Lessons from a family feud

For Tamil Hindus of my age, I would think that it is not uncommon for Rajaji to have been our interlocutor for the Mahabharata.  His retelling/summarizing of the epic into a manageable tome in the local vernacular, Tamil, was a fascinating read.  A gripping story involving a gazillion characters and complex inter-relationships between the characters.

Of course, it is not a mere story for the believers, of whom I was one.  I was a true believer when I read Rajaji's Mahabharata but even then it came across more as an awesome story than as a religious text.

As the polymath-polyglot-scholar-intellectual David Shulman noted in his review of a wonderful book: 

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war.

As Karthika Nair observed in the introduction to her book:

Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."

In this great epic, the war is between cousins; the sons of two brothers.  And one set of brothers has the counsel of god--Krishna. During a critical part of the war, when Arjuna loses his composure at the thought of killing his uncles and cousins, Krishna advises him that it is his dharma to fight.  Wendy Doniger wrote about the transformation of a war cry into something else that it is not:

How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

The Gita is a mere subplot in this massive epic.  The war does not end the epic though.  A confusing aspect of Rajaji's short versionof the epic were the pages well after the war, when the victorious brothers and their common wife are all dead.  This part of the Mahabharata is what Wendy Doniger is after this time in her latest work of translation, After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata.

In reviewing the book, Sunil Iyengar writes, "Why are the final books of the Mahabharata so unsettling, so gloomy about postwar prospects for what we now might call closure?"  Exactly.  That's how I have always felt about the post-war part of the story.  But, there was nobody that I could talk to about it, nor was I interested in religion and its stories for too long anyway.

Iyengar adds:

“The Mahabharata wants to have its karma and eat it too,” Doniger writes in her introduction. ... Doniger hails this ambiguity as an enduring charm of the text. It “is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics,” she writes, “that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion.”

I was in my pre-teens when I read Rajaji's version for kids.  I can understand now why the final chapters of the Mahabharata were so confusing to me.  I was looking for a tidying up of the story, all wrapped up with a bow on top, but the end was not cut and dried.  (Too many metaphors in one sentence? To heck with that rule!) 

I have placed an order for the book.  Perhaps you too should?

Postscript: Vyasa is credited as the author of the Mahabharata.  To give you an idea of the complex inter-relationships between the characters, here is one: Vyasa is the father of the brothers Pandu and Dhritarashtra, whose sons battle it out on the killing fields of Kurukshetra.  Karthika Nair sarcastically described Vyasa like this: