The greatest epic from ancient India is still exploited by politicians in our century, writes Sean Ledwith

As Covid ripped through the Indian population in 2020, many people on the Asian sub-continent remarkably found consolation and reassurance from a televised adaptation of a story written over two thousand years ago. Shown twice a day during the lockdown in the spring of that year, a serialised version of the ancient epic known as The Mahabharata (MHB) attracted a staggering 353 million viewers, amounting to 109 billion viewing minutes per week. The series, alongside similar mythological based dramas, represented nearly half of the output of India’s primetime TV schedules. The president of the channel that showed the series noted its enduring appeal:

‘In difficult times, people always turn to a higher power and seek answers. For decades, mythological stories have told us about our culture, the lives and valour of the heroes, and taught us life lessons. These values and teachings are deemed sacrosanct and have been passed across generations. The combination of purpose, nostalgia and the great narrative keeps bringing people back to watch these shows and take away something meaningful from it every time.’

Modi’s Myths

Interestingly, analysis also indicated the show was just as popular among young Indians as among members of older generations. It would be difficult to imagine a mythological or religious story having quite the same impact in the West. The dark side of the revived interest in this classic of Indian literature, however, is the cynical attempt by PM Narendra Modi to appropriate the story to bolster his quasi-fascistic brand of Hindu nationalism. Absurdly, he tried to exploit the massively popular television MHB to justify his handling of the pandemic: ‘The Mahabharata war was won in 18 days. The was that the whole country is now fighting against corona will take 21 days. Our aim is to win this war in 21 days.’

Modi’s anachronistic rhetoric on behalf of his BJP Party belied the incompetence of his pandemic management which led to over 500,000 deaths in the country. This wasn’t the only time Modi has sought to hijack the story for his reactionary agenda of communalism. This year, a superimposed image of the poem’s climactic battle was cynically added to a social-media post of his meeting with US President Biden in Delhi. At the same meeting, Modi claimed: ‘The idea of elected leaders was a common feature in ancient India, long before the rest of the world. In our ancient epic, Mahabharata, the first duty of citizens is described as choosing their own leader.’ The irony here being that under his leadership India is sliding into authoritarianism and frequent outbreaks of state-sponsored sectarianism.

Modi’s defence minister last year similarly referred to the most famous section of MHB to justify the country’s neutral stance in the ongoing Ukraine war between Russia and Nato’s proxy, the Zelensky government: ‘That’s why I often say that India never troubles others but if someone troubles us, India will not spare them. This is the message of Bhagwad Gita.’ The massive length of the MHB is one reason it retains this astonishing ability to supply possible answers to the range of life’s conundrums. Eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, three times longer than the Bible, and consisting of 100,000 two-line stanzas in some editions, the book itself proclaims an agenda to encompass the totality of human experience:

‘What is found here regarding the aims of human life –
righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release –
may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas.
But what is not here, is found nowhere.’

Polyphonic

Authorship of the book is nominally attributed to Vyasa, a priestly figure who features periodically throughout the text. In reality, modern scholars suggest The Mahabharata is a composite poem written by multiple authors over a huge period of time, somewhere between 400 BCE and 400 CE. The misplaced notion that MHB is a single, coherent text derived from one author is part of the right-wing Hindutva ideology personified by Modi and deployed to intensify discrimination against India’s non-Hindu minorities. One of the books most highly regarded interpreters, Sunil Elayidom notes its resonance in modern politics:

‘At a time when a huge spread of Hindutva is happening, we have to remember that texts like Mahabharata have a life of centuries or even Millenia. It is multilayered and polyphonic if you ask me. It was also why I took up an effort to build a counternarrative or ideological resistance against Hindutva using Mahabharata as an engagement medium.’

Caste

The poem is written in Sanskrit, the language of choice of the Brahmin caste which attained hegemonic status in ancient India sometime after the collapse of the older Harrapan civilisation of the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE. A new regimented social hierarchy emerged that became known as the caste system. The Brahmins, or priestly class, provided the ideological superstructure in the form of religious doctrines and rituals that protected the landowning and trading class known as the Vaishyas.

This superstructure would evolve over many centuries into the multifaceted and pluralistic belief-system known in the West as Hinduism. In turn, both Brahmins and Vaishyas were secured by a warrior class known as the Kshatriyas. Beneath all three sections of the elite were the Shudras who provided the manual work in the fields and villages to sustain the whole edifice. The overall effect of the caste system was a biological analogy with the human body, with the Brahmin acting as the mouth of Brahma, the supreme deity, the Kshatriyas being his arms, the Vaishyas the legs and the Shudras as the feet. Marx was intrigued by the specificity of the caste system, but he did not have time to make a specialised study of it. He did note in 1853 that it was one of the reasons India was vulnerable to British conquest:

‘A country not only divided between Muslim and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? ’

Social immobility

The distinctive aspect of the caste system, as opposed to other forms of stratification that developed in other parts of the world, was its extreme rigidity with social mobility rendered virtually impossible by the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Suffering in this world was the consequence of misconduct in a previous life and could only be rectified by conformity that might lead to a better status in a future life. In The Mahabharata, one character in the form of a jackal expresses this unbending view of the human condition: ‘What are you achieving by ending your precious human form gifted by God? You will again be born as an animal like me or even worse. Instead, cure your pain by Patience and resume your work and look after your Family. The Jackal gave him an option.’

In parallel with this social order, ancient India developed two genres of texts which provided guidance on ethics and politics. Firstly, the great religious texts such as the Rig Veda and the Upanishads, which collectively form the dharmasutras or sacred revealed texts. These writings root social behaviour and ritual in a transcendent authority such as the godhead known as Brahma and were to be passed down over innumerable generations from teacher to pupil with the emphasis on continuity and conservatism.

India’s Machiavelli

In contrast, the arthashastras were a body of writings from the third century BCE, mostly associated with the political philosopher Kautilya, which highlighted the importance of empirical observation and critical reason in the formulation of policy. Kautilya has sometimes been compared to Machiavelli in the West for his prioritisation of pragmatism in politics, although the loose framework of faith for the former makes this comparison imprecise.

It would be reasonable, however, to observe that this seminal Indian thinker introduced a materialist form of analysis into ethics and politics. Kautilya is interested in how human beings really act in concrete situations, rather than how the dharmasutras say they should act. He observes cautiously: ‘Don’t judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.’ In a similar vein he notes: ‘The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.’

Paradigms

The vast canvas of events and personalities portrayed in The Mahabharata can usefully be interpreted as the dialectical playing out of the clash between these two value-systems in a quasi-historical context. Sometimes characters strive to conform to the devout, Brahminical tradition, while on other occasions they base actions on consequences and expediency as might be recommended by Kautilya. This dynamic interplay in the story of two contrasting intellectual traditions from ancient India has been noted by literary commentator Alf Hiltebeitel:

‘In Mahabharata, the mythical and rational are not two separate paradigms or separate channels of tradition. Often they overlap, even assume one another’s nature, and often they thrive on each other. It is impossible to determine whether the mythical emerged through the symbols and metaphors of representing the rational/real, or the rational/real transformed into mythical by the natural myth-making logic inherent in human nature.’

Unity of opposites

The title of The Mahabharata can be translated as ‘the great story of India’ which centres on the battle for control between two sets of cousins for the throne of the kingdom of Hastinapura. The two rival clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, are led by the essentially decent Yudhisthira for the former and the ruthless Duryodhana for the latter. Part of the greatness of the story, however, is that no character is purely good or evil, and so both of these leaders display both commendable and appalling behaviours at various times. Yudhisthira is always striving to follow the right path, but has a fatal weakness for gambling which leads to disastrous consequences for his family.

Truth and lies

Duryodhana seeks to exterminate the Pandavas but in the name of restoring what he perceives to be the honour of his family. The rich combination of dharma and atharshana that characterises the plot is illustrated in the climactic battle of Kurukshetra. Yudhisthira prides himself on his inability to tell a lie. However, in a devious ploy to incapacitate Drona, a Kauravas general, he tells the latter that his son has been killed. In fact, an elephant with the same name as Drona’s son has been killed. Yudhisthira therefore is not strictly speaking lying when he announces Ashwatthama is dead. Of course, he is clearly guilty of duplicity, but the narrator leaves it to the reader to judge whether this ruse – worthy of Kautilya himself – is justified or not. The incident is described thus:

‘Fearing to utter an untruth, but earnestly desirous of victory, Yudhishthira distinctly said that Ashwatthama was dead, adding indistinctly the word elephant (after the name).

And since Ashwathama Hataha means Ashwathama is dead, assuming his son to be dead in the great war, Drona collapses and seeing this as a cue, Draupadi’s brother Drushtadyumna beheads Drona.’

I am become death

The best known passage from MHB for Westerners is the Bhagavad Gita, which translates as the ‘Song of the Lord’ and concerns the advice given by the Lord Krishna to Arjuna, a Kshatriya fighting for the Pandavas just prior to the mutually destructive battle of Kurukshetra. This conversation has become famous partly for the chilling  words of Krishna that were quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, as he reflected on the destruction of Hiroshima: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Before the battle, Arjuna expresses a reluctance to fight as he understands the Kauravas, although clearly the enemy, are also his kin and therefore he will be killing people known to him. His words are a powerful evocation of the horrors of war and still resonate in our century as Modi, Biden and the other neoliberal gods of destruction threaten to plunge us into the abyss:

‘After seeing fathers-in-law, companions, and all his kinsmen standing in the ranks of the two armies, Arjuna was overcome with great compassion and sorrowfully spoke these words: O Krishna, seeing my kinsmen standing with a desire to fight, my limbs fail and my mouth becomes dry. My body quivers and my hairs stand on end.

The bow slips from my hand, and my skin intensely burns. My head turns, I am unable to stand steady, and O Krishna, I see bad omens. I see no use of killing my kinsmen in battle.’