The Mahabharata The Telegraph 22dec06

Friday, December 22, 2006

ENQUIRY OF AN EPIC Editor's Choice The Mahabharata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition By Chaturvedi Badrinath, Orient Longman, Rs 1095 The Mahabharata is one of the greatest and grandest books in the world. It is longer than both The Iliad and The Odyssey but it has not generated even a small percentage of the critical literature that surrounds the two Greek epics which are seen, with every justification, as the springs of European literature. The Mahabharata is more than literature. It is, as this book demonstrates, a treatise on philosophy as well as a tract on the conduct of everyday affairs. This is not an easy book to read. But it is a rewarding read. Its difficulty lies in its mode of presentation. The author seeks to support every point he makes through quotations from the original text which Wise words are accompanied by his own translations. The ordinary reader, not familiar with Sanskrit, would have preferred a paraphrase or a summary of the text but Chaturvedi Badrinath, with his formidable learning and command of the text, is unwilling to make any such concessions. The Mahabharata, as is well known, has 18 parvas or chapters. Only four of these are directly connected with the great war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas at Kurukshetra. The other chapters deal with a variety of issues, which are brought to the reader through stories and, sometimes, through stories within stories. Badrinath draws his material mostly from those 14 chapters that are not retelling the story of the great war. The focus of the book thus automatically becomes different from the conventional one. What are some of the issues that the epic brings to the fore? Badrinath writes, “The concerns of the Mahabharata are the concerns of everyday life everywhere. In its inquiry into the human condition it raises those very questions the answers to which we all seek in the diverse circumstances of our lives. What is happiness? What is unhappiness? What is truth? What is untruth? Are they absolutes? And also whose truth? What is violence? Is one free to make oneself what one is? What is governance? What is order? And what is disorder? What relation do they have with time and place? What is death? And what is that which is deathless?” These are all profound questions but the epic addresses them in a manner which brings to them a practical as well as an abstract and philosophical dimension. The Mahabharata’s mode of inquiry is conversational. The problems are presented either through stories that are narrated in answer to a question or as a dialogue, for example, between Bhishma and Yudhisthira in the Santi parva or the Anushashan parva. Here it continues with the mode that was established in the Upanishads. The latter, Badrinath notes, begins and ends with an abstract problem of knowledge, seeking to know the nature of reality. The epic begins and ends with concrete human life in all its complexities. A scholar once remarked that reading the Mahabharata is like entering a dark and dense forest to seek the truth. A book like this one is a help to light up the darkness. Truth remains elusive. http://www.telegraphindia.com/section/frontpage/index.asp