern history restricted some of my fictional options: as the novel progressed, I was obliged to abandon novelistic conventions and develop some characters who are walking metaphors. Draupadi, thus, became emblematic of Indian democracy, her attempted disrobing a symbol of what was sought to be done to democracy not so long ago. Equally, the story of Jarasandha, the king who was defeated by being torn in two and flung in different directions, mirrored the 1971 breaking up of Pakistan.
All this needed a style as varied in tone, form, and scansion as the epic itself, with its numerous interpolations and digressions: the story of India, like that of the Mahabharata, had to come across as a tale of many tellers, even if it is ascribed only to one.
This is why I agree with the critic who has suggested that The Great Indian Novel “speaks for an India of multiple realities, and of multiple interpretations of reality.” So, I would
suggest, does the epic; and so does Indian culture, that elusive construct. Throughout my novel runs an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of truth, and a conscious evocation of the many truths that have helped give shape and substance to the idea of India. My fiction is infused, in this sense, with the “greatness” of India, of Maha Bharata, a greatness that has emerged from the fusion of its myths with the aspirations of its history.
My motivation is a conscious one. Most developing countries are also formerly colonized countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriated the cultural definition of its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land. Think of India in the English-speaking world even today, and you think in images conditioned by Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, by the Bengal Lancers and The Jewel in the Crown. But their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine; and my fiction seeks to reclaim my country's heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress, a story of India; for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them.
Of course, mine is an Indian voice in the English language: our multiple identity is expressed in a multiplicity of tongues. At the same time, as an English-language writer, I acknowledge that the colonial connection also helped us find our Indian voice. Early in the novel, a British official remarks, “Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.” (It was no accident that my novel was first published by a British publisher!)
And so my allusions are not only to Indian myths, ancient and modern. I have tried, in the story, in its metaphors and in stray references throughout the text, to take account of other fictional attempts to depict the Indo-British encounter. (Which is why there are chapters called “Passages through India” and “The Bungle Book” — and even, in another sly dig at Kipling, “Him.”) It is no accident that the fictional re-creation of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in this novel takes place at the Bibigarh Gardens. Paul Scott took the Bibigarh (the site of the massacre of English civilians in 1857) from Indian history to make it the site of the rape of Daphne Manners by several Indians in his otherwise admirable The Jewel in the Crown. I am hardly the first to point out that the use by both Scott and E. M. Forster of rape as a metaphor for the colonial connection is a bit odd, since the facts of imperialism would suggest that if any violation occurred, it was of India by the English, and not the other way around. So I reclaimed the Bibigarh Gardens for my side, as it were, by casting it as the location for a historical massacre of Indian civilians by British troops.
No name in the book, not even of a minor character or place, is casually chosen: each is derived either from the epic itself (Lord Drewpad, for instance, is an anglicization of King Drupad) or from writings (and writers — Kipling, Scott, A. L. Basham, Beverly Nichols) about India, unless it is a direct reference to real geography (Comea is obviously Goa, Hangari Das a personification of Hungary during the 1956 Soviet invasion, and so on).
So in reminding readers of an epic past, I am not writing of some atavistic view of India, an India of distant greatness untouched by the rest of the world. In fact the sensibility from which my narrator speaks is an eclectic one, heir to centuries of Hindu, Muslim, and colonial rule. At the same time, I see his telling of this story as a part of the challenge of post-Independence development, a narrative to set alongside the railway lines, the steel mills, the space stations, of the new India.
The novel begins with the proposition that India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such sentiments are, of course, the privilege of the satirist; but the notion of decay apart, I am trying to remind readers of an India that was indeed highly developed once — an India that evolved a settled civilization five thousand years ago, an India whose level of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy made it perhaps the most developed country on earth in 300 b.c., an India that invented the zero and the decimal system, an India that evolved two major systems of classical music and five of classical dance, developed highly sophisticated techniques of medicine and meditation, exported silk and spices, and was the birthplace of four of the world's major religious faiths as well as home to many more. I could go on, but I am not seeking to romanticize a mythic past; rather, when my cantankerous old narrator declares, at the beginning of the novel, that “everything in India is overdeveloped,” he is deliberately provoking his readers to forget their usual view of an underdeveloped country as one devoid of everything the material world today generally values. In the telling of the story of India, I try to evoke an idea of development that transcends — but does not deny — the conventional socioeconomic indices.
I realize I may be providing fodder for those who have penned learned analyses about some Indian writers’ “anxiety of Indianness.” To me, my Indianness is not a matter of anxiety. I see cultural reassertion (the reassertion of a pluralist Indian culture) as a vital part of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India — as vital as economic development. We are all familiar with the notion that “man does not live by bread alone.” In India, I would argue that music, dance, art, and the telling of stories are indispensable to our ability to cope with the human condition. After all, why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive, if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life — it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life. Our poorest men and women feel the throb of culture on their pulse, for they tell stories to their children under the starlit skies — stories of their land and its heroes, stories of the earth and its mysteries, stories that have gone into making them what they are. And (as I suggested in my second novel, Show Business) they see and hear stories too, in the flickering lights of the thousands of cinemas in our land, where myth and escapist fantasy intertwine and moral righteousness almost invariably triumphs with the closing credits. In India and elsewhere, there is no “development” without fiction.
Without culture, development becomes mere materialism, a set of figures on GNP tables, a subject for economists and planners rather than a matter of people. And if people are to develop, it is unthinkable that they would develop without culture, without song, and dance, and music, and myth, without stories about themselves, and in turn, without expressing their views on their present lot and their future hopes. Development implies dynamism; dynamism requires freedom, the freedom to create; creativity is both a condition and a guarantee of culture. This is why it is worth retelling our ancient stories in new and original ways — why literature, as Grass would have it, must refresh memory. As we hurtle into the twenty-first century, we need ways of remembering all that happened in the previous twenty (or in India's case, the previous thirty-five).
As a novelist, I believe in distracting in order to instruct — my novels are, to some degree, didactic works masquerading as entertainments. I subscribe to Molière's credo, “Le devoir de la comédie est de corriger les hommes en les divertissant.” You have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to what end? What is the responsibility of the creative artist, the writer, in a developing society? In this exegesis about my own novel I have pointed to one responsibility — to contribute toward, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, variegated, and multiple, in the Indian case) of our postcolonial society. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism, which has in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what has made us, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. In
this process, culture and development are fundamentally linked and interdependent. The task of the creative artist is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his or her culture, just as society strives, through development, to find new ways of being and becoming.
In reiterating the epic, the reteller and his audience are recalling the shaping of their own cultural identity. Yet it is this identity-asserting quality of the Mahabharata that has also, to some observers, made it dangerous in contemporary India. “For the lost generation of today,” wrote the cultural commentator Chidananda DasGupta, “a generation that has become incapable of reading it in [the] original and too impatient even to read complete translations, the degraded version on television… is still a revelation of an unsuspected facet of our national heritage.” In the process, DasGupta regretted that the votaries of Hindutva had laid claim to it, “that one of the world's greatest and most universal epics should be reduced to the religious text of a community.” The writer Sukumar Mitra, deploring the “transfigurement” of the epic “into a religio-didactic spectacle,” saw a sinister purpose behind the TV-inspired Mahabharata revival:
The message is that modern Bharata must be turned again into a “dharmakshetra-kurukshetra”… to regain for the saints and God's chosen communities the right to perform selfless karma…. In the present troubled state of Bharat, God's agents, aided by an enthusiastic Doordarshan, are stirring up 82% of the country's souls to the doom of the rest, to receive their redeemer… for the re-establishment of dharma.
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