Many Mahābhāratas

Nell Shapiro Hawley, Sohini Sarah Pillai, Nell Shapiro Hawley, Sohini Sarah Pillai

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438482408, 9781438482415
• eBook ISBN: 9781438482422
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mah?bh?rata studies.

Many Mah?bh?ratas is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mah?bh?rata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mah?bh?rata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mah?bh?rata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mah?bh?rata has been not to consume it but to create it anew.

The many Mah?bh?ratas of this book come from the first century to the twenty-first. They are composed in nine different languages-Apabhramsha, Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. Early chapters illuminate themes of retelling within the Sanskrit Mah?bh?rata itself, demonstrating that the story's propensity for regeneration emerges from within. The majority of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Sanskrit epic. Readers dive into classical dramas, premodern vernacular poems, regional performance traditions, commentaries, graphic novels, political essays, novels, and contemporary theater productions-all of them Mah?bh?ratas.

Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mah?bh?rata's long life in South Asia, Many Mah?bh?ratas constitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mah?bh?rata studies.

Chapter One

An Introduction to the Literature of the Mahābhārata

NELL SHAPIRO HAWLEY AND SOHINI SARAH PILLAI

Those who hear Mahābhārata in many languages,

in many styles,

from many tellers,

always wanting these stories,

all the rewards of many offerings will forever

be theirs.

—Nannaya, Mahābhāratamu

Always Wanting These Stories

As soon as you begin to ask questions about what the Mahābhārata is, does, and says, you find yourself staring at some of the most daunting and irresistible challenges in the study of South Asian literature and religion. The earliest and largest Mahābhārata, a Sanskrit epic1 poem of some 100,000 verses2 that was composed and compiled early in the Common Era, narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war and, along with it, nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. Since a certain darkness haunts the events of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata’s core narrative—the protagonists’ family splinters; the characters hurl accusations of moral failing at one another in infinite regress; the main figures die vividly and poignantly; everything is subject to deconstruction, dilemma, and decay—it is sometimes, in India, considered inauspicious to read the entire text or to keep it inside one’s house.3 Yet even its own sinister power cannot contain it. Triumphalist readings of the Mahābhārata have made it India’s “national epic.”4 The Bhagavadgītā (“The Song of the Blessed Lord”), a series of chapters in the Sanskrit epic’s sixth book, now constitutes a sacrosanct strand of many Hindu worldviews.5 But the clearest indicator of the epic’s allure is the fact that for the last two thousand years, the most common response to the Mahābhārata has been to recreate it. From medieval Telugu poetry to transnational Twitter, Mahābhāratas flood the languages, localities, and literary genres of South Asia and beyond. How is it that a story so disquieting has also proven so attractive?6

Each of the eighteen chapters in this book presents its own answer to that question.7 Here is ours. The Mahābhārata story inherently invites more Mahābhāratas. Because of the relentless complexity of its worldview and the ensuing magnitude of its scope, the Mahābhārata persists in leaving its interpreters more to tease out, more to experience, more to complicate or to resolve.8 After all, as belief has it, there is something dangerous about a complete Mahābhārata. And so there are many of them; one is never enough. There are Mahābhāratas in Apabhramsha, Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and countless other South Asian languages. They testify to the fact that when it comes to this story, there will always be more to say. And there will always be more ways to say it. The many Mahābhāratas that emerge from the Indian subcontinent include poems, plays, sculptures, paintings, novels, folk tales, short stories, comic books, essays, television shows, and films.

This desire for more—“always wanting these stories,” in the words of passage from Nannaya’s eleventh-century Telugu Mahābhāratamu quoted above9—is baked into the Sanskrit Mahābhārata’s own creation myth. There Gaṇeśa, the elephant-headed deity and the text’s divine scribe, demands that the sage Vyāsa, the text’s mythical author (and the grandfather of the story’s main figures), dictate the Mahābhārata to him without interruption so that Gaṇeśa will not have to stop writing, even for a moment. Gaṇeśa, “always wanting these stories,” becomes not only the Mahābhārata’s original hungry audience but also its original reteller, its transmitter from one medium to another. Already the myth links the desire for more of the Mahābhārata with the act of retelling it. And Gaṇeśa never finds satisfaction. Vyāsa makes a counteroffer (in the world of this Mahābhārata, everything is up for negotiation) and demands that Gaṇeśa comprehend each passage before writing it down. When Gaṇeśa seems to be getting ahead of the dictation, Vyāsa interrupts the flow of the narration with an especially complicated passage.10 This call for perpetual interpretation—that Gaṇeśa make meaning out of each verse—would seem to be disruptive enough. But there is also the literary strategy of rupture per se—what Emily Hudson calls a “gap of meaning” in the narrative, a moment in the Mahābhārata story when a palpable “presence of absence” disorients the listener from her emotional and intellectual expectations.11 The two outermost frame stories of the Sanskrit epic employ this idea of rupture in a more literal way.12 In both frames, the narration of the Mahābhārata takes place during the pauses in an ongoing ritual: the Mahābhārata interrupts the ritual, and the ritual interrupts the Mahābhārata. All of these meta-narratives teach us that an essential part of reading (or hearing) the Mahābhārata is never getting quite enough of it, at least not as soon as one wants it—the story remains interrupted, incomplete, and maybe a little incomprehensible. That the epic claims to include “whatever exists”13 and at the same time runs on the fuel of unfinished, unstable, unsatisfied things—stories, rituals, lineages, truths, audiences—is one of the tantalizing incongruities that propels the Mahābhārata forward into endless tellings.

What’s more, the chapters in this book demonstrate that any Mahābhārata represents many Mahābhāratas. We have retellings inside retellings: four chapters explore Mahābhāratas that reconstruct the events of the Virāṭaparvan (“The Book of Virāṭa’s Court”), a book of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata that self-consciously mirrors the epic as a whole. Other authors find it impossible to stop at one Mahābhārata, even though they know that the volume addresses over a dozen more. The process of organizing this book has taught us that when it comes to understanding the Mahābhārata, comparison—which drives every chapter in one way or another—becomes a particularly fruitful tool for interpretation. Clearly a comparative approach complements the multivocality that many Mahābhāratas embody.14 Mahābhāratas often unfold through multiple narrative voices that diverge from and question one another. This intrinsic multivocality allows Mahābhāratas to mirror, on a formal level, the various conflicts that they depict. Even Mahābhāratas that present the narrative in an ethically and aesthetically straightforward manner, as some of the works in this volume do, are in some sense responding to this multivocal, “interrogative” mode of storytelling.15

There are no categorical boundaries that the Mahābhārata does not overstep. The chapters in this book show that the Mahābhārata has been both elite and popular, Hindu and non-Hindu, classical and vernacular, orthodox and heterodox, constructive and destructive, textual and performative, fragmented and whole, normative and subversive, and affirmative and surprising. For some of the interpretive communities featured in this book, the Mahābhārata defines these categories. For others, the Mahābhārata dismantles these terms of analysis entirely. To anyone who insists that the Mahābhārata is one thing or another, we present the astounding magnitude and heterogeneity of this literary cosmos. If there is “a” Mahābhārata, it is transhistorical, translinguistic, transmedial; it is a Mahābhārata that insists on engendering more Mahābhāratas.

The Story

We first conceived of this book as one answer (among many, of course) to the enduring questions of just what the Mahābhārata is, does, and says. There will be many answers to this mega-question, and many of them will presume many Mahābhāratas. Even the title, “Mahābhārata,” suggesting a unified body of text, hides a plural behind its ever-so-gossamer veil. “Mahābhārata,” after all, means “the Great Bhāratas.” Still one might ask: Is there not a single core story of these great Bhāratas? Let’s begin by expounding the story most people assume.16

The nuclear tale of most well-known Mahābhāratas goes something like this. After the death of Pāṇḍu, the former ruler of the Bhārata empire, a fierce rivalry is born between two sets of royal cousins, all in the Kuru family: the five Pāṇḍavas (Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva) and the one hundred Kauravas, who are led by the formidable Duryodhana and the obsequious Duḥśāsana.17 While “Pāṇḍava” literally means “son of Pāṇḍu,” the five princes are actually the offspring of Pāṇḍu’s two wives, Kuntī and Mādrī, as impregnated by five Vedic deities. (Pāṇḍu himself is unable to father children—the result of a curse.)18 The Kaur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Foreword
• 1 An Introduction to the Literature of the Mahābhārata
• Part I The Manyness of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata
• Part II Sanskrit Mahābhāratas in Poetry and Performance
• Part III Regional and Vernacular Mahābhāratas from Premodern South Asia
• Part IV Mahābhāratas of Modern South Asia
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover