Confessions of an Epic Indian

Over the years, I’ve read Irawati Karve’s Yuganta more times than I can remember. The copy I now own is at least my third copy - the previous two editions wore out from repeated readings - and I remember buying it at least ten years ago, from Book Point at Ballard Estate, the bookstore owned by and neighbouring the offices of Orient Longman Ltd.

It’s a small book, some 220 pages in a small paperback size, published by Disha Books, an imprint of Orient Longman that was earlier called Sangam Books. And it’s an English translation of a Marathi Book, originally published by Deshmukh Prakashan in 1969 according to the copyright page of my copy.

In its Marathi original, Yuganta won the Sahitya Akademi prize as the best book in Marathi in 1967. (Yes, I know that’s before the “first” publication date listed on the copyright page - I guess, there was an earlier edition that’s unacknowledged or some mixup with the dates.)

According to the publisher’s note, the English translation “was prepared mainly for a foreign audience.” But that was essentially because, according to the author, foreign readers showed the most interest in the Mahabharata. I’d wager the situation has changed a great deal now. When I began writing my Ramayana, one of the strongest criticisms levelled at me was that only foreign readers would want to read an exoticized version of an ancient Indian epic, since most Indians “don’t find the Ramayana relevant anymore”.

As the popularity of the series, and subsequent sales figures have proven beyond doubt, not only is the Ramayana relevant even today, it’s a great story that lives on regardless of the shenanigans of votebank politics as well as the cynicism of media mavens who would probably love to see a John Grisham in the hands of every English-speaking Indian. But the other oft-repeated comment among the tons of reader responses I recieved for the Ramayana series was a loud and lusty clamouring for my Mahabharata.

That clamouring hasn’t died down, if anything, it’s gone up several notches, until every person I correspond with or meet now seems to inevitably ask, “So when’s your Mahabharata coming out?”

(The answer to that is, ’soon’. It will follow close on the heels of the last Ramayana book, which means that you’ll see the first book of the Mahabharata in Indian bookstores sometime next year itself. I’m almost done with the first draft of the first book, titled As The Blind King Watched, and hopefully should be done with the revisions and rewrites sometime in August 2005, barely a year and a half after I started - but of course that’s not counting the years spent researching it, because you can’t really research the Ramayana and ancient Indian puranas without studying the Mahabharata as well. Anyway, to get back to Yuganta…)

Even rereading Yuganta today for the umpteenth time, it doesn’t seem written for any particular audience, whether foreign or Indian. It is a book that appeals to anyone, regardless of race or age, who is fascinated by the great epic of Krishna Dwaipayana-Vyasa named Jaya, which we popularly call Mahabharata. Divided into 11 short chapters, it explores different facets of the epic from a character-based point of view, shedding new light on old knowledge and illuminating new areas in startling ways.

The 11 chapters are titled as follows:
Introduction,
The Final Effort,
Gandhari,
Kunti,
Father and Son?,
Draupadi,
The Palace of Maya,
Paradharmo Bhayavahah,
Karna,
Krishna Vasudeva, and
The End of Yuga.

Every one is a gem. My favourites are Draupadi, Father and Son?, Gandhari, and Kunti.

Perhaps the most insightful is Father and Son?. This chapter postulates whether Vidura was the father of Dharma, (who later came to be called Yudhishtira - every character in the epic has several different names, like the epic itself Jaya/Bharata/Mahabharata, and its author Krishna/Dwaipayana/Ved/Vyasa).

There is a fair amount of evidence to support the possibility of Vidura being Yudhishtira’s father. Nor is Karve the first Mahabharata scholar to ask the question.

For instance, in the epic, Yudhishtira is said to be sired by the god Yama. And Vidura is called an incarnation of Yama. So, at the end of the great battle, when Vyasa says that Yama and Yudhistira were father and son, it is unclear whether he means Yama himself or Yama in his current incarnation as Vidura. The semantics of Sanskrit are such that either interpretation is possible, and Karve informs us that even the critical edition (also known as the Baroda edition) leaves both options open to interpretation.

Karve explores the entire relationship between Vidura and Yudhishtira in this light, throwing up a great deal of detail to support her theory. In the end, she neither forces the reader to accept her theory, nor backs down and denies it either. She raises the question, and this in itself is enough.

Each essay in this beautifully composed little book is a masterpiece, achieved after a lifetime of study of the great epic. Her familiarity with its characters, events, details are nothing short of miraculous. At times, she makes the story so clear and simple, it seems like child’s play. But as anybody who has ever attempted to study the Mahabharata in its unexpurgated form can testify, there is no shortage of confusions and contradictions. Yet, Karve makes you see beyond the cross-interpretations of Sanskrit obscurities, and the conflicting viewpoints of scholars, to glimpse the pure story beneath the veil. And that story, ultimately, is simple and beautiful. Well, perhaps some people who don’t appreciate thousand-page epics won’t agree with the ’simple’, but surely everyone will agree that it’s ’simply beautiful’!

In her own introduction to the revised edition, Karve admits to wrestling with the idea of adding a synopsis of the whole story in her book. In the end, she decided against it. Which is a pity, because I suspect that her retelling, even in a few dozen pages, would be far more compelling than those of a number of other scholars whose studies of Jaya I’ve read. She has the rare gift of seeing the skull beneath the skin, rather than losing sight of the forest for the trees - to mix two unlikely metaphors - as most scholars seem to do. And this makes you wish she had written more, much much more.

In the end, Karve’s steely-gazed unsentimental secular outlook comes through most clearly in the way she approaches every aspect with an unstintingly clinical approach, asking questions nobody has thought to ask (publicly at least) before or since, and that few people are willing to discuss in these relatively more conservative and controversial times.

Take it from someone who has spent the last several years studying every available book on the topic - and several other books that aren’t on the topic at all - Irawati Karve’s study of the Mahabharata is itself a classic in its own right, and a book well worth reading several times over, whether or not you’ve read the Mahabharata itself.

If you have read the Mahabharata, or are about to, then it’s still a treat. Like a road map you can refer to while navigating the complex byways of the labyrinthine landscape that is the world’s largest - and in my opinion, greatest - epic of all.

In fact, the sheer smallness of Yuganta in relation to the vastness of the Mahabharata itself puts me in mind of the little modak at the feet of Lord Ganesha.

It’s an offering that - even the elephant-headed one Himself would agree, I think - demands to be devoured.