Many Mahabharatas

Chinmay Sharma

Many Mahabharatas

Chinmay Sharma

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The quest for an authentic version of the Mahābhārata reveals diverse viewpoints, highlighting the impossibility of establishing a single original text due to the myriad of manuscripts and recensions. Scholars like V.S. Sukthankar emphasized that the notion of an original Mahābhārata is more about exerting control over narratives than genuine historical inquiry. The article advocates for recognizing the multiple interpretations of the Mahābhārata, stressing the importance of understanding its cultural significance rather than fixating on an elusive core.

Many Mahābhāratas “No Hindu reads the Mahābhārata for the first time. And when he does get to read it, he doesn’t usually read it in Sanskrit,” wrote A.K. Ramanujan the renowned Tamil and folklore specialist. Mahābhārata is so deeply imbricated in visual, performance and textual culture in India that everyone knows at least some part of the story. And because the story has travelled widely over time, space, language, and genre, there are not one, two, but hundred ‘versions’ of the story. Yet a common refrain has been to understand the Mahābhārata and its various iterations as a singular work. This has manifested itself most often as the quest for the authentic Mahābhārata, the text in all its supposed pristine glory, often obscuring the vast cultural spread of the story. Ironically, the quest for the fabled original takes on different meanings, depending upon the knight errant. In my conversations with friends and college students, some assume and/or fancy that if they stare at the text hard enough, it will shed its various textual accretions and reveal its fabled original core; others reach for the seemingly autochthonous ‘folk’ tales. Some, like Bibek Debroy, argue that the Critical Edition is the sole Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Nothing of course could be farther from the truth. V.S. Sukthankar, the general editor of the Modern Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata pointed out almost half a century ago in his Prolegomena, concluded that an ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ was an “ideal but impossible desideratum” cannot be found— there simply isn’t any empirical method or facts to prove any part of the text as older than other parts of the text. Any such theory remains a hypothesis supported by conjecture. Why so, you might ask. For starters, the oldest available manuscript dates from the 16th century. This is hardly old, considering that the prevalent scholarly consensus is that the Mahābhārata was written between 400 BCE and 400 CE, which has been contested by scholars like Alf Hiltebeitel. The extant manuscripts are the handiwork of editors—Sukthankar mentions seven. The earliest available recension is attributed to Devabodha, and the most popular recension in North India before the Critical Edition, to Nilakantha. Nilakantha’s recension is also popularly known as the vulgate and was the go-to text in North India for Mahābhārata scholars before the Critical Edition was completed. We are presented with the problem that the oldest available text dates from at least thousand years after the Sanskrit text was supposed to have been written, and the texts that we do have always reach us through the refracted lens of their editors. The idea of creating a critical edition when first floated by the Oxford Indologist Moriz Winternitz in the International Congress of Orientalists, was considered quixotic. “At first”, Sukthankar writes, quoting Winternitz, “the idea of a critical edition of the Mahābhārata met with great scepticism. Most scholars were of the opinion that it was impossible to restore a critical text of the Great Epic, and that we should have to be satisfied with editing the South Indian text, while the North Indian text was represented well enough by the Calcutta and A version of this article first appeared in the Scribbler— https://scribbler.co/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. The article can be accessed here— http://128.199.169.58/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. My thanks to Rajiv Naresh for publishing it. 1 Bombay edition.” Work finally commenced in 1919 under the stewardship of Sukthankar, a student of Winternitz and took almost half a century to complete. In that time, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) at Poona, where the edition was being compiled, collected 1,259 manuscripts in as many as 12 different scripts, of which 734 were actually used. Perhaps the very idea of so many versions of 100,000 verse long poem makes you dizzy— don’t worry, that was the easy bit. Mahābhārata has travelled across languages and forms, not only in India but South East Asia as well. The Hindi poet Vishnudas wrote the Pāṇḍavcarit in 1435, the Telegu poet Pingali Suranna wrote Rāghavpāṇḍavīyam. Akbar commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahābhārata, called the Razmnāmā, completed between 1584 and 1586. The Sanskrit playwright, Bhāsa, created a cycle of five plays based on the Mahābhārata which was directed for Delhi’s stage by K.V. Panikkar over the 1970s and 80s, while playwrights like Dharamvir Bharati and Girish Karnad produced their own magisterial works. The story was adapted for Parsi theatre for the first time (and only time in its totality) by Narayan Prasad ‘Betab’ in 1913. The story has been reworked in prose and verse in the last century by many authors and poets, including Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Narendra Kohli, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, as well as Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), and three television serials. ‘Folk’ performances of the story are or were prevalent in Garhwal (Pandava Lila), Chattisgarh (Pandwani), and Tamil Nadu (Terukuttu, Kattaikottam). Almost unbelievably, the list goes on. It would seem that while the Mahābhārata has inspired many creative and cultural works, these works have helped sustain the Mahābhārata, constantly renewing the story for a new audience. This constant experimentation and its archival is important because it gives us information not only of the forms and styles of times gone by but also the political contexts of the works and the motivations of the authors. It shows us that to keep experimenting and re-creating the Mahābhārata revivifies the story, avoiding its reduction to an anthropological oddity on display in a forgotten corridor in a museum somewhere. To state Mahābhārata’s multiplicity and fluidity is stating the obvious. Ramanujan posited the same argument for the Rāmāyaṇa, a text that has often been twinned with the Mahābhārata as a national epic. Yet in 2009, Delhi University, one of the premier universities in India, decided to drop his essay under the pretence of avoiding ‘hurting religious sentiments’. That any religious sentiments should actually be hurt by the article, or the statement of the story’s fluidity is baffling at best. But as the pulping of Wendy Doniger’s book by her publisher suggests, is not an isolated incident. So why is it so problematic to state that there were and are many Rāmāyaṇas and Mahābhāratas? It is entirely possible that for some, the search from an authentic Mahābhārata is a genuine search for the original so that the ‘dross’ can be identified and separated, even though I think that this point of view has a lot to do with ‘traditional’ opinion that has congealed and ossified over centuries. But for some, the quest for a putative original is not about seeking the true source, but rather controlling the narrative. They can do so because they occupy a privileged status in their socio-economic milieu and enjoy easy access to the A version of this article first appeared in the Scribbler— https://scribbler.co/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. The article can be accessed here— http://128.199.169.58/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. My thanks to Rajiv Naresh for publishing it. 2 modes of discipline and punishment. Their intervention is a part of larger process of politicisation of cultural history. Their concern is not to actually study and preserve history or culture as they claim— if it were, the BORI archives would not have been attacked and valuable manuscripts destroyed, or at least such an act of wanton destruction should have moved them more than mixed dates in academic books— but to impose a specific version of it in the public, violently if necessary, to score political and electoral points. In such a scenario, reading and documenting culture and history has become both hugely important and insignificant. It is hugely important because it is more important now than ever before to push back narrow parochialism and one way to do it is to correct the facts that are used to whip up mass frenzy. It is insignificant because in some ways because doing so is merely treating the symptoms and not the cause of the mass frenzy. It fails to combat the heavy symbolism of the ‘Hindu histories’. Then what might be done, you might ask. To be honest, I do not have one answer. I can only tell you what I have come across, and what I try to do. In all my conversations with people on the Mahābhārata, and these range across different social contexts— from family weddings, to train, cab and auto journeys—, no one has seemed offended by my arguing for different Mahābhāratas, even if they are somewhat disconcerted by it. What I find is that most, if not all, accept the fact of many Mahābhāratas quite easily. They might be discomfited by its implications, but to be fair to them, they do not care beyond a point. The Mahābhārata is a story from which they derive some form of pleasure— be it aesthetic, moral, or religious. For most, I found, the story carried positive emotional attachments from their childhood— whether it was in the form of easy teasing of a child with voracious appetite, or a beloved grandparent narrating the story to their little grandchild. Perhaps it’s more important to go back to these moments and argue that ‘their’ Mahābhārata isn’t ‘wrong’ but there are other points of view that are also right. For me personally, the search for a supposed ‘original’ Mahābhārata distracts from the more important project of understanding the cultural spread of the story, and how it touches people and shapes living culture— as the philosopher Matilal noted wrily once, “peeling of onion skins does not lead to any core, as we know”. Chinmay Sharma is a PhD candidate only too happy to talk about his thesis. Currently on fieldwork, he enjoys watching people’s eyes glaze over as he prattles on about the Mahabharata. He hopes to one day write a blog about it and find like-minded people to bore on the internet. A version of this article first appeared in the Scribbler— https://scribbler.co/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. The article can be accessed here— http://128.199.169.58/r/53a5d87363b86f0000388b29/many-mahabharatas. My thanks to Rajiv Naresh for publishing it. 3

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